So before i carry on looking at the marketing efforts of the TOP for the Olympics after they’ve paid the huge sum to put their name under the TOP list. I wanted to share some ’should know’ stuff i pulled together for using the mobile as a medium and how it has been integrated with this year’s Olympics.

The main reasons why i think mobile is a great medium for sports fans is the fact that its a medium which is “on the go”. It connects sports fans closer to their sports without having to GO TO a television, newspaper or desktop. While the Olympic committee grapples with this new medium, its fascinating to know that fans now bring the event with them rather than going to the event.

3 other reasons why i think mobile is THE MEDIUM for sports fans to be linked with

1) Live score updates are great when using your mobile (Trust me, i didn’t know Spain won the euro’08 till i checked my phone)
2) Watching the game on your mobile is pretty neat, although this is still prevalent in Korea and Japan.
3)Aggregated articles of sports that u care about, to read on the go and yet keep u updated without missing out the vital bits of sports news that u want to know.

ReadWrtieWeb has done an excellent article, which i must trackback, on how the mobile has integrated itself into the Olympics.

Which of course brings me to the examples of which brands are currently using the mobile.

Let’s start with Yahoo!.

Check out their homepage on their mobile for the Olympics. Pretty neat page with the countdown timer, medal count, reviews by sports analysts etc. But what’s so cool is how they’ve integrated this with the web. A more in depth coverage can be found on its webpage for the Olympics. As you can see from there, Chevy is already on of the advertisers which Yahoo! has managed to attract.

It’s interesting to see how a company has integrated sports into their brands and how it has attracted advertisers. This, compared to Google mobile whereby you have to customize your own Olympics page, kindda sucks… I mean, Google could’ve at least put in more effort for the Olympics…

Moving on, we have Fring.

Fring, a Voip and IM mobile company has been launched the interesting idea of writing the event through blogs to encourage users to be sports citizen journalists. I’m wondering if this is now limited to using social networking on the mobile only or on the web to blog about the events.

I’ve heard of companies asking users to blog about a product, service or event. But to tie this in with mobiel and sports is pretty cool! This is off their blog entry on this initiative:

We will happily provide the fring Olympics commentators with a 3.5G mobile phone with GPS, camera, local SIM card and (almost) unlimited data plan. In return, the fringCommentator will regularly micro-blog with quick updates & pictures (the winner, the loser, the cutest flag-bearer, the poor girl who lost her swimsuit, the poor guy who dropped the baton in the 4×100 meter final… you get the idea). If you’re a real sports enthusiast you may focus more on the records; if you’re more of a night owl, we may all live vicariously through your night-time escapades in the Olympic village – pics & videos most welcome!

Will be keeping a close tap on that 1, wondereded if they actually found any1 just before the games too!

There’re others like MobiTV providing video coverage of the games on Mobile, Plusmo with their mobile Olympic apps are prtty neat too…

To wrap things up, we’ve seen how mobile can be integrated into the games and why it is such an ideal platform for using it as a sports marketing tool. It’s great for advertisers to reach out to users who wanna be kept on the go about their sports events.

However, i agree with this article for my 3 wishes and the Olympics.

1) Text to cheer

2) Athlete’s bio on mobile

3) Olympic Trivia Contests

I would also like to add in a 4th wish whereby we can keep track of our local atheletes rather than the celebrity athelete of the sports. Kindda having a locaized version just to keep us updated on how our country’s sportmen and women are doing this Olympics. Just a micro site within the mobile web page would be nice enough.

So there you have it. Any other brands u know using the mobile to reach out to their consumers? Any interesting campagins you care to share? Or do u disagree that mobile will be a vital medium and that traditional media is still the way to reach out to fans and for advertisers to continue using that as the main platform? Share you thoughts!!