Churbuck.com

Nestor, who I met at the Wall and at the USA House, and who is a digital dude, had this on his agency bio.

It was too good not to share. Meet “Speak: The Hungarian Rapper”

Caroline Lind and Elle Logan, US Women's 8+ Gold Medalists

Caroline Lind on the left, Elle Logan on the right. Gold medal in rowing in the women’s eight.I think everyone at the USA House tonight asked for a picture with the two champions. The excitement was infectious.

Welcome to the last week of the Beijing Olympics. I wanted to look at how the heart of our online activation of our sponsorship is going, and let you know about some good content being generated by the athletes.

First, for some background on the project, we issued a press release today that can be found here at MarketWatch. The nut of the release is:

“Lenovo has provided IdeaPad and other notebook PCs and video cameras to more than 100 athletes from more than 25 countries and 29 sports who are participating in the program. Their blogs are presented on the website www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames. To date, there have been 1,374 athlete postings on the forum, reaching more than 8.5 million Olympic fans through conversations on third-party blogs and social media sites.”

This is a pretty complex social media play, so bear with me.

1. These are athlete owned and produced blogs. Lenovo has no editorial oversight on what they write and photograph. The only guideline applied is the IOC’s Rule 41. These are the first Games where athletes have been permitted to blog after the opening ceremonies, and so far there have been few to no restrictions applied.
2. The plan is to aggregate – or collect in one place – all the blog posts, biographies of the athletes, and provide linkage to …
   1. A YouTube channel: LenovoAthleteBlogger
   2. A Flickr photoset
   3. A Twitter stream: Lenovo2008
3. Lenovo promotes the primary page – www.lenovo.com/voicesofthegames or summergames.lenovo.com – through a banner campaign on Federated Media’s network of blogs. Promote blogs on blogs, right? Right, so we’re building dynamic banners that refresh with the content posted by the athletes and running it automatically through the Federated network.
4. In Europe the European Broadcast Union is hosting most, if not all, of the country specific video of the Games. We’re a primary sponsor, running pre-roll and display ads to the tune of many, many millions of impressions. Due to IP targeting, this program is only visible in Europe. Those clicks are going to the Voices of the Olympic Games page.
5. In the US there is a major program in place on NBCOlympics.com. Those clicks are not going to the bloggers, but a landing page on Lenovo.com that explains our sponsorship of the Games and role as the lead technology provider and designer of the Olympic torch.
6. We’re running paid search and bidding on some Olympic terms and sports related to our bloggers and their sports. The idea is to find the athletes’ fans and make them aware that a channel exists for them to follow their favorite sport.

How to declare success? I think there are three vectors to success in this program.

• First, of course, is “gross tonnage” – how many people looked or heard about it. We asked the athletes to put a badge on their blogs, so we’re getting some impressions on that. But to be frank, I could care less about the gross tonnage measurements.
• Second is PR effects. Is this a good story? Did the press find it interesting? CNET Asia has a post titled “How Lenovo Changed our Olympics Experience.” The Burlington, Vermont newspaper, the Burlington Free Press is syndicating the blog posts of hometown favorite, US weightlifter Carissa Gump using Pluck. The Rocky Mountain News writes about it. That’s just the press. The blog pick up has been very gratifying, with some good conversations with bloggers developing both here in China and globally. This also is good positioning for the brand with the issue of free speech and communications hanging over the pre-Game buzz (a non-issue as far as I can see).
• Engagement and conversations. My line is this: “The Lenovo Voice of the Summer Olympics is not going to be measured by the Web 1.0 metrics of millions and million of impressions but by the Web 2.0 measure of thousands and thousands of conversations between athletes and their fans.” Nuff said.

From a purely selfish point of view, the best part of this project has been meeting the athlete bloggers and seeing how genuinely excited they are to hear those words that thrill any blogger: “I read your blog.” They started off doing this to let their friends and family know what they are up to. Then suddenly, some, like India’s first individual gold medalist, Abhinav Bindra, have a place for an entire nation to offer their congratulations. One second he had 30 comments on a post. An hour after winning gold he had a thousand! My thanks go to them, because this is their project in the end.

