NBC’s The Voice Drives Real-Time Engagement

Background

The goal of NBC’s hit television show, The Voice, was to create one of the most social shows on television. The producers wanted to drive real time engagement and connect the viewers to the contestants and talent like never before. The show promoted its official hashtag (#thevoice), encouraged contestants and coaches to live tweet throughout each event, and created a special room (the V-Room) to showcase fan tweets.

In order to display tweets both on air and in the V-Room, the producers needed a platform that could filter out profanity, retweets and spam and could surface the most relevant social content.  They needed a tool that would integrate with their on air graphics package (Ross XPression) and give them total control over what tweets went on air (hand curation of content).

Mass Relevance’s technology, TweetRiver, was chosen as the tool of choice for its curation and moderation capabilities. Using our platform, we were able to create topical and broad streams of content that could be filtered by algorithms and then hand curated by multiple layers of people to ensure only the best (and TV safe) content made it on air. Mass Relevance worked closely with Ross Video to help build a custom integration that allowed the Ross XPression to not only show tweets via a lower third graphic, but to allow the operator to have full control over what tweet showed when.

Objective

• Further the direct connection between the audience and the contestants and judges in a viewer-driven singing competition
• Allow viewers to not only drive the quantitative results, but to stimulate discussion and provide a mechanism for tying that conversation into the on-air show
• An ear-to-the-ground for audience feedback
• Give show producers absolute control over the content displayed on air to ensure all FCC rules and regulations were followed (via machine and human curation)

Strategy

In order to infuse America’s latest singing competition with real-time social engagement, we pulled tweets from three sources: fans, contestants, and judges. Fans were allowed to directly communicate with the contestants by tweeting at their favorites with specific questions or discussing the show using the hashtag #thevoice. Correspondingly, the contestants and judges were encouraged to tweet live commentary during the show and interact with one another via Twitter.

To ensure the most relevant content was sourced from Twitter immediately after viewer creation, multiple streams were created for each show. Prior to each show, the social media team built these individual streams to correspond to the different segments of the show.  This allowed them to source content for a specific activity (say a sing off battle between two teams/contestants) easily and quickly during the show.  There were also a few other streams created to source content from the judges, contestants and celebrities that interacted with the show. All of these sources had various filtration rules to ensure the content was safe (no profanity) and relevant (discussing The Voice). From there, all of the streams fed into a stream that allowed NBC to have one final human review of the tweet before approving it for on air use. These streams also fed the Twitter wall and the content for the V-Room consultant.

We provided three output destinations on the show: on-screen, on a screen scrolling behind the contestants, and on a tablet during a question-and-answer forum. All of these outputs were featured in a special segment of each episode located in the “V-Room,” a social media portal where the contestants were interviewed. Alison Haislip, the Voice’s in-show and online correspondent, read question tweets that were curated for her in advance via her tablet.

This three-pronged approach to displaying tweets allowed The Voice to take advantage of our multi-stream curation process. Through using different Tweet sources and filtration rules, we were able to pull and separate content to generate live streams with distinct purposes.

Results

In the end, The Voice was extremely successful in engaging users and driving traffic to their site and to the show (especially on air), making them the most social show on television.  Content curated by Mass Relevance helped showcase the social conversation.

• 70% of Voice-related tweets during the first live episode included the hashtag #TheVoice
• 200,000 Voice-related tweets were sent during the June 7 episode alone
• Roughly five times the social-media response of American Idol (according to Bluefin)
• #1 ranking among all episodic TV shows in social media engagement during its run (according to Bluefin)