Channel 9's Olympic Coverage & their Facebook Page

Someone at Channel 9 is running around stressed. Meetings are happening to discuss how to handle this and the social media monitoring companies, the social media commentators (me included) are already gearing up for another "How to handle a social crisis" Slideshare deck. Australia's biggest TV channel and Olympics broadcaster channel 9 is being "smashed" on their Facebook page over their coverage. Mostly around the coverage, or over coverage, of swimming. In heir defence, swimming is usually the area where Australia does the best in the medals so 9 probably over invested in their prep around swimming. The page is getting around 10 angry posts a minute and I found a lot of them funny. There's even some memes (both good and bad) popping up. The example below sums up Australia's youth well. But it's not all young kids there's also some people that will pick out any fault whether it be the pronunciation of a country or even when the channel accidentally broadcasts old footage. Whoops. What surprised me was this "Dear Channel 9" post by Matthew Taylor which has since reached 94,000 likes and 4,000 comments. It's as if it was posted by Lil Wayne himself. Foxtel, Australia's only pay TV provider, must be loving it. If they don't have a reactive ad coming out soon to capitalise on this I would be surprised. Foxtel's games profile, Follow The Games* is dedicated to the games in this period. It'll be an interesting few days to see how Channel 9 respond to this and how the other networks cover it. Oh and more importantly how the "social media experts" say they should have handled it. It also begs the quest does Australia's largest television network have anything to gain by running a Facebook profile for the channel itself? Sure their shows desrve a place for fans to chat but people don't like a channel, they like the content on it. Their 54,000 fans are nothing compared to their viewership and unlike brands they already have a channel to reach and engage people with, it's their own network.