How @nbcolympics Prepares for the 2024 Paris Olympics
Featuring an interview with Justin Karp, Vice President of Social Media at NBC Sports.
Here’s what the next few weeks will look like for Justin Karp, Vice President of Social Media at NBC Sports, as he leads NBC’s social coverage of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games:
Oversee a team of 60 people (which flexes up from his usual 12 to 14)
18 of those people are on-the-ground in Paris collecting, editing, and publishing content
15 hour days that begin at 9 a.m. and end at midnight (while managing shifts that allow for 24-hour coverage)
Countless posts on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook
He is going to be very busy. Which is why I am so grateful that Justin took the time to chat with me about what these preparations have been like (“It’s realistic to say that we’ve been preparing for Paris 2024 from the day after Beijing 2022 ended”) and how his strategy for approaching the Olympics has changed over the years.
Let’s jump in.
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Rachel Karten: First, can you tell me about your current role and any past social (or not!) roles you've had?
Justin Karp: I work on social strategy and content development for NBC Sports, overseeing about four dozen social accounts that cover everything from the Olympics, NFL, Premier League, men’s and women’s golf, motorsports and more. The team also support our entertainment and cable social partners and data and analytics.
Before joining NBC, I was the head of social media at Pac-12 Network (2014-2017) and the social media manager at WJLA-TV in Washington D.C. (2011-2014).
RK: What does your day-to-day look like in a VP role? It's always cool to see social roles that extend beyond director-level.
JK: It varies (like any good social media role)! But in general, my day-to-day primary priority is to ensure that the team is properly set up for success and understands our priorities and executions for any given day/week/month.
I also work very closely with our partners in marketing, sales, production, programming, and many other departments across NBCU to ensure that our social business is property integrated and aligned with the larger business goals and needs.
RK: Can you talk about how long you've been preparing for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics? What are some of the big milestones?
JK: It’s realistic to say that we’ve been preparing for Paris 2024 from the day after Beijing 2022 ended. There was so much to learn and put into place after both Tokyo and Beijing that not only impacted this upcoming Olympic/Paralympic cycle, but also ideas and best practices that could live across our entire portfolio. Our leadership has stressed for two years just how important Paris is going to be for the company and our audience, and we have taken that extremely seriously.
The biggest milestone was the success that we saw during the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Trials; we treated that as our “Olympics before the Olympics” and put as much strategy and workflow into place for those two weeks as we could with one-third of the staffing level that we’ll have for the Olympics. Seeing the audience reach, video viewership, and follower growth during those two weeks showed just how far we’ve come, and the lessons we learned from Trials are ones we’ve been actively working to integrate into our Olympic coverage.
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RK: What does your on-the-ground coverage look like? How big is the team that's reacting in real time?
JK: Beyond the Paris Creator Collective, we will have a team of about 18 people collecting, editing, and publishing content to a variety of our channels from venues and historic sites throughout France.
We have strategically placed our producers at both the biggest events each day AND we will have people working directly with Team USA athletes on content as they’re available.
We also believe that Paris itself is a main character and we are eager to use the city as a dramatic backdrop and stage for storytelling and content creation throughout the Games.
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RK: How has your strategy evolved over the years? I'd have to imagine, for example, the popularity of TikTok has affected the way you cover these events?
JK: It’s like night and day from 2018 (my first Olympics at NBC) in terms of how these platforms, content formats and the savvy and desires of our growing audience have all evolved. We’re keen to that and have designed a strategy that will leverage the strengths of every social platform as a chance to engage every American every day for three straight weeks.
But one thing that has not changed and remains the centerpiece of our story: we must get our facts straight, we have to take the work seriously, and we have to do right by fans across the country with awesome content and wonderful stories. We approach the Olympics with a simple and strategic rallying cry: Every single post we create has a chance to be someone’s first-ever interaction with the Olympics OR NBC. We owe it to them to make it great.
RK: I'd love to hear about a post from a past Olympics or Paralympics that you are particularly proud of. Why did it work?
I think about Lydia Jacoby winning gold in the 100m breaststroke in 2021 at least once a week. The Tokyo Olympics presented SO MANY challenges, but the biggest one we all faced was how to capture the emotion of fans, friends, and family when nobody could attend the Games in person.
Our Olympics production team set up an incredible network of content capture opportunities nationwide to do just that, and when we saw this video of her classmates in Alaska losing their minds while watching their peer win Olympic gold, it was magical. Mashing together the video of the celebration with her race finish was just the tip of the iceberg; all the back-end work across multiple departments to simply make that moment possible still gives me goosebumps.
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RK: What do you love about working in social media?
JK: The two biggest things: Finding new ways to connect people to the things they’re most passionate about (and people who are equally as passionate about them), AND helping people discover new things that they didn’t know they would love. The surprise and delight of discovering something new (a song, a movie, a sport, an athlete, a moment) never gets old, and I love being a part of that for so many people.
RK: What advice would you give social managers who aspire to be a VP of Social Media one day?
JK: The most pivotal thing to do is genuinely understand how social plays a part in the greater mission and goals of your company. Get to know the needs, workflows and priorities of everyone you can across the place you work; it’ll give you both the connections you need to succeed and the empathy to understand the stress and work that others are taking on.
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Love this: “The two biggest things: Finding new ways to connect people to the things they’re most passionate about (and people who are equally as passionate about them), AND helping people discover new things that they didn’t know they would love.”
Big mistake separating the summer and winter games to separate years. Who’s enthusiastic about the games now?