Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games is all about providing technology to help the athletes of the world achieve their dreams. Our computers are powering everything from the Athlete’s Village and iLounge to the Olympic Games. We collaborated to design the official Olympic Torch and sponsored its journey around the world. With the Voices of the Summer Games Lenovo Blogger Program, we are trying to do something that has never been tried on such a large scale before:
To bring a real insider’s perspective on what is happening during the Games to fans at home around the world.
To do that, we have invited a collection of athletes from every sport and every region around the world to blog about their experiences leading up to and during the Olympic Games. In some cases, these athletes were already blogging. In others, we helped them to start their blogs and get into blogging for the first time. Together, they represent the real stories of the Games. Athletes who may or may not win a medal, but have struggled, persevered and taken years of their life to be a part of those few short weeks in August when the world’s attention will turn to Beijing and their dreams will take center stage.
All the athletes participating in our program were provided with new Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences. They all also agreed to place a badge on their blogs indicating that they were part of our program (to be fully transparent), and also all agreed to allow their blog posts to be pulled into this site you are reading now. They were NOT paid in any way apart from the machines, and have not been asked or required to write about Lenovo in any way.
We are producing this program with our partners, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and have adhered to the best practices set out for campaigns like this by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Athletes are provided support for starting their blogs, but Lenovo does not regard the blogs of the participating athletes to be Lenovo blogs – nor will Lenovo ever ask for any overt advertising or sponsorship acknowledgement on the athlete’s blogs. These properties are the property and responsibility of the athlete and are not subject to editorial management in any form by Lenovo, Ogilvy or Google. Terms and conditions are governed by Google’s standard terms for its Blogger and YouTube properties, and content guidelines have been established by the IOC.
Why are we doing this? Because we believe that our sponsorship should be about empowering the Games with technology and the best way to do that is to support the athletes directly. We hope you agree, and invite you to participate in the conversation here on our site, or on any of the participating athlete’s blogs. The stories that you’ll be able to follow here are the real stories of the Olympics and we’re looking forward to watching them unfold with you.
About Lenovo
Lenovo, purchased the IBM PC division, maker of the ThinkPad notebook, back in 2005. We are a global company playing on a global stage as well. We are worldwide partner of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and Torch Relay. We are the official PC provider to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. We also designed the torch!