Purely selfish photo of your humble narrator with US epee fencer/blogger Capt. (USAF) Seth Kelsey who “gets to travel all over the world and stab people with swords.”

Having a team on the ground to drive the content creation has proven invaluable and I couldn’t have asked for more than Rohit Bhargava and Kaitlyn Wilkins from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Project. They have been tirelessly roaming the streets of Beijing, interviewing reporters, snapping photos, tweeting away on Twitter, helping me cover this vast project while I do the thing in the war room. Back home, the team of Esteban Panzeri, Alan White and Tim Supples are keeping the sites live and building the infrastructure, delivering the PCs and cameras … the details and logistics have been staggering. Here in China, Yan An for his diplomacy with the IOC and Sheji Ho for his interactive expertise.

I have no doubt the second half of this program will be just as interesting and surprising as the first. I guess that’s the fun part of all this for an adrenaline fiend like myself – it all changes hour by hour.

Here’s Seth Kelsey on YouTube talking about blogging.

You definitely want to be in the grandstand when a Chinese team wins a gold medal. I was surrounded by Chinese in the last grandstand, right on the finish line. Here they are going insane as the women’s quad (four scullers) wins right at the very end.

Ten minutes later, everybody is back on their feet and belting out the Chinese National Anthem. It was cool. The people were proud and they should be, these Olympics defy criticism and the Chinese are excellent hosts.

My day (which ends in 27 minutes) started near the Ming Tombs, at 5 am at a very nice house. I didn’t want to wake anybody so I walked the grounds — an old persimmon orchard — and snapped some shots. I ate a persimmon the night before – my friend told me Americans never really get to experience them because they are hard to cultivate and serve. The trees must be grafted onto rootstock to thrive, and then, when the fruit is ripe (it resembles an apple) and the leaves have fallen, the fruit should be ripened in powdered lime (the mineral, not the citrus) or in a warm place for two days. It was served nearly frozen and spooned out of the center. I liked it but wouldn’t go crazy for the next one.

As I walked the path clicking away I could hear the fruit randomly proving Newton’s point with a dull thud – a measure of how quiet it was where the farm was located… the steep hills to the north are where the Great Wall passed, and to the east is the ancestral burial grounds of the Ming dynasty (which was replaced by the Qing Dynasty, the final one before the Nationalists (The “Last Emperor” was a Qing) took power.

More China orchard shots here.

I drove back into the city and met some of the Lenovo Athlete bloggers at a round of Olympic table tennis at Beijing University. I sat next to Seth Kelsey, the American fencer, saw Joshia Ng the Malaysian track cyclist (Keiren) and David Oliver the American track star. There were others, but I was rude, didn’t introduce myself as that would have been rude in the middle of a game and could only stay a half-hour (but saw some ferocious volleys involving a determined Hong Kong player) before I went to the Olympic Green to dodge the SBD’s (“Silent But Deadlies”, what I call the electric vehicles that creep up behind you),  and admire some dedicated national pride at work. I will never contemplate painting my face after seeing this work of art.

Then I checked out of our Showcase on the Green, took off the Lenovo uniform shirt affectionately nicknamed “The Oven Mitt” by those who admire it’s bulletproof, flame retardent qualities, and made my way to Shunyi to watch the rowing. This was the high point of the day. Dave’s very own “Chariots of Fire” moment.  I saw true greatness before my very eyes.

Dinner? An astonishingly awesome Chinese meal of cucumbers and chili, black bean spareribs, roasted eggplant, smoked rice, and beef and peppers and onions, two Tsingtaos, and home with actually enough time to upload 457 photos and write two blog posts. So, half-a-day-off, saw two sports, did a little work, and had a most profound walk amongst the persimmons.

(*Empachers are the yellow boats favored by most Olympians, I own one, and saw a lot of them today.)

I can check off the top thing I wanted to accomplish while here in Beijing: I watched the US Women’s 8+ crew win the gold medal at Shunyi, stood with my hand on my heart, and sang the words of the Star Spangled Banner as the red, white and blue went up the flagpole as the sun set to the west.

I can’t offer any intelligent play-by-play. The Americans led from the start and won by a nice margin. I expected them to win. It was an incredible spectacle to witness – from start to finish to medal ceremony to the victory lap before the grandstands. If you ever get the chance to be at an Olympic Games in person and be at an event where your country wins, then count yourself very fortunate, it’s pretty emotional.

