Social Integration for TV and Publishing: 2011 Year-End Review
We may look back at 2011 as the year social integration into TV and publishing really accelerated in velocity. At least, we’ve seen that in the clients we work with.
Mass Relevance partnered with nearly 100 TV producers, broadcasters and publishers last year, in addition to our work with brands and retailers (stay tuned for more on this). In collaboration with our clients, we established best practices and processes to integrate real-time social content into live and scripted shows, next to articles and immersive social experiences.
Our Director of Content and Production, Derek Dodge (ex-CNN Social Producer) put together this ‘sizzle reel’ of some our TV and media work last year.
When it comes to social, we’re seeing more and more US and international TV producers are ‘getting it’. Broadcasting executives are paying attention to how integrating social into linear TV and digital is making a difference in audience growth and tune in. These are early days, but those who are moving now are the ones that are evolving and gaining competitive advantage. Moreover, we’re witnessing a ‘building’ of audiences over time. So there’s a “Net Present Value” effect of getting started with social now. Each audience member that experiences the opportunity to engage socially is more likely to amplify that experience and come back. Perhaps this is why The Voice (in their first season) was the most social show, despite American Idol launching 10 years ago.
Where is this all going? We see producers and publishers are evolving quickly after an initial project, event or show. They’re looking to consistently integrate their real-time audience into the show, the site, the app, the second screen experiences, and involve talent in the experience. At Mass Relevance we’re ready. We’ve built the infrastructure of real-time social aggregation, filtering and moderation at large scale. We’ve built many ready-to-go digital visualizations and our team now has a great deal of experience on how to integrate into TV and media. So the stage is set (no pun intended) for a big year in Social Experience Integration for 2012!
5 Ways to Integrate Social into Sporting Events
You didn’t have to be a sports analyst to know that Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos did something big on Sunday January 8th – the Twitter volume was evidence enough. According to Twitter, the overtime win against the Pittsburgh Steelers hit a sports-related record of 9,420 tweets-per-second.
In his 1st playoff game, @TimTebow lead the way to a new sports related TPS (tweets per second) of 9420, oh and a win in the playoffs too.
— Twitter Sports (@TwitterSports) January 9, 2012
It’s not surprising. No other form of entertainment engages audiences the way sporting events do. The competitive nature of team sports combined with fan loyalty creates levels of engagement that advertisers crave. Not to mention sports are often the top topic of conversation in social circles.
Sports broadcasters, teams and leagues are increasingly looking for ways to foster, capture and own that conversation. Here are five ways to integrate social content into sporting events:
1. In Venue Displays
Tens of thousands of people in a stadium arena create a captive audience ripe for social content experiences. In fact, a more linear version of this already takes place in venues across the country – the “Fan Cam.” Cameras around the venue randomly show fans on the jumbo-tron, eliciting excitement for five seconds of fame. Now it’s time for “Fan Cam 2.0.”
Photos, videos and tweets from attendees at the game can be captured, moderated and then displayed within the sporting venue in real-time. This modern version of the “Fan Cam” gives the same excitement for fans, but with the added value of increasing social buzz for the team outside of the venue.
2. On Screen Graphics
Television audiences now have the opportunity to watch a game with commentary from more than just a couple talking heads in a studio. Curated tweets from athletes, coaches, celebrities and other influencers can be curated and displayed in on-screen graphics for an added value to the audience. Combine these with viewer tweets and the engagement level among fans skyrockets.
3. Web Experiences
When the social conversation around individual games reaches millions of social mentions, the need for robust curation becomes paramount. It’s impossible to follow a conversation that has a million of voices speaking all at once. A custom micro-site, like the Mass Relevance-powered Super Bowl experience is the ideal solution. Filtered streams give users the ability to see only the best tweets from coaches, players, analysts and fans. They can join the conversation right from the site and even participate in Twitter polls and view the leaderboard of trends within the game.
