And the Olympic Spirit continues

Wow.

It’s really quite hard to believe that one year has already past since the Winter Olympics last came to town and took over the hearts of all Vancouverites. I can still feel the energy thrumming in the air; I can still remember walking downtown at night and soaking in the atmosphere, the pride for our Canadian athletes.

The last weekend saw Robson Street and Granville Street closed to celebrate the one year anniversary. And even though it just wasn’t the same as 2010, the crowds were aplenty.

What helped to create buzz for the event?

I believe that Twitter, word of mouth, radio and the longing for the Olympic experience played a large part. All throughout the week leading up to the “Relive” event, I heard radio ads, I saw bands Tweeting that they were going to be playing, and certain Vancouver based blogs and Vancouver Tourism trying to add in some interactivity with facebook and twitter games. For example, if you tweeted something with the hashtag #relivedowntown, the tweet would show up on a projector on Granville Street.

It helps that I have a RSS feed that aggregates all my blogs and facebook invites for me.

Also, while walking around downtown, I also grabbed a lot of free swag. One set of freebies particularly stood out for me.

The website links to Canada Tourism’s Facebook page where for every ‘like’  they receive on their page, $1 goes to Canadian athletes. I thought this was a very nice way of promoting Canada and it’s athletes by capitalizing on the Relive Olympics weekend and the social-media savvy population. Nearly everyone is on Facebook these days, and people don’t mind doing something as easy as just liking a page for a good cause.

The foam finger like was extremely popular, and nearly everyone on the streets had one at some point. The facebook ‘like’ stickers are even better as there are many times when one comes across something that they like. Giving these  stickers not only adds value for whoever owns and uses them, the stickers also provide free promotion for Canada Tourism and hopefully more traffic to their facebook page.

Hopefully more of these stickers will turn up around the city. And who knows, maybe the sticker you see on a particularly funny bus ad will be mine. 🙂