I was rooting specifically for one rower, Elle Logan of Boothbay, Maine, who rowed at The Brooks School in North Andover, Mass. (my alma mater) with my daughter. Together they won the second of Elle’s two national high school championships, Elle going on to Stanford. This is, I believe, the third Olympic medal won by a Brooks rower – the others being Gene Clapp in ’72 and Douglas Burden in Barcelona and Atlanta in ’92 and ’96. Congratulations Elle!

The Victory Lap

Inside the last 250 meters in the sprint.

More photos here.

Wednesday’s rains flushed the skies and last night’s weather for the opening of the track-and-field events was more than perfect, almost freaky perfect, with a big full moon climbing out of the southeastern sky, and the Fragrant Hills orange in the sunset.

I woke up this morning to more of the same. Sweet. I was beginning to think I’d never draw a chestful of air again. Here’s hoping this sticks around for the marathon. Have a press panel today on the impact of blogging on the Olympics, then have to switch back to the old hotel, then onto the big marketing push (even bigger than the one we’ve unleashed) to close out the rest of the Games. Ten days and I’m home. I think this is exactly the mid-point.

Huge thanks to Nicole Estebanell at Neo, Gary Milner and Rahul Agarwal at Lenovo. They’ve accomplished a miracle in the last four days and they know what I am talking about …..

I just returned from the National Stadium at the Beijing Olympic Green, aka the Bird’s Nest, site of the well-watched opening ceremonies last week, and where today athletics debuted for the first time on a floor where Chinese director Zhang Yimou blew away the world with 2,000 drummers, dancing calligraphers, and the unscrolling of 5,000 years of Chinese history. Being the Olympic purist I am, all the psychic unrest caused by my first Olympic event – Beach Volleyball in the Rain – was undone in an instant when I saw the women’s heptathalon heats and disci flying, sprinters, sprinting and shot puts putting.

The only medals final was the men’s shotput. Big beefy guys launching 16 pounds of iron as far as they could, while on the other side of the stadium a dozen gazelle-like sprinters limbered up for the 3,000 meter steeplechase. Radio controlled cars returned the discus to the thrower. Choreographed squads of helper set out hurdles for the 400 meter men … it was an amazing spectacle of multi-tasking track-and-field with announcements made in Mandarin, French, and English, replays on the huge displays at each pole of the gigantic bean shaped stadium.. The crowd was nuts. Face painters and flag wavers … it was hard not to start yelling for the American shot putter Chris Cantwell as he threw for a silver medal tonight. I may have to be a face painter at rowing on Sunday.

I tried to take it all in, first with the camera, then with the video camera – there was always something going on some place in the vastness of the stadium. Finally I just let it sink in, pretty blown away by my utterly perfect seats 20 rows back from the track on the 50-meter line.

I have some 500 photos to process, and as the Florida fishing guide told me once after I caught a fish: “Even a blind squirrel bumps into a nut now and then …” there might be three or four worth posting. But, alas, to bed. Photo work will have to wait until after the Games.

My Olympic Flickr stream is here.

Left turns and directions: there are few things more exciting in Beijing than a left turn in a cab in the face of an ongoing tour bus with no intention to ever slow or stop. I am now squeezing in behind the driver’s side of the back seat, figuring that gives me a couple feet of dead air when the right side of the vehicle gets stove in. All cab rides are high drama. Non-Mandarin speakers must carry a card with the destination written on it. The drivers always, without exception, scrutinize it, look puzzled, shrug, and then take off with great determination. I spend the ride worrying I am about to get launched into an episode of Lost. I always make it and have started to relax.

Score: I hold rowing finals tickets: that’s right, I was all freaky this morning, looking at the number one resolution I made with myself which was to see Elle Logan and Caroline Lind row in the US Women’s Eight in the rowing finals on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t looking good. I was searching scalper sites and the damage was going to be ugly, then lo and behold our “Ticketmaster”, Steve Crutchfield said, “I think we have rowing tickets.”