4. Twitter Polls
Polling is not new. In fact, polls can sometimes be boring. You vote and see the current results, but it’s not a very rewarding experience. Twitter polls change that. When a user votes in a Twitter poll, their vote goes out as a tweet. They can amend that tweet with whatever commentary they wish, possibly providing an explanation for why they voted a certain way. Those tweets are then captured in a curated stream below the poll.
For sports teams, Twitter polls provide a simple mechanism to engage fans with a direct call-to-action like “Who was MVP of the game?” with the added bonus of amplification since every vote goes out as a tweet. The NY Giants uses the Mass Relevance platform very effectively for this purpose. They often transform the homepage of Giants.com into a Twitter poll asking fans to vote on the “Extra Effort” player of the game.
5. Twitter Battles
Twitter battles engage fans in a social competition to see which team receives the highest amount of social buzz. We can track specific hashtags assigned to individual teams or a multitude of keywords that encompass the entire conversation happening around the event. The data is cumulated and displayed in a numeric ranking or leaderboard. It’s a fun way to encourage fans to tweet and talk about their team and gives a layer of gamification to the social conversation.
These are just a handful of ways we see our sports-related clients using the Mass Relevance platform to engage audiences. With several big sporting events on the horizon, including the Super Bowl and March Madness, I think it’s fair to say we’ll continue to see more record-breaking sports moments in the social space. That trend opens up a world of opportunity for teams, leagues and broadcasters to capitalize on the social buzz by shaping the conversation and creating richer viewing experiences for audiences.
A New Dawn for Interactive Advertising
We live in an age where we view and interact with screens at every turn of our lives, from the mornings where we arrive at work and check up on the latest news on our laptops, get our emails and status updates on our smartphones, and finally settle down in the evenings and view our favorite shows on our televisions. Between these and other screens, it seems that information and entertainment is never out of our reach, and marketers are now faced with the task of restructuring their current marketing efforts to better target customers at any given point in the day. Forrester Research recently released their 2012 Interactive Marketing Predictions Report, and in it they highlight the advertising trends of the upcoming year, giving us a good idea of what to expect from marketers.
A Retrospective
2011 was a year for efficiency and data collection, where digital marketers utilized a variety of outsourced data overlays to gather as much information on consumers as necessary in an effort to become as efficient as possible. Analytics were a key feature for most marketers, and they used the collected data to create relevance for the consumer in an effort to get them to be more interested in the service or product.
We also saw the rise of privacy concerns among customers, who learned to be more cautious when releasing and handling any information online. These fears were reinforced by the numerous inquiries levied against our biggest social networks by government agencies, and going forward consumers are now aware to be more careful and mindful online with their social data. In the upcoming year, we should expect to see many of these fears addressed and marketers will utilize this data control in new ways to target more focused demographics.
Evolving the Mobile Game
In 2012, marketers will see the full realization of the fact that a majority of consumers will now be always-on, referring to the fact that they will virtually always have online access to any number of networks and websites, no matter the screen. The convergence of the variety of screens people have on them will mean advertisers will now find ways to target customers at all times of day, and with the vast capabilities of modern smartphones, mobile will take center stage in terms of targeted advertising.
Mobile advertising has grown substantially over the past year, however there are key features most phones have that marketers have yet to tap into and we should expect to see these features utilized to produce highly effective customer results. The first of these features is geo-locating, which is done either by GPS pinpointing or cell network triangulation. Regardless of the method, a person’s cell phone can generally be tracked down to within a mile of any given location, and this functionality will pave the way to location-aware advertising. This means consumers will not only receive promotional messages for products, but will be informed of the nearest places they can get them. Recent studies have found that more than 50% of people want location-based advertising on their mobile devices, and this shouldn’t come as any surprise given the recent surge of location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare or Path.
Relevance vs. Targeting
2012 won’t be all about mobile though. As I mentioned earlier, data gathering was tantamount to marketing success this past year, and now all this data will be pooled and used to manage demographics in new and more relevant ways. Numbers will fade into obscurity, as marketers will target consumer interests. We’ve no doubt seen plenty of examples of this already in our day-to-day lives on sites such as Youtube or Netflix, both of whom give suggestions based on what we’ve either rated already or what we are currently viewing. This will translate into advertising by the aggregation of social data from our Facebook or Twitter pages, where we generally give out and share our interests.
