THE VOICE: Some of the tweets, including NBC Olympics boss Jim Bell’s, from the games so far. (
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The “Twitter Olympics” aren’t a competition about who can tweet the fastest.
It’s what they are now calling the London Games because of the huge impact — good and bad — that the super-quick social media is having on NBC.
Suddenly, it seems that now everyone can be a critic.
“When you’re learning through Twitter what’s going on, everyone became a commentator in their own right,” says, Elaine Filadelfo, a spokeswoman for Twitter, which has partnered with NBC for Olympic coverage.
But so far — with partners like Twitter — NBC must be asking who needs enemies?
Not only is NBC being pilloried for different aspects of its coverage, but Twitter users are playing spoiler by posting results well before the events air on TV.
“The Olympics are an intense demonstration of what’s become a fact of life: We get our news from Twitter,” Twitter’s own head of TV, Fred Graver, wrote in a blog post over the weekend. “We’re getting insider news like never before.”
There have been all sorts of weird situations sparked by the Twitterverse.
The social-media site, for instance, went so far as to suspend the account of British journalist — and prominent NBC critic — Guy Adams after he posted the corporate e-mail address of network exec Gary Zenkel so tweeters could complain directly to a higher up about the network’s tape-delayed coverage.
One measure of how bad it has become is that NBC top man in London, “Today” show producer Jim Bell, who presumably had more important things to worry about, has been all over Twitter in the past few days, responding personally to complaints about coverage.
“My guess is that, in the next Olympics, the coverage will shift now that we know the audience can talk back,” Graver wrote. “There ARE experts online.”
On the other hand, it appears as if sites like Twitter may actually be driving more viewers to watch.
The first three nights of the Olympics have all scored record ratings — even though people knew the winners of the events hours before.
The Twitter onslaught has grown so exponentially that it’s begun to affect other areas of the games — and is apparently even being held responsible for . . . wait for it . . . jamming satellite signals. According to CNN, NBC sportscasters covering bike racing over the weekend complained that they couldn’t tell the distance between the bikers because GPS systems were knocked out — a situation that’s being attributed to an avalanche of tweeting.
“We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by [using] social media,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told The Indepedent. “But perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”