This is the newest wrinkle in corporate blogging. It’s brilliant and it’s simple. Coke has found six smart university students (from China, the U.S., Austria, Germany, Canada and Italy) to blog the Torino Winter Olympic Games for them. Torino Conversations features the photos – and corresponding country flags – of the students along with snippets of their most recent entries. Click the one for Du Wei from China and you’ll see her latest entry. It includes a link to a podcast. She writes:

“Finally, we are getting started. Katie and I spent 2 hours walking around within the sponsor village and into the streets of Torino, grasping people to talk to and pose for photos. It was also good to have opportunity to walk around and look at Torino from a non-Olympic angle.

The Chairman of Coca-Cola, Neville Isdell came to award the first Coca-Cola Live Olympic Award to the very first employee of TOROC, Giovanna Locci, and we got a chance to talk to the chairman before the ceremony. Check it out here [link to podcast] and we will come up with more interviews with PIN TRADERS and perhaps the Opening Ceremony tomorrow.”

According to MarketingVox the students have agreed to keep their blog entries positive and upbeat. Travel and accommodations are being paid for by Coke. How cool is that…

I’d be interested in knowing more about how Coca-Cola identified the students and vetted their blogging skills and common sense quotient. (Gotta be some good parties in Torino… )

Oh and just noticed this. Scroll down on Torino Conversations and you’ll see photos they’ve uploaded along with comments from (no doubt envious) friends. This fits right in with Pew Internet’s recent survey that said 57% of teens create content for the Web. It’s as natural as talking on a cell phone for them.

Useful Link

Light the Torch is another twist on Olympics blogging. It was just launched by blogging network b5media and is inviting guest contributors. All proceeds from Google AdSense revenues on the blog will go to athletic organizations supporting athletes (not sure what those are exactly, but sounds good).