Think about it like this: Paramount is looking for ways to get the word out about their newest movie, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, and to do so they want to rely heavily on targeting users who are more likely to spread the word to their friends. When targeting these users, the best place to look would be social data, and Paramount could look either at existing profile data where people shared other movies they liked (and most likely included similar movies to MI:GP), or past status updates, where they shared excitement either about Mission Impossible itself, or other movies that are similar. The results would be that these users would be way more likely to talk about Mission Impossible with their friends and networks.
What It All Means
These new and innovative marketing techniques will take hold in the upcoming year, and consumers will now be empowered with the utmost relevant information to their needs, whether they are influenced by looks, stats, or any other variety of factors. It’s through these upcoming advertisements that we will see the full integration and implementation of marketing at its utmost personal level, driving conversions at an unprecedented level.
You can find the Forrester 2012 Interative Marketing Predictions Report here.
Photo by Emerson Walter
Brands + Consumers + Social Media: What’s Now, What’s Next
Social networks have weaved themselves into our day-to-day lives over the past decade, and with this increase in usage comes new expectations we have for the brands we encounter and interact with over Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. CMO Council’s “Variance in the Social Brand Experience” report outlines many key points of data that help shed light on the growth of social media integration by many of the biggest consumer brands, but it also highlights areas that are in much need for improvement.
Social Currency
A big surprise was the current disconnect between what today’s marketer thinks the digital consumer wants from a brand and what the digital consumer actually expects from a brand when it chooses to engage online. A majority of marketers believe quality consumer content is merely an organic occurrence that cannot be forced or influenced; however, two-thirds of customers expect to be eligible for some kind of exclusive offer when they engage with brands online, and nearly the same amount expect to gain access to games or contests provided by brands. These savings and deals gained from social interaction, known as social currency, translate to increased loyalty and revenue.
Brands like Wendy’s understand the power of this, as one of their own Tweets – pledging that Wendy’s would donate 50 cents to charity per Retweet – was the most Retweeted Tweet of 2011. According to Twitter, it surpassed the likes of Beyonce, Ashton Kutcher, and even Charlie Sheen. Examples like this show the power of social currency – driving massive amounts of customer interaction while simultaneously promoting the brand.
Social Customer Service
An Xbox 360 user Tweets, “Red Ring of Death? Not good,” without hashtags or usernames included.
Within hours, @XboxSupport replies, “Hi there, I saw your tweet about the Xbox 360 console. What’s going on?”
This proactive response to a product issue is what sets Xbox Support apart from most other brands, and it highlights what customers are going to expect within the next year from customer service. Even today, according to the CMO Council report, 22% of customers expect any questions they submit over social networks to be answered almost immediately, and only 12% are willing to wait longer than 24 hours. However, only 4% of marketers are utilizing the immediacy of Twitter or Facebook to promptly respond to any issues their customers are facing. If brands hope to engage and connect with users in the coming year, this is one area where adoption is key to success.
Xbox not only shows how to tackle what I refer to as social customer service, but they exemplify how every brand should proactively search for and engage with customers who are having issues. @XboxSupport has a dedicated team of 18 Twitter support users (dubbed the “Elite Tweet Fleet”), whom all use the Xbox Support account to quickly reply to any questions directed at them and also search Tweets for terms relating to Xbox problems (“Red Ring of Death”, “Live Dashboard”, etc.), and replies to those as well.
Now I’m not trying to tell you that every brand needs its own “Tweet Fleet”, but customers are demanding resolutions faster than ever before, and utilizing social networks to provide quicker results will only benefit brands and strengthen their bond with customers.
What It All Means
Interacting and engaging with customers through social media is a brand new side of marketing, still in its infancy, and marketers are experiencing the growing pains of adjusting to this relatively new way of promoting their brands. The findings by the CMO Council will help empower these marketers in the upcoming year to pinpoint and utilize ways to engage customers better on social networking sites, while simultaneously promoting brands and building loyalty among users. It is clear now that there are effective and ineffective ways to connect with customers, and finding that right way to communicate with them will only help your brand today and tomorrow.
