One Million Facebook Fans for IOC – FanTrust: Your Mission Control for Olympic Fan Action

As the official International Olympic Committee Facebook page hits the one million mark this week, FanTrust is following up our Twitter Olympics blog with a focus on Facebook fans.

Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert took his fandom to a new level becoming the primary sponsor of the US Speedskating team for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. He’s taking donations for athletes and – in yet another form of bank bailout – replacing the team’s original sponsor, the now bankrupt Dutch Bank DSB.

“We must ensure that it is America’s 38-inch thighs on that medal platform,” said Colbert in the official news release. Colbert’s Facebook page includes wacky Olympic sports coverage, video outtakes and a “Skate Expectations Facebook App.”

Inside Facebook is reporting that NBC’s official Olympics page has almost 18,000 fans and includes a widget to watch the games from Facebook. NBC also developed an application, Vancouver Olympics, that currently has more than 60,000 fans and is essentially a video box for NBC content from which users may see Olympics video, photos and news.

To empower fans and get people’s attention, the Associated Press has also set up Twitter and Facebook accounts for the Winter Games. Video and other material from the AP’s Winter Games site can be embedded into other Web sites, including fan’s own Facebook pages.

The AP’s Facebook page is an extension of its online Winter Olympics content venture that will collect online ad revenue from more than 900 news outlets. AP’s content includes schedules, results, photos, videos, news and the ability to share all of it with widgets on other Pages, according to Inside Facebook.

About 120 AP reporters, photographers, editors and videographers will be here in Vancouver to cover the Winter Olympics. Only NBC, which owns the television rights to the Olympics, will have a larger news staff at the event, reports the AP. The news cooperative, now also a fan-friendly cooperative, has covered every Olympics since they were revived in 1896.

As for the IOC Facebook page – in an era of fly-by night corporations, up-start start ups and multi-billion dollar market caps for nascent companies – it’s also great to see some social networking by an organization with a Facebook profile “founded in 1894.”