The Baku2020 campaign struggles to find online marketing sweet spot

Baku, the home of the 2012 Eurovision and UEFA U-17 World Cup, is now working to get the 2020 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. This event, which would bring a lot of financial and energy spending to Azerbaijan, is now in its preliminary stages.

There seems to already be a lot of activity on Facebook. Baku2020 official campaigners have spent money for advertisement to get ‘likes’ on the Facebook page, which is now at nearly 36,000. This could be result of clicktivism, nevertheless it’s still a good result. For comparison, Madrid, which is also a potential city to host the Olympic Games in 2020 have collected 34,600 likes.

Baku2020′s Facebook page posts stories in three languages, which is not exactly what should be done to get Olympic Games followers. Campaigners haven’t decided on whom they want to influence or bring together. That’s why the number of shares, and especially comments, are fewer than posts of some well-known activists.

Another issue is Twitter activism. The Baku campaign has only collected 431 followers, while Madrid2020 has nearly 2850 followers. Probably the main followers of Baku2020 are local users, who are not using Twitter as much as Facebook. This means that Baku2020 should change its online policy toward involving more international communities rather than staying within local boundaries, which seems not to have been successful so far.

The last issue I want to touch on related to Baku2020 is based on the news from last week. Online I found many links saying that campaigners have collected some 100,000 signatures for support of their campaign on 20 March. Many links inside news articles were asking readers to come participate in this supportive action. The links lead to this page, which shows only around 80,000 signatures, which is strange compared to what news reported. If signatures were collected offline users should be informed about this.

As a result of this bidding process, only one city out of five (Istanbul, Tokyo, Baku, Madrid, and Doha) will be selected in September 2013 by the International Olympic Committee.