People seem to be having a great deal of trouble separating cause from effect within the social media space.
They see Facebook and Twitter usage exploding during the U.S. hockey team’s loss to Canada in the Vancouver Olympics—with especially notable spikes when the U.S. took the game into overtime and again when Sidney Crosby scored his game winning goal for Team Canada—and they are quick to credit “The Twitter Effect” for boosting Olympic ratings.
The same phenomenon repeats itself around any number of big, live-event TV broadcasts, including the Grammys, Oscars, and Super bowl. All saw ratings climb this year, and many pundits pointed to integration with social media as the cause.
Hello? Let’s break it down: An event like the Oscars happens (cause) and people talk about it (effect). Occasionally, a little time shifting goes on, in that people may start talking about the event a relatively short time prior to it’s happening, as anticipation builds. But that is still the event driving the chatter, and not vice versa. As Simon Dumenco reported in Ad Age, “your average Twitterer doesn’t care until the damn show is on the air. Then, just as quickly, the Twittersphere stops caring again.” For those more visually oriented, he posts a nice chart to prove his point.
This is not to disparage the impact social media can have, because it sure as heck can drive eyeballs for a telecast. But for this impact to qualify as “marketing,” there needs to be an actual strategy involved, starting with identifying and building an audience before the event, and then recognizing and feeding them with appropriate talk-generating content before, during, and after the event.
The Oscars made an effort, streaming the nominations live on Oscar.com and taking real-time questions from Facebook during live, streaming red carpet interviews. However, once the show actually aired the Academy’s social media channels went silent, and after the telecast the engagement nearly ceased.
This is why Twitter posts containing the terms “Jeff Bridges” and “Hurt Locker” spiked impressively around the telecast and then quickly faded away. Only one Oscar “brand” showed real staying power: Sandra Bullock. Why is that? Because Ms. Bullock, in the words of Bonnie Raitt, gave them something to talk about. She started a playful mock war with Meryl Streep during award season and accepted a Razzie while handing out All About Steve DVDs to the audience. She gave a charming and gracious acceptance speech.
Whether this was coincidental or whether Sandra Bullock is one keen marketer (we wouldn’t put the latter past her), she built a social media campaign with proper attention to the velocity, propagation, and durability of her message.
That’s the approach we took in working with the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) and their Critic’s Choice Movie Awards show on VH1. We worked with individual critics to expand their social profile by sharing celebrity anecdotes and movie reviews in key online channels in the month leading up to the broadcast and helped establish a pattern for them to continue their activities afterwards. Ratings were up 39% for the awards show and BFCA members have been able to maintain the relationships and momentum they built on Twitter and Facebook.
Cause and effect, people! A little planning, a little strategy, a little follow through. Then you’ve got a social media marketing campaign. Otherwise, it’s just talk.
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