Photo by: Emerson Walter
5 New Year’s Resolutions for TV Executives in 2012
Popular New Year’s resolutions often include eating healthy and exercising more regularly, but I think such lists should apply to our work lives as well. As such, I’ve created the following list of five New Year’s Resolutions for TV executives.
This is meant to be an informative list aimed at no person in particular. It’s simply an attempt to highlight some qualities I believe are essential in the modern day TV executive. Truthfully, there are many execs that already embody these traits, so please forgive me if this does not apply to you specifically, and then share this with your less-informed colleagues.
1. Become Twitter literate
Take the time to fully understand Twitter and you will see its power and potential. Just having an account is not good enough. Find and follow users that interest you and your profession. You need to realize Twitter is not a social network in the strict sense of connecting with friends – it’s a real-time publishing medium. It’s okay if your friends aren’t on it. Every journalist, politician, celebrity, author, you-name-it worth listening to is, and that’s who you want to follow.
Don’t worry if you never have anything to tweet about. There’s a reason why we don’t all have our own newspaper columns: we don’t all have interesting things to say. Twitter is where news happens first. If you’re not following along then you will be left behind.
2. Acknowledge the link between Twitter and TV
When people talk about TV on the Internet they do it on Twitter. Why? The medium allows for short and frequent conversation. The same behavior on Facebook would not be acceptable. Couple that with the fact that many celebrities also participate in the same conversation and it’s easy to see why Twitter and TV are such a great pair.
The social conversation on Twitter almost always reveals what people are watching on TV at any given moment. Just the other night, early in the morning actually, “Batman Returns” was trending worldwide on Twitter. Why? It was playing on TBS and Twitterers were commenting on how much they love the movie and were happy to find it playing on TBS. You can’t buy that type of social promotion. But you can facilitate it.
3. Appreciate social buzz as a new form of TV ratings
Nielsen finally found evidence of what many of us have been saying for a long time. There is a relationship between social buzz and TV ratings. If you haven’t already, read the study. It says, a nine percent increase in buzz volume for the premiere of a show correlates to a one percent increase in ratings among people aged 18-34.
This new ratings proof is great news. Now take it to the next step. A set of ratings based on social buzz volume is the future of the television industry. This new data helps to inform on the traditional notion of a show’s success or failure by pure numbers alone. For every show you produce the social buzz metrics should be just as important to your decision-making process as the Nielsen ratings.
4. Look to the future
Chances are you’re used to programming for your own demographic. Nielsen’s study about the impact of social buzz on TV ratings found the strongest correlation among the younger demos, ages 12-17 and 18-34. These people are already watching TV, so they’re hardly the “future.” They might not be the key demo now, but they will be eventually.
There are plenty of people in your organization who understand this demo. If you don’t, then seek out those who do. Listen to their fresh ideas and take action on the best ones. Be a part of their innovation and let them learn from your experience.
5. Take risks
The television medium just may be the least social form of communication. It has traditionally been dominated by large networks broadcasting their messages to passive audiences. That is changing. Progressive producers are finding new ways to involve their audience in the television-making process through social integration. Be a part of that change. Don’t discourage it.
Because in all reality, what do you have to lose from social integration? If you facilitate the conversation about your show then people will be talking about it, regardless of whether the show stinks or not. That increase in social buzz will lead to higher ratings, as has been proven. And if your show does stink, wouldn’t you rather know about it sooner rather than later?
Happy New Year
As the New Year progresses, it is certain you will continue to hear more talk about social integration for TV. It may be easy to dismiss or ridicule things one doesn’t understand (like pokes and tweets) but it’s important to remember that this is not just some new fad. It is a natural step in the evolution of human communication. Humans are inherently social. Our technology has finally caught up with that fact. And TV is no exception.
