Its amaz­ing to me to see the real life impli­ca­tions of online social media. Take the Bei­jeng Olympics, for exam­ple. There are groups of Twit­ter users meet­ing together online to dis­patch Tweets about what they see offline at the games. These Twit­ter users will likely meet offline for a meal or drinks, as do many other Twit­ter user through­out the world.

Social net­work­ing has proven itself to be much more than a buzz word in the Inter­net world. It’s real­ity. Humans are social crea­tures, and no mat­ter if we’re teth­ered to our internet-​​enabled devices, or per­haps even more so if we’re con­nected to our inter­net devices, we crave face to face human inter­ac­tion. Twit­ter has made that bridge eas­ier to cross for peo­ple of all nation­al­i­ties dur­ing the Bei­jeng Olympics.

Keep up on some of the Bei­jeng Twit­ter hap­pen­ings here:

#080808 Twit­ter cam­paign — started by Chi­nese Twit­ter users. One of the best ways to keep up with the excitement

Ogilvy China Dig­i­tal Watch — There’s tremen­dous buzz online about the Games, no sur­prise there, and they’re fran­ti­cally fol­low­ing all the goings-​​on.

#080808 Twit­ter Cam­paign for Olympics — This is a link to a great col­lage of #080808 Twit­ter buddy icons.

This is cer­tainly one of the most excit­ing events I’ve expe­ri­enced on Twit­ter — no doubt due to its global scale. And huge agen­cies like Olgivy and oth­ers are tak­ing the lead in bring­ing the event to social media net­works. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing some of the research strate­gies that come out of this global social media case study. Exciting!

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