The long anticipated TVnext event took place yesterday at Boston’s beautiful Institute of Contemporary Arts. As promised, the structure of the event, the length of the panels and the case-study focused content created a general consensus both at the event and on Twitter, that Mike Proulx and his agency did well. The Social TV book that recently went on sale officially launched at the conclusion of TVnext. Lost Remote is acknowledged and featured throughout the book on several occasions.
Top tweet of the day: Chris Gorham’s (star of USA’s Covert Affairs) thoughts on social TV:
“It’s not necessary or smart for everyone (actors) to [be on twitter]. it has to come from a genuine place.” – @Chris_Gorham #TVnext
Advertisement– Eleanor Dowling (@eleanordowling) February 27, 2012
Bluefin’s Eleanor Dowling was the top #TVnext tweet of the day according to Twitter’s search who quoted Gorham about Twitter not being for everyone. “They know you,” Gorham said as he described what it means to be on TV entering living rooms each week which he understands is the same as social. He also described how people on social platforms “can sniff a fake,” which is why every actor shouldn’t be on. It’s not surprising that the top tweet at TVnext was during the keynote with a TV actor and it was innovative to see USA Network step up to the plate providing an actor for this conference.
(Image from video. You can watch the TVnext sessions on demand right here)
Social TV case studies:
Jesse Redniss from USA Network – While many networks create social events with their stars on a cyclical basis, USA has continued to work with show writers and producers to “use social platforms to extend storylines.” He talked about Missiona Budapest using Twitter and for #Hashtag Killer using Facebook. He discussed how they created original video on set for each week’s episode of #Hashtag Killer. and how 400,000 unique people in 18-34 demographic, 15 minutes per session participated in Hashtag Killer. “The show does about 1.3 million in the 18-34 demographic on a typical Wednesday night, so we were engaging with, every single week, about 1/3 of those people,” Redniss explained. Here’s our story on SocialSamba one of the technology pieces that helped make Killer possible.
JP Lespinasse from BET – Lespinasse spoke about the most followed TV show on Twitter (@106andpark) and started by asking everyone at TVnext who in the audience has watched the show. “If you ask Chloe from Twitter or look at the statistics,” Lespinasse discussed, “106andpark crushes Twitter Monday through Friday 6-8pm.” He then answered what might have been one of Twitter’s biggest mysteries to users that don’t watch the show. “If you ever been on Twitter and wondered where in the world are these trending topics coming from? 106 and Park is the answer.” The show has almost 4 million followers on Twitter, 2 million on Facebook and they partnered with Google to launch the 13 and over initiative. “Because they knew about our pre-teen audience,” they launched with them and now have almost one million followers. They create a new “Trending Topic of The Day” that they even started crowdsourcing on air.
Lisa Hsia from BRAVO – click here to read our full inside look at Hsia’s presentation on ‘Last Chance Kitchen.’
Carson Daly from NBC’s The Voice provided a video on the show’s first season success with social.
Marc DeBevoise from CBS Interactive spoke about the 130 million likes CBS has across their shows, which is “up 30% this year alone,” according to DeBevoise. 15% of traffic to CBS.com is from social. “We do know there is correlation,” between social TV and ratings, “which is why we’re diving into,” it, he described. He spoke about Tweet Week and Social Sweeps Week.
Matt Crenshaw from Discovery Communications spoke about #PuppyBowl which we wrote an in depth piece on here. “We keep seeing good ratings when social does good things, but we can’t necessarily say that A is causing B just yet,” Crenshaw explained. “When thinking about the Pedigree brand, we wanted to keep it front and center,” he described. “People saw the brand as essential to the story,” Crenshaw explained that according to Bluefin Labs data people saw the connection to Pedigree (a dog food) and the Puppy Bowl.
Rick Mandler from ABC described social TV as “all very much still up in the air.” He spoke about Revenge being a great vehicle for the network to promote Lexus. He described the Facebook application they made the “Who’s Next app,” depending on how well you knew who the next victim was you’d rise up the rankings. The promotions for the app include call-to-actions on the lower third on linear.