2 “Meta” Social Media Predictions
It’s that time of the year again – the time when all the pundits come out and share their predictions for what’s in store this coming year. While I’m going to play right into that trend, I feel more than just one year smarter than the last. A year of learning and execution at Mass Relevance is more akin to dog years! In the last 12 months we’ve grown 5X and powered innovative social experiences for over 100 clients across news, sports, TV and brands.
With that densely packed experience in mind, I feel more than confident in sharing a couple high level observations about where media and brand clients are moving. It’s a simple and straightforward point of view on what we can expect from the year ahead in social media.
To get right to it, we’ll see two key trends that are inextricably linked: This will be the year that social media fades into the background, and it will also be the year that social media takes center stage.
Allow me to explain.
Social media will fade into the background as it becomes even more ubiquitous and cements itself as a given for nearly any media experience. Claiming to have some social dimension will be seen as less of a differentiator and more of a must-have. That shift in mindset is already happening – if a global consumer brand were to roll out a $50M ad campaign tomorrow, who among us wouldn’t be shocked if it didn’t have its own Facebook page or Twitter account?
At the same time, we’ll see brands and media companies become even more prolific in integrating social-powered experiences outside social networks. Whether part of a second screen experience during a breaking news broadcast or an integrated element of a brand campaign, consumers will increasingly expect social interaction to be an inextricable part of any media or marketing experience. This means what goes into a brand page should go into the web page, broadcast, or mobile experience.
In addition to the everyday trappings of Facebook pages and branded Tweets, we’ll see big brands, broadcasters and publishers create a bevy of new, innovative applications of social media that inherit the spotlight from traditional programming and advertising – demonstrating that social is more than just an obligatory sideshow.
One year ago, Altimeter reported that “Social Integration” was CMO’s #1 priority. Yet, just last week CMO Council released a study that suggested only 17% of CMOs believe social is integrated. Forrester just reported a new trend is “multi-screen experiences.” My assertion is while social media becomes even more ubiquitous and commonplace inside the networks, this year we will start to see progress integrating it elsewhere. Thus, the pendulum swing has begun where all the spending in other functions will stay in those functions, but point towards integrating social into sites, advertising, email, production, etc.
From where we sit, there’s little doubt in our mind as to whether the above predictions will come true – it’s only a matter of how soon. Based on the work we’re doing and the respective agendas of our customers, I believe the train has already left the station.
From all of us at Mass Relevance, enjoy all that’s in store for the year ahead and we wish you a happy, safe and fulfilling holiday season.
Photo credit: Flickr
5 Ways To Integrate Social Into Awards Shows
It’s award season, again. As countless celebrities walk down the red carpet it seems like the biggest star of them all is…the audience.
Award show producers now have the means and increasing desire to integrate social content into this long-established format. The result is a more interactive and engaging experience for viewers and hopefully higher ratings for the producers.
The social experience for an award show has to be built into the entire production. It can’t be a marketing afterthought. What makes this format so ripe for social integration is that the events have well-defined moments of anticipation and payoff. When done correctly, watching an award show with social integration can become an event in and of itself.
Here are five ways producers can integrate social into their award shows:
The Oscar Buzz Site
1. It all begins with buzz. Who are critics and fans talking about? What’s been nominated? When will the show air and how will it play out? Being able to capture this buzz to amplify the show’s promotion is priceless for award show producers. A custom microsite like OSCAR BUZZ, powered by Mass Relevance, does just that.
The site features a filtered stream of tweets with #OscarBuzz alongside official tweets from The Academy. Below that is a leader board that ranks the most mentioned actors and movies.
2. For some, the red carpet pre-show is more exciting than the main event. It’s where the celebrities parade in front of the paparazzi and answer questions about who and what they’re wearing. Now the audience can ask their very own questions through social media.
The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show pre-show Twitter display
Producers behind-the-scenes search for real-time questions from viewers and feed them to a reporter on the red carpet. Once the right question is paired with the right celebrity the reporter asks the question and it’s displayed either in on-screen graphics or a monitor on the red carpet.
