How RebelMouse is helping TV deliver social to fans

By Natan Edelsburg 

RebelMouse, an NYC based startup, launched in June of last year and has become one of the most talked about social startups. Founder Paul Berry, has built a platform that turns your social content into an easy to digest and understand front page. The great part is, you can let it do the organizing for you visualize your content in a way that makes it all easy to touch. We spoke with Berry about the growth of their platform and how TV networks have jumped on board to deliver more social TV experiences. 

Lost Remote: Why did you start RebelMouse?
Paul Berry: I was CTO of HuffingtonPost, running design, product and engineering. People were asking me many dozens of times a week for how to solve problems around social news. I realized that there was a massive gap in the tools that were and are available that I could solve. The power in the world is shifting to social, yet social teams have their hands tied to connect the final dots and drive websites. The technology stack for publishers is built around a pre real-time and social web, and so is the mindset of product. I realized that RebelMouse could solve a very large problem.

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LR: How do you work with TV companies?
PB: We are working in particular with Fox and USA Network right now on shows like Glee, The Following, Psych, Graceland, New Girl, and more. It’s an exciting time because the teams there truly get social and when they saw what they could do with the RebelMouse platform it was something they immediately could connect with. TV companies are asking their audiences to react to the shows across all the big networks. A great example is The Following, Kevin Bacon’s show asking their fans to send in their vines and photos of their faces and their friends faces in horror as they watch the scariest episode ever: . The fans find out they are getting published on the site and they become uber fans.

We also help bring together all the social assets of the talents on the TV show to highlight all their awesome contributions and make it engaging, shareable and real-time.

LR: What are some recent social TV products you launched for your partners?
PB: We worked very closely with MTV for their Movie Awards to create something customized and seamlessly blended with their styles. The MTV Revealed page was integrated in their high traffic experience which was exciting for us:.

Our core product works for all these use cases without any product launched specifically for TV which is something that we really deeply love. We are working with TV shows to have two way conversations, really fun brainstorms to figure out new best practices of ways to be creative about engaging audiences leveraging the RebelMouse platform.

But we are starting to work with our top TV shows on a charter program that let’s them both advertise in a social way and also bring their advertisers a native and social advertising solution. We are in first tests and implementations but through the next few months we will have something very concrete that any social TV effort could use.

LR: Why should TV brands use RebelMouse?
PB: We make it so easy to engage fans without worrying about a big budget and losing tons of hours on development and design. What we are doing is really technically difficult to put together and the metrics of the use cases when you see how fans react, how they share and how much better the websites of the TV shows are with RebelMouse on them becomes obvious.

LR: What are your favorite TV shows and why?
PB: I have been a long time fan of Psych, and New Girl is a guilty pleasure that I will reluctantly confess to enjoying. I did get hooked on Game of Thrones so we’re really excited to make a break through and start working with them 🙂

LR: Anything else?
PB: I think the questions you asked cover this really well, but it’s worth noting that we are also helping power HelloGiggles.com which is Zoe’s site. We can help power really fantastic sites for the talent of the shows themselves, and then bring it together to the show’s advantage.

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