Between photos and insights about their Olympic experience, some Olympians are turning over their social media accounts to sponsors, agreeing to quotas of postings on Twitter and Facebook and letting other people send commercial messages in their name.
The agents for US figure skaters Ashley Wagner and Gracie Gold both say sponsors draft some of their tweets, plugging their brands.
"This is the first Olympics where I actually have a social media calendar, where an athlete has to tweet or mention something on a given day," Gold's agent, Yuki Saegusa, said in an interview.
"We get a list of tweets or social media things that need to be posted and then we approve them for her," said Saegusa, senior vice president for Olympic clients at sports management giant IMG.
Although they "encourage" Gold to post the pre-packaged commercial tweets to her 65,000 followers herself, sometimes others do More