Social Media and Big Data – Their Potential Impacts to Sport Event Sponsorship

Abstract

Sponsorship for mega sports events has increasingly played a critical role to achieve financial benefits in return for business in the past few decades. Not until recent Olympics: 2012 London Olympics in the UK and 2016 Rio Olympics in Brazil, started the sponsorship for mega sports events experiencing more vibration in business due to intervention of social media and big data in relevance to the sponsored event. Clearly, nowadays, an important element in mega-events planning is the advent of social media and its impact. The purpose of this manuscript was to examine social media and big data relevant to Olympic events and attempted to develop a comprehensive model to interpret the impacts of social media upon mega sports events. Rio Olympic 2016 along with other mega-events were selected as case studies. The result indicated that social media and big data on the event are primarily descriptive, however, impacts created from social media and big data on the event could be on various levels. Sponsors are recommended to implement a relationship marketing approach to deal with the dynamics of the event market in order to address the influence of social media and big data.