You no longer have to stay glued to the television to get your daily dose of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Not when you can stream, share, tweet, blog and bookmark them, anyway. While companies and event promoters have embraced social media as a way to establish relationships, the 2010 Winter Olympics has taken it to a whole new level of interaction, setting the bar higher than Cypress Mountain.

According to Nielsen, 13 percent of the audience who watched the Olympic opening ceremonies on TV also watched them simultaneously online. Fourty-one percent of which watched on Facebook. Yes, Facebook. The you-can’t-go-a-day-without-checking-because-you-might-miss-a-wall-post-Facebook.

Compare this to the zero people who watched the 2006 Turnio Olympics on Facebook, when it was only available for high school and college students and “Fan Page” meant your favorite unofficial band website in middle school. Vancouver 2010’s Facebook page has well over 1 million fans, with the number increasing by the minute. Made for Olympic lovers to share their enthusiasm, fans can comment on photo albums, post to discussions boards and upload video content… then update their status to let their friends know.

Just as the Olympics aims to bring people together on a global scale, NBC and the Vancouver Organizing Committee are using social media to foster interactive discussion and action in what may be the largest campaign ever— with Olympic viewers all over the world.

Let’s put this into perspective. NBC plans to stream 400 hours of live video content, compared to the mere two hours streamed from Turino that was done as a test. In the first two days of the Olympic ceremonies, NBCOlympics.com had 4.5 million unique visitors, which is 30 percent more than Turnio.

NBC has made it a priority to keep viewers connected through its social media center Olympic Pulse. Through Olympic Pulse, users can share Olympic content on almost any social platform and track the Twitter activity of both Olympic Athletes and fans. At the time of this post, the Twitter Tracker reported 265 Olympics-related tweets in ten minutes. Compare that with the zero tweets in 2006, before Twitter revamped communication in 140 characters.

Looking for Olympic coverage by phone? Of course there’s an App for that. With more than 1 million downloads, the Official Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games Mobile Spectacular Guide took the Gold for most popular free iTunes App when it was released. The application delivers more than 2,000 events over the 17 days of the Olympics to your phone, combining schedule listings, news, photo and video with enough social media tools to rival your computer. For added personalization, the App adjusts to your time zone to give you the most relevant content. For those attending the Games, the App tells you what events are happening closest to you, complete with maps and directions to get there. This kind of technology was not available for the 2006 Winter Olympics, as the iPhone and App revolution were not introduced until 2007.

If you can’t seem to stream enough video, the Vancouver Organizing Committee has you covered. On YouTube. With over 800,000 upload views, the VANOCwebteam uploads Daily Host Videos, which recap the day’s events in both English and French. This is leaps and bounds over the 2006 Winter Olympics, which had no official video on YouTube. We don’t believe it, either.

With endless ways to connect to the Vancouver Olympics, you don’t even need a television. USA may be leading the medal count, but in our opinion the real winner is social media. How’s that for 21st century? Or 2010 for that matter.

(Posted by Natalee Ranii-Dropcho, Intern)