FreshNetworks Blog

On Sunday, lots of people were talking about Dannii, Danyl and instant X-Factor feedback. If you weren’t one of them (or if you’re not in the UK) let me quickly recap: on X-Factor, a talent / singing / reality TV programme, one of the judges, Dannii Minogue, brought up the sexuality of contestant Danyl when she was supposed to be commenting on his performance on stage. There has been a lot discussed about this and we posted about how Twitter is a great barometer and feedback mechanism in this kind of situation, how the brand that is X-Factor was able, almost immediately, to know what was being said about them and to plan how they should respond.

Like any good brand, the X-Factor on Saturday night would have benefited greatly from buzz tracking. From watching, tracking and analysing what was being said in real time. Analysing the extent to which the sentiments being expressed were positive, or negative, finding