I have my flight to London booked. I have a hotel booked – well, actually I am living in a London pub in my old neighbourhood for three weeks! My wife is coming with me and she is covering the Olympics, writing articles and blogging for a major magazine in Brazil.
A few months ago, I was chosen as one of the 100 BT Storytellers, a hundred British people picked to blog about the Olympic games. I’ve been working on two books about social media recently (one of them to be published by the UN no less) so I never had a lot of time to kick off my Olympic blogging, but now we are in 2012 itself and the Huffington Post has agreed to also run my blogs – one of the most-read news sites in the world.
But I want to make this process more interesting than just blogging my own opinion about the games – there will be plenty of that this year anyway. I am looking forward to the London Olympics – it will never happen again in my lifetime and regardless of all the budget issues the acceleration of development in East London and the attention the UK will get this year are worth more than money alone.
I want my blogs to focus on the people who make the games happen – competitors, broadcasters, and the infrastructure itself – and as this is the first ever truly social Olympic games (Beiijng doesn’t exactly count as smartphone penetration in China was low – the iPhone was only 1 back then) I want to explore how these people are using social media; talking to fans and the general public, exchanging ideas, discussing their training or plans, sharing their thoughts…
So I am focused on the people who are online and using social networks to interact with other competitors, or people from their industry, and their fans - athletes or business people on the social web. I want to interview them (phone or email questions) and to explore how this concept of social training and planning has changed since Beijing and how it may develop further as we head towards Rio in 2016.
My blogs will appear on the BT Storytellers website, on the Huffington Post website, and I intend to collect them together for publication as a book (physical book, ebook and Kindle) as soon as the games are finished and I can get the material edited together in book format.
If you are competing in London 2012, in any event, and you would be interested in helping me with this project, please do get in touch: mail@markhillary.com.
And if you want some more background on me, click here for my profile…
