Twitter’s NBC Olympics Partnership: A Sign Of Things To Come

Twitter and NBC have announced a new partnership around the 2012 Summer Olympics, which begin this week in London.

The partnership centers on Twitter’s third “hashtag page,” which will go live later this week at twitter.com/#Olympics. Twitter will have staff monitoring Olympic-related tweets from athletes, coaches, Olympics officials, NBC personalities and others and curating the best content surrounding the #Olympics hashtag on a single page.

NBC will promote the page and the hashtag during its on-air coverage across each of the networks that is providing coverage, including in primetime coverage on NBC itself. The Wall Street Journal has reported that there’s no money changing hands in the NBC/Twitter partnership.

Twitter has already done similar hashtag pages with the Euro 2012 event and NASCAR. It’s expected to formally announce the Olympics hashtag page later this week.

Earlier this month, NBC announced a similar Olympics partnership with Facebook.

Grand-scale happenings like the Olympics, Euro 2012 and NASCAR races may just be the beginning of Twitter’s event-related efforts.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the WSJ earlier this week that some of the company’s priorities surround events both big and small:

In a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Costolo said Twitter is working to expand a fledgling plan to help its users make sense of blasts of messages that are concentrated around major events and sports, essentially building up more of a presence around live “tentpole”-like events.

Twitter is also trying to make it easier for third parties, such as conference organizers, to organize Twitter posts around smaller-scale gatherings.

Costolo told the paper that Twitter wants to “more closely tie the shared experience on Twitter to the actual event that is happening.”