3. The preshow can be streamed online alongside the curated conversation. As producers moderate the conversation they can highlight the best questions and comments in filtered streams next to the live video. Celebrity attendees can participate in this experience through a Q&A on the site in the weeks leading up to the show to build buzz or on that very same night for direct engagement.
NHL Awards with a lower third Tweet graphic
Additionally, photos from the red carpet, viewing parties, or the celebs themselves can be curated in real-time to the site, creating a richer viewing experience for those at home. For the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show we powered a display of photos coming in from VS fashion show viewing parties on college campuses across the country.
4. And now it’s show time. A room full of celebrity entertainers is the perfect setting for showcasing real-time social content. Encouraging the influential attendees to engage in the conversation about the show gives viewers at home hundreds of different and often witty firsthand perspectives of the event.
These celebrity tweets and posts can be displayed in-venue on displays in the auditorium or in on-screen graphics like a lower-third banner. The producers can monitor the content from attendees and viewers alike and display it in real-time for the audience.
The Grammy’s post-show event with displayed Tweets
5. And the show doesn’t end there. A post show can be broadcast on TV or streamed online where the viewers submit reactions and questions for the event’s winners and losers. For the GRAMMY nominations live post-show on GRAMMY.com we powered real-time tweets to a monitor behind two hosts interviewing the nominees after coming off the stage.
Everyone loves a good award show. From the Oscars and Golden Globes to the GRAMMYs and MTV Video Music Awards, there is plenty of opportunity to celebrate the world of showbiz. And through social integration the audience can finally get in on the action. With custom micro sites, live streaming pre- and post-shows, filtered streams of conversation, Q&As, real-time celebrity and viewer tweets, producers have more ways than ever to socialize their award shows.
Paramount Pictures features Mass Relevance’s latest product – Flock-to-Unlock
Mass Relevance announces the launch of their latest product – Flock-to-Unlock – recently featured in Paramount Pictures’ campaign “Flock-to-Unlock – Be a Part of the #MISSION.”
Paramount Pictures’ Flock-to-Unlock
The Mass Relevance Flock-to-Unlock product offers a shared gamified experience where the mass audience is invited to Tweet or post relevant content via Twitter or Facebook with a common goal of unlocking a specific offer or reward. Participants can either share a pre-formatted Tweet or Facebook post or customize their own giving brands a greater ability to “de-frag” social activity and keep brand mentions on message. Relevant content is filtered, counted, and curated to display anywhere – website, Facebook page, big screen, or mobile. The flexibility of the product allows clients to bring endless creativity into the execution that may include the unlocking of a variety of offers, such as exclusive videos, funny photos, Q&A with a celebrity, or coupon codes. A single Flock-to-Unlock can have multiple thresholds along the way where the experience and rewards build upon themselves as Tweet and Facebook post volume increases.
Flock-to-Unlock drives engagement, community, and awareness for brands in a few different ways.
Example of Photo Wall for Flock-to-Unlock
Addition of game mechanics spurs engagement
Adding gamification elements to a site has proven to drive increased engagement for many brands. Forrester’s Elizabeth Shaw states that, “applying game mechanics to your marketing efforts can lead to positive engagement results — including an increase in user participation, brand sentiment, and viral word of mouth.”
With Flock-to-Unlock, Paramount Pictures was able to add a layer of game mechanics to a social onsite experience for Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol in order to drive engagement and traffic back to the site. In their implementation, a community of fans comes together through Facebook and Twitter to unlock exclusive footage to one of the most thrilling scenes from the new movie. The collective efforts are tracked and displayed through a counter display, which in turn encourages fans to return to the site and continue to post relevant content to their networks in order to unlock the reward.
Collaboration unlocks onsite community
Flock-to-Unlock enables onsite community through joint collaboration towards a common goal or outcome. The display can accept images of user profile avatars, submitted photos or video thumbnails. In the case of Paramount Pictures, contributors are highlighted onsite through an avatar wall, clickable Tweets, and a real-time single stream display of shared content. This enables contributors and influencers to connect and see what others are saying about the upcoming event as well as invite their friends to help unlock the special content.
