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Ground rules for athletes using social media like Facebook and Twitter. - Source: ONE News
The explosion of social networking has changed sport for fans and athletes, with experts predicting the greater interaction will mean the demise of passive armchair sports fans by the 2020 Olympics.
The London Olympics have been dubbed the first "social media Games", with sports fans and athletes heavy users of Facebook, Twitter and the video-sharing site YouTube to talk about events as they happen and show them immediately.
Olympic gold medallist and chairman of the London organising committee (LOCOG) Sebastian Coe said people will no longer passively consume the Games from their armchairs.
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"They are part of the action," he said in a study on the future of technology and sport by Atos, an Olympic sponsor that provides the IT operations for the Games.
"They can comment on content, interact with the athletes, create and publish their own content. Never before has there been such a channel to interact with the world, especially with young people."
The change has happened fast, he said, which has wide-reaching implications for the commercialisation of sport and how companies target fans. At the time of the 2000 Games in Sydney, few people had fast internet connections. In Athens 2004, not many people had smartphones.
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 100 million people were using Facebook, but that figure has soared to about 900 million. Twitter was new in 2008, but now has more than 500 million users, who send about 400 million tweets daily with sports news regularly broken on the micro-blogging network.
Atos' Global Functions head Gilles Grapinet, said social media was already playing an unprecedented role in how information is disseminated from the 2012 Olympics, and how the global sports conversation is driven during July and August.
Looking forward to 2020, he said there were two technology trends that would converge and totally change the way people watched sport at home - social media and direct gaming.
"The guy sitting calming with a beer or a diet coke, with some peanuts and watching alone - this armchair fan will die," Grapinet said at the launch of Atos' study.
He said, in the past, spectators at home might shout their advice or comments at the television, but many people now used two screens for sport - one to watch the action, and the other to talk to people or see what was being said about the event.
By 2020, he predicted this would become more interactive, with spectators able to jump into the action themselves, replaying a missed putt or goal themselves, or putting themselves in the shoes of a player receiving a ball or preparing for a race.
"This spectator will make and publish his own content, and share it with other people," said Grapinet.
The study predicted that social media would not only change the way people watch sport, but also planning at stadiums, where wireless capacity would be needed, the scouting process to spot young talent, and interaction between athletes and coaches.