Those who live by the blog shall die by the blog

The London Olympic logo saga is actually a fascinating case study of how PR peeps often just don't "get" the new media technology. This entry was posted on the BBC a few days before it all happened, about how "New Media" aware the London Olympic lot were. Some of the passage is....well, in hindsight very entertaining.

London 2012 are to launch their new brand and logo on Monday and are attempting to use a bit of blogosphere buzz to generate a bit of heat around it.

Those who sign up at www.london2012.com are being given one clue per day (it is day two today) which leads them to a blog or social networking site where there is a video trailer which gives a hint to the “story of the brand”.

In the words of the PR guy who emailed me to tell me about the campaign, “the 2012 brand will embrace a lot of the principles of participation and democratisation familiar to those us in the blogosphere and in keeping with that, the 2012 people have agreed to launch the brand into the blogosphere before it is unveiled to an auditorium full of VIPs and the world's media.”

Ummmm...what principles of participation familiar to us in the blogosphere? They knowingly passed up opportunities to use all the Web 2.0 staples - User Generated Content, any form of "Wisdom of Crowds" user involvement (or even just Rating and Recommendation). The only use of Web 2.0 were of SocNets and blogs to pimp it.

Reading on about the pre launch puff from the same article:

.....The brand ambition will be “to boost the image of the city and the country, to change people’s attitudes about sport and this country, to move people, to leverage change in the way we deliver sport - to create a new kind of games.”

You will also probably hear a lot about the L word - legacy. Legacy for the country, for east London and for each of the 26 sports being contested.

Denny said unlike many previous Olympics where competitions had been used to find the winning logos, London 2012 had been through a lengthy and painstaking brainstorming process before identifying theirs.

He said they were after something "that would capture the hearts and minds of everyone, give them an emotional attachment" - in the same powerful way Apple were perceived to have done so successfully with their simple apple logo.

And now we know how powerful it was.......the logo has probably generated the UK's biggest online hate campaign to date - a "change the logo" online petition of c 50,000* signatures and counting in 2 days, a plethora of sites sporting new logo design competitions, and a major media and blog storm.

What is fascinating is that these guys were (according to themselves) "acutely aware how the changing digital landscape may radically affect our experience of the Games in 2012 - and the journey towards them." - and then totally ignored all the interactive tools of the Web 2.0 media

In fact it looks more Old Media - small bunch of "creatives" closet themselves away to build brand / logo that was then PR pimped and launched in all the usual ways.

Maybe the best thing now is to embrace that other staple of Web 2.0 - the perpetual beta - and use the feedback from their users to improve the design.

Or maybe not - as I write, just seen the CEO of Wolff Olins, the Media/PR company involved, on TV telling us that it is - if I parsed it correctly (i) the Olympic Body's fault it as it was badly presented and (ii) its not that cr*p really, it's just been mis-presented and we - the punters - just don't "get" how good it really is. Also, a number of worthies have popped up on TV with messages basically around toughing it out, and that in the past things that were much derided became much loved.)

This is probably sound advice in the Old Media world, where a big PR budget can smother a story and in the limited bandwidth of the the Old Media inventory it rapidly goes away (It used to be said if you tough it out for 7 days it will go away). Not sure if it works in new Media though....we predict they are going to learn the hard way all about how the New Media can get very viral, very fast........(Cue Walmart and Acer PC lessons).

In the final analysis however, money talks - lets see what the potential Olympic Sponsors do about the logo and the derision it has received so far......as there are already calls to boycott anything that the logo appears on, we are sure that minds are starting to focus on this.

(Postscript...found someone who likes it - though they reckon that is cheap at £400k and it is good graphics - even though it causes artifacts on digital media...)

(Post - Post Script - Luke and Hugh like it too....well that makes 3 v 50,000

* 48,615 and then the petition was halted and on its website its creator said:

"I have decided to close the petition as it becomes clear that the logo is here to stay - there is little point in damaging the reputation of our Olympic Games, that was never the intention. The protest has been effectively made."

.

That seems very lame to me, I wonder if he/she was "leaned on" - it has been known to happen