Well, Lenovo did have tickets and I am now holding them because no one else wanted them. I am going to Shunyi Sunday afternoon at 3:30, ready to cheer and see my first Olympic rowing, the medal finals for both men and women.

Wuatodetwect: when I log into the hotel network at the Grand Hyatt sites like Google assume from the origin of the IP address that I am in China (which is correct) and therefore want to see their site in Mandarin (which I do not). I can’t find the link on the mandarin page that says “change the language” so I end up blindly clicking until I get to where I am now, which is Elmer Fudd.

I also see that Google thinks I am in Hong Kong, which I am not, but which leads to me think of the conspiracy theory something is going on with IP addressing that will insure people in high end hotels like the Hyatt see what they want to see when they are online (I literally have nothing firewalled or blocked right now).

When it is midnight and the day has been too long, it is time to do a video dump. Here goes.

Rohit Bhargava and Kaitlyn Wilkins got into the iLounge on daypasses today with their FlipCams and kicked butt with a ton of good interviews with the athlete bloggers. Check out the YouTube channel, LenovoAthleteBlogger. I like South African kayaker Shaun Rubenstein’s observation that the athlete blog movement is gaining steam among his fellow kayakers who want to stay “trendy.”

I had dinner at the Temple of the Five Pagodas, or Wutasi, near the Beijing Zoo. The place is incredibly beautiful and 500 years old. This was with our VIP guests and I sat with Jeff Levick from Google. I liked the music ladies a lot. The calligraphy over the round table — original poem drawn by Mao himself.

On the Olympic Green on Wednesday I saw this hallucination:

I was interviewed at the USA House this morning by Loretta Chao at the Wall Street Journal.  When she was interviewing our CMO I decided to film her filming him. The audio is useless. But hey. It’s content. Go complain elsewhere.

Big day for us. CNBC says we’re doing the best job of any of the Olympic sponsors and third in terms of traditional media mentions after McDonalds and Coke.  .  I remain paranoid, taking nothing for granted, this is not the time for self-congratulations and now we’re about to light up the afterburners with a much bigger online promotional play. Our teams in Bangalore and New York are now sharing in the sleeplessness.

Yo, CNBC, make your video embeddable.

Richard from the comments points to a piece in the Financial Times and this quote:

“David Melançon, a partner at the Ito Partnership, a brand consultancy, says he is impressed with Lenovo’s efforts to connect with potential customers through blogging and social networking during the games.”

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis – A golden opportunity? How Chinese brands are betting on an Olympic boost.

Big Olympic cliche is the trading of pins. Little medal/enamel trinkets. I thought it was an athlete thing — “I’ll trade you my Russia for your USA pin” — but it turns out everybody from the sponsors  to the teams to cities bidding for future Games are in on the action.

If you are cool (I saw this first on colleague Andrew Barron) you show off your pins on the neck ribbon that holds your security pass. As of today I have contracted pin fever and am as manic as a jackdaw (I think that is the name of the bird that steals shiny objects to decorate its nest). Here is my collection after five days. I am on track to make my flair quota.

This is where I spend a good portion of every day here in Beijing. A board room two floors below the lobby of the Beijing Grand Hyatt next to our VIP guest hospitality center. This is the central nervous system for tickets, transportation to and from the Olympic venues, planning, fire fighting, special requests and your’s truly, Lenovo’s Olympic Blogger-in-Chief.

I don’t do much except clean the empties off the desk so we don’t spill coffee on the spreadsheets and flow charts.

From left to right is Mike Cunningham, he’s our Mister Wolf (Pulp Fiction reference) who can make anything happen. Melissa Herb is the quarterback, she works as a liason with all the different Lenovo leaders and makes sure it all goes according to plan.  Julie Gifford is in charge of transportation logistics. She has a walkie talkie in one ear and a cell phone in the other. She makes air traffic control look easy. Jenni Morgan seems to do everything — juggling more balls and details than can be imagined. And finally, Tom Grimes is the man on the scene at the Olympic Hospitality Center. This crew sometimes operates on three hours of sleep per day, never knows what the weather is like outside unless someone tells them, and yet is the source of the funniest repartee I’ve seen since the newsroom of PC Week in the early 80s.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Next door is a huge room with about 40 people in it. Stacks of t-shirts, Olympic pins, IT dudes, junk food, weird hotel food, big signs so guests won’t get lost, drivers, printers, tired people, happy people ….