Awareness amplified through existing networks
Avatar wall display and counter
Big opportunities are presented for marketers when brands provide the tools necessary to enable their fans and customers to do the talking for them. There is an ecosystem of relevant brand, product and service conversations across social media. Being able to curate and integrate that social participation into the brand experience creates opportunities for fans and customers to amplify the brand message and gain additional followers through their networks. Flock-to-Unlock allows participants to Tweet/post content that contains a link back to a specific page. Each Tweet reaches an average of 100 to 150 followers, driving awareness and call to action to a wide social audience through the authentic voice of your customers and fans.
Visit the official site, MissionImpossible.com to see the full implementation of Flock-to-Unlock.
Contact Mass Relevance if you’re interested in exploring how Flock-to-Unlock can unlock new customers, followers and visitors.
How To Sell Social
Social sells. It’s an important resource for media and brands, but what has been missing is the ability to monetize the experience. Now that has changed.
Through our partnership with Twitter, companies who work with Mass Relevance can move beyond simple engagement and create new revenue streams around social experiences for TV, web, mobile and live events.
The upside for brands is simple. Social experiences create higher audience engagement because more emotion is involved, which can then be associated with a brand. Additionally, brands that participate in these experiences can gain more followers, amplification and interaction.
How do you sell social? First, you need to determine if you’re creating a brand-passive or brand-interactive experience with the sponsor.
A brand-passive experience is one where the brand may come along for the ride, but the interaction is limited between the audience and/or the publisher.
A brand-interactive experience is one where the brand is actively involved in the experience. Perhaps their celebrity spokesperson is involved in the social experience by live-tweeting an event, or they sponsor trivia questions to the audience, or they create bonus content that drives an audience reaction. Or maybe the event’s hashtag and topic of conversation is more aligned to the brand’s unique product.
Next, you must determine how the brand is going to be part of the advertising for the experience. Here are some of the ways we see our clients selling social experiences.
Standard Ad (Premium)
You can sell premium CPM for Web or rates for TV ads when you integrate social into media.
Module Sponsorship
Plug the sponsor directly alongside the social module that may be part of a larger non-social experience. This way the audience will see the brand more closely tied to that element since the real-time, social content usually captivates their attention.
Carve Outs
Smucker’s has been sponsoring the birthday celebrations on The Today Show for years. That segment is a section of a TV show that is a carve out, and is built to carry the brand along with that element of the show that is repeated. TV shows can carve out the “social buzz” sponsorship for lower third on TV, or a recurring element on a page (similar to module) that carries a sponsor.
Integrated Sponsorship
You can created an entire experience that is social and integrate the brand into that experience as the master sponsor (across the top) or throughout the design of the experience.
Social integration is redefining the media landscape. Companies can work directly with Mass Relevance for help creating and selling integrated social experiences. We’re creating exciting new opportunities for media companies and brands to engage with consumers in a more meaningful way. And when done correctly, the experience for the end user will be more relevant and rewarding – and that’s what matters most.
News Orgs Missing Out on Real-Time Social Content
A new study by the Pew Research Center suggests news organizations still use social media as traditional broadcasters, distributing a monologue to what they believe to be a passive audience. This highlights a missed opportunity for them to engage in a dialogue with their consumers while utilizing real-time social content and conversation.
The opportunity for news broadcasters and publishers to use social content is even more apparent in advance of the 2012 election season, as they look for ways to extend the scope and reach of their political coverage. The challenge for these organizations is having the ability to find the relevant content while putting it into context for viewers and readers.
The massive volume of social content and the conversation it inspires is staggering. This is an asset to the news business and is critical to coverage of something as important as a presidential election. Come with me as I travel in time to Election Day 2012 and into a fictional newsroom of the very near future to see how social content can be used to its fullest potential.
