Social Media and Big Data – Their Potential Impacts to Sport Event Sponsorship

Sponsorship for mega sport events has increasingly played a critical role to achieve financial benefits in return for business in the past few decades. Not until recent Olympics:  2012 London Olympics in UK and 2016 Rio Olympics in Brazil, started the sponsorship for mega sport events experiencing more vibration in business due to intervention of social media and big data in relevance to the sponsored event. Clearly, nowadays, an important element in mega events planning is the advent of social media and its impact. The purpose of this manuscript was to examine social media and big data relevant to Olympic events and attempted to develop a comprehensive model to interpret the impacts of social media upon mega sport events. Rio Olympic 2016 along with other few mega events were selected as case studies.   The result indicated that social media and big data on the event are primarily descriptive, however, impacts created fromsocial media and big data on the event could be in various levels. Sponsors are recommended to implement relationship marketing approach to deal with dynamics of event market in order to address the influence of social media and big data.