My complaint is the TV in the war room does not get NBC (NBC is camped at the St. Regis so there is NBC there of course) and so we watch China television which only shows Chinese athletes winning Chinese medals and then every so often does 30 minutes of economic news which is usually scenes of farms, dams, livestock, wind farms, coal fired electical generation plants, and every now and then a Lenovo ad.

Row2k Coverage: Olympic Games Blog.

I just discovered Row2K’s blog. Ed Hewitt delivers the best rowing coverage anywhere, anytime (and I send him a PayPal payment from time to time to keep Row2K rolling).

Anyway, he has Brad Lewis (gold, LA 1984, Assault on Lake Casitas) Xeno Mueller (Gold, Atlanta 96, Silver ’00, Iron Oarsman) guest blogging from Beijing and Shunyi.  Man I wish I could join them. I am starting to get frantic to get out of the basement of the Hyatt and out to the venue to see some serious rowing!

Oh well, here to work, not to spectate.

Taken at our product showcase on the Olympic Green yesterday. Have a choice of three backgrounds. Great Wall. Bird’s Nest. Water Cube.

Operating on minimal sleep now. No time to be intelligent. Photos uploading now.

Turns out that Zhang Yimou used a few “Performance Enhancing” techniques to achieve that dazzling Olympics opening ceremony:

Opening On Steroids: Fake Fireworks, Mimed Singing – Thomas Crampton.

… because I just ruined a nice set of blue Brooks Brothers boxer shorts when our Olympic blogging site went dark for 30 minutes. Story of my life — when the website absolutely positively cannot go down — it will go down. Without fail. Forbes.com alumni will recall the September 1999 disaster when we lost the site for three days during the publication of the annual list of the 400 richest Americans. That was 72 hours of badness.

This one was particularly hairy because the site is our default in our iLounges — internet cafes for athletes and their guests in the Olympic Village. Press is all over it. This site CANNOT fail.

My man Esteban Panzeri was able to get it fixed, but I still need a new pair of these:

Back now, all is well. But now I have the paranoia.

This is a very important column by David Carr on the effects the Web 2.0 Games are having on the containment of content by the mainstream media. Very important. This is it ladies and gentlemen. Image of little boys with their fingers in leaking dikes comes to mind. Take 10,500 athletes, give them video cameras, cell phones, whatever, and watch them share what they see with the world.

“On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC’s game of “whack-a-mole” as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free, its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived.

The Media Equation – All of Us, the Arbiters of News – NYTimes.com.

Very little time to blog, but …

Went to the USA House yesterday — the hospitality center in Chaoyang at the Worker’s Stadium (didn’t see many workers) sponsored by the USOC and the US Olympic sponsors — to find the Randt brothers (Clark and Paull) as Paull is blogging for Yale and we hung out at the Wall on Saturday night. He was nowhere to be found, but Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy scored me an invite to the premier of a documentary sponsored by Kleenex about emotional Olympic moments called “Let It Out.”

The concept was brilliant. Sponsor a film about the more emotional moments in Olympic history to make people cry and use more Kleenex. I’m a weepy guy, I admit. I am in touch with my inner boo-hoo, but the audio wasn’t awesome enough to hear everything but …

I still get all tingly over the 1980 Miracle on Ice. I watched that go down at college, and remember as the US won, and goalie Jim Craig is searching for his recently widowed Dad in the stands with a USA flag on his shoulders 100 drunk and crazy college students singing “God Bless America” because none of them knew the words to the Star Spangled Banner. I cried then.

The documentary was very very good and when it gets on line at letitout.com you should watch it. The trailer is up there now.

The last time I cried was June when I flew back from Tokyo and watched this other documentary , Young At Heart, about a senior citizen’s chorus in Northhampton, Mass.. The scene where the show goes on at a Massachusetts prison after they learn one of their fellow members has passed away, and they sing Dylan’s “Forever Young” to a crowd of tattooed hard-time inmates … and make them cry. Well, I challenge anybody to watch that film and not start leaking.

Anyway, blog site just crashed (Thanks MidPhase!) and I have fires to extinguish!