It’s the early hours of the morning in the fictional newsroom of MRN. The anchors of the morning program are pounding coffee and applying their requisite cheery personas. It’s early, but voters are already at the polls, smartphones in hand. They’re snapping pictures of the long lines, tweeting overheard conversations of fellow voters, checking in on foursquare, and writing on candidates’ Facebook pages.
The producers of MRN’s morning program are interested in using this social content to tell the story of the early-morning voter in a visual manner. They’ve asked viewers to send in pictures from the polls and they’ve set up a monitor on the set to display the content. The pictures are streaming in from all over the country in real-time and are popping up on the monitor behind the anchors.
It’s not possible to send photojournalists to every polling center in the nation, but now there’s no need. MRN has created a real-time photostream offering their viewers at home an unprecedented view of what voters across the country are experiencing at the polls.
Lunchtime comes quickly and MRN sees an uptick in traffic on their Web site as viewers take a break from work to surf the Web. In a national election, with so many candidates and different referendums, how is the average person to keep track of it all? MRN.com has solved that problem for its readers by creating filtered streams of social content on its site.
The political editors at MRN know the noise online from so many different voices can be overwhelming, so they embraced their role as curators. They set up individual streams to pull content from candidates, politicians, reporters and more, and curated it to display just the most relevant and on-topic content. They then gave their readers the ability to filter the streams themselves, allowing them to see content and conversation relevant to their individual state, political party or to even search by a particular issue. The result is a robust, real-time experience for visitors to get safe, relevant content that has been put into context by the journalists at MRN.
It’s now afternoon and the MRN newsroom is buzzing. The first polls will begin closing in just a few hours. Senior political analysts and strategists are working in the main election set and are discussing possible outcomes in a live broadcast. Working in tandem, these very same pundits are engaging with MRN viewers in a back and forth dialogue on MRN.com.
When more than one person speaks at a time on television it creates an unwatchable and incoherent experience for viewers. But with so many opinions from intelligent experts on its election broadcast MRN producers wanted to capture as much analysis as possible. To accomplish this, they have set up each pundit with a computer and instructed them to tweet throughout the broadcast. The tweets are then pulled into a hub on MRN.com where viewers can watch the real-time analysis unfold as a compliment to what’s being said on TV.
And because MRN wants their viewers to be included in the dialogue, they’ve included the viewers’ voice in that experience. The political experts who are speaking in the broadcast are also responding directly to viewer questions and comments. Those questions and answers are automatically paired up on the MRN.com web site in the form of a Q&A, acting as an added resource to viewers and readers alike.
MRN viewers are busy and hardworking people who are not always near a TV or computer. The news organization has built a mobile app for the very purpose of bringing election news to its consumers wherever they may be. An integral part of the apps features is its real-time streams of social content.
The app acts as a second-screen experience to MRN’s television broadcast by pulling in live video alongside filtered streams of conversation. Viewers can engage with reporters and other viewers from the app, in addition to seeing real-time trending topics within the conversation, leaderboards of the candidates, and interactive polls.
The first results are in and MRN is ready to call a winner in a key race. The reporter walks over to a video wall where a map of the United States is lit up in Red and Blue. He zeroes in on the state of New York where a winner is announced. After the reporter explains the finding of the exit polling data he then shifts his analysis to see how voters are discussing the outcome on social media.
The map of New York is now being populated by growing and shrinking dots, which represent new tweets coming in from those locations. The reporter explains that people in New York are tweeting about the winning candidate at a much higher percentage rate than the losing candidate. In fact, he says, a real-time analysis of keywords from New Yorkers tweeting about the winner shows general happiness and excitement, with trending topics such as “happy, hope, and change.”
The reporter then shows us a sampling of what’s being said about the winner being declared, including messages from other politicians, celebrities, and public figures, who are tweeting about the candidate’s win.
The ability to harness real-time social content as I’ve outlined above is not only possible it’s already being done by some of our forward-thinking clients. It’s a logical template for how news broadcasters and publishers can use social content to enhance their stories and ultimately be better journalists. With more sources and more data to extrapolate from it, the power to add value for news consumers comes through the ability to curate and add editorial relevance.
