A Beijing Experiment: How To Feature Olympic Content On Your Blog

I just landed in Beijing and will be spending the next two weeks here as part of the promotional efforts for what I have previously called my dream project, helping Lenovo to promote its Voices of the Summer Games site that features 100 Olympic athletes blogging their journies to Beijing and experiences at the Olympics. Armed with my Nikon and a brand new super light Lenovo U110 Red Ideapad (PRODUCT PLUG/DISCLAIMER – I already love this machine, but it’s standard issue for Lenovo team members during the Olympics and I will be returning it after the Games).

As myself and my colleague Kaitlyn (aka – CatchupLady) get ready to create a flood of content from the Games, we had an idea for how this could also be the chance to conduct a little social experiment by offering some custom and exclusive Olympic content to ANY blogger who would like to take part. Think of us as your resident bloggers on the ground at the Olympics. We want to build out a core group of at least 25 bloggers who are interested in grabbing content that we will create (either blog posts or photos) and feature it on your own blog (either with or without your own commentary added). There are only two conditions to be part of this group:

  1. You must include the standard line that will be at the bottom of each of our posts about how this is part of the Lenovo Voices Of The Summer Games Campaign and include the link back to http://summergames.lenovo.com.
  2. You must provide separate attribution and link back to the original source of the content (either our Flickr gallery or one of our blogs – Rohit’s or Kaitlyn’s)

If you are willing to do both those things, leave a comment here or on Kaitlyn’s blog or send me a personal email at rohitaustralia [at] gmail [dot] com to be added to the list. In return, you will not only have our full permission to repurpose and use any of this content, but you will also be added to a list of people that we will be emailing first with links to exclusive content, new blog posts and anything else we manage to create. The main topics of this content will be stories about Olympic marketing and PR, real stories of athletes, discussions with Olympic athletes, sponsors, fans, training personnel or family members, and anything else we can think of. I will be doing this full time over the next two weeks, as opposed to my usual struggle to blog while still doing my day job. For the next two weeks, blogging will be my day job (and in case you are wondering, yes, that was as satisfying to write as it sounded).

Both Kaitlyn and I will also be seeking our your suggestions about any ideas that you might have for interesting blog posts or content to come out of the Games that you would love to see me focus on. If we take on your idea, you will have EXCLUSIVE rights to publish that piece of content first on your blog before anyone else gets it (we will share ahead of publishing it) and we will credit you with the idea and link back to your site. Finally, all bloggers that want to take part will be added to a list on this blog post, hopefully driving even more traffic in your direction as a participating blogger.

Easy enough? Let me know what you think or if you are willing to be part of this experiment. If it works, everyone will win … our client (Lenovo) will get more attention to their site and marketing efforts, you will have exclusive and interesting content about a topic that is relevant and heavily searched (Google linkbait, anyone?) and we will have a chance for our content to reach a wider audience. So, will you join the experiment?

Note: Please help spread the word about this through your social networks – here is a shareable link to this post: http://www.tinyurl.com/beijingexperiment

List of Blogger Participants (a work in progress – email me to get added!):

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