Opinion

How Russia could manage @sochiproblems

As thousands of journalists and competitors take to social media to vent their frustration at the Winter Olympics Games facilities Karalee Evans takes a tongue-in-cheek look at how Russia could manage the situation. 

Thanks to the number of socially-literate journalists, the problems of Sochi’s 2014 Winter Olympics are trending online and go beyond questionable figure skating routines. The Twitter account @sochiproblems rose to thousands of followers in minutes and is now tweeting to over 330,000 people. And you know it’s not going away when clone accounts pop up getting in on the action.

Evans

Evans

A quick Google search will pull up thousands of results under “weird Sochi”. Type “Sochi Problems” and hundreds of listacles curating the best of the worst of Sochi fill the results.

And it’s not limited to the usual internet suspects of Buzzfeed and Mashable. Mainstream news are jumping onboard the Sochi Problem bandwagon, with Time, the Washington Post and the Bleacher Report all curating the wonders of two toilets in one cubicle, doors without handles and signs advising women to be embarrassed and ‘busting’ before they enter the bathroom.

What would you do if you were the Brand Manager of Sochi 2014?

In an age where business problems can’t be hidden and instead are amplified online by Twitter, Facebook and the listacle news sites, if you had a problem with infrastructure and weird toilets, what could you do?

Russia could follow the North Korean example and simply turn off the internet.

That’d stop those pesky journalists from Instagraming their hotel rooms. And by turning off the internet, it would also stop those competitors from being distracted on Tinder and focusing on winning Gold. Indeed, even if they wrote their phone number on their helmets during televised competition, they wouldn’t receive the thousands of sexts if there wasn’t internet, would they? 

Turning off the internet completely seems a bit extreme. Only dictatorships in war torn lands go to that extreme.

What else could Russia do? Perhaps they could bust Dennis Rodman out of rehab and take him on a tour of the Olympic Village while he outlandishly says stupid things and distracts the journalists to a point where Rodman becomes the voice of Sochi?

Let’s assume Rodman isn’t available post North Korea.

There’s always the option of having all the journalists making fun of poor Sochi’s bathrooms, accidentally fall on knives. Perhaps a bit extreme. Any other options?

In all seriousness, there is an option to mitigate #sochiproblems. Russia and Sochi’s greatest social asset; President Vladimir Putin. Renowned for his on-trend photo calls, his strong persona, his ability to kill a bear with his bare hands, Putin is the key for Russia to regain focus on the positives of Sochi.

Sochi’s only hope is for Putin to go all Kardashian-like and post selfies in the best (worst) of the weird bathrooms and own it. Two toilets in one cubicle can become a Van Damme stage for bowl-splits. No door handle? Putin can make a six-second Vine of him smashing that door open with nothing but a hairpin. Problem solved.

Sochi problems become Putin’s Sochi Selfie Quest and Russia turns a social media Issue into a tourism campaign. Easy.

Karalee Evans is the Head of Social at DDB 

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