Treat Digital Blog

Olympics Webinar

by Ed Dyson | 21.05.2012

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There was a telling moment at the end of the Arkadin ‘Olympics and the Communications Flow’ webinar we spoke at last week, when a series of questions were fired at the head of news for TFL. “So and so would like to know if Liverpool Street station will be affected by the Olympics at all”, which was followed by copycat questions about other London tube stations. These questions followed a lengthy talk about how TFL have set up a special website www.getaheadofthegames.com to inform travellers of transport ‘hot-spots’ in advance. This just shows how anxious people are, understandably, about transport problems around the games. But their worries should be eased, in part, by what the web brings to the communications mix.

After the webcast, I spoke to the TFL man and he said that these were the first truly digital games. Though Beijing 2008 utilised the web in a number of ways, social media platforms like Twitter were in their infancy then, so did not play a huge part. This time however, there will be more people tweeting comments on the action than waving flags.

With touchscreen technology and better connectivity, the mobile web has also come a long way in that time. If spectators in the stadia don’t know about a particular competitor, they can find out all they need to know without leaving their seats.

This is why, some two years ago, we decided to help an athlete with limited funding by designing and building a pro-bono website for him/her. We looked up a few up-and-coming athletes to see if they had their own website, but many didn’t. After weighing up a few options, we approached Perri Shakes-Drayton, the current UK 400m and 400m hurdles champion, and the rest, as they say, is history. To hear more about our work with Perri, and why we did it, listen to the webinar here...

And if you’re watching the action in the summer, or just want to know more about Perri, check out her website here.