Social TV data:
We wrote about Tanner’s new survey that she released about social media’s connection to ratings and the fear of TV spoilers here.
The Second Screen panel paints an honest picture of the state of social TV:
Mike Proulx kicked off the panel by posting the question, “are we asking too much of TV audiences?” after he described his frustration trying to fumble around with all the social TV opportunities that existed for the Superbowl.
Somrat Niyogi from Miso – “I don’t think we are, people are doing it today. We’re not trying to create a new behavior. The question is how how do you deliver an experience that improves television instead of takes it away…There are moments of downtime that are natural…Drama is different than reality than is different than news.”
Kimber Myers from GetGlue – “It is totally growing, that’s why when we were just starting out with checkins in the summer of 2010, while we didn’t immediately launch into anything with advertisers because that tiny of a segment of the population isn’t interesting. What we’ve found when we’ve done things like Pepsi with the Superbowl..the real value is that the brands actually travel when they share their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook, that amplification is huge.”
Jeremy Toeman from Dijit – “Yes, I think we’re making people do way too much work to accomplish something. That’s the missing holy grail of social TV. What is the incentive?”
Brad Elders from Viggle – “What we’ve found in four short weeks, is that you have to keep it simple. We had 50,000 check in to the Superbowl. We had 85% of the 50,000 play almost the entire time. If you keep it simple and make it easy for them to do.”
Neil Shapiro from Shazam – “Today, we’ve run a little over sixty different campaigns. Each time we run a campaign, we see more and more people engaging with it. I can choose to engage with that content on the couch, or the next day…”
Proulx then asked everyone to describe how their second screen solution is different.
Jeremy Toeman from Dijit – “I don’t compete with anyone on this panel. We care entirely about the consumer finding content to watch. Actually, once they begin the watching experience we want to let them go…Our key verb on television is escape…it means not tweeting or checking-in…In our perspective we’re going to wait to see who wins and partner up on the second half of the experience.”
Kimber Myers from GetGlue – “Not everyone is saying something incredibly value, so we’re surfacing the most interesting conversations, so whatever you’re watching you’re seeing great comments and replies.”
Somrat Niyogi from Miso – “People don’t like to share everything they watch. There’s got to be more beyond checking in. A SideShow is a synched experience that you can tune into that can be watched by anyone. The same way you can author a blog you can author a second screen experience using one of these tools…We have about 600 SideShows, which is about 30,000 hours of second screen programming, authored by super fans, network partners…We think there will be a new class of second screen producers authoring content for the second screen.”
Seth Tapper from SecondScreen Networks – “We are an ad network, we aggregate audience across all kinds of sites..Everywhere that communities already exist people are gathering around television shows..that happens around everything. Our company is enabling brands to do synched advertising. We’ve found scaled audience today that you can do that at.”
Neil Shapiro from Shazam – “There’s a big challenge here..They take this piece of art and spend all this money getting as many people as possible to see it. But what happens what that 30 seconds is over?…Our value proposition is letting people continue that engagement and turn that thirty second spot into a two or three or five minute engagement form someone who’s literally raised their hand…take that experience with you..when I want to where I want to. We’re doing that today and we’re doing that at a scale that comes close to matching TV.”
Brad Elders from Viggle – “We don’t consider ourselves an app. Really what we’re building is a loyalty platform for entertainment consumption. It just so happens that we’re starting with TV… We have a production roadmap… we’re going to be on Facebook. More importantly when we look at the future we want Viggle to be currency… that rewards people for the activity and time they spent.”
What’s missing and what’s next:
The fact that there’s now a book on social TV is a huge testament to the future of this industry. Students will have a new way to learn about the topics we cover here at Lost Remote and college students will begin to tell their peers, career offices and families that they want to go into social TV. There’s already proof, which can be found in the younger generations (including myself) that are finding their way into TVnext to try and help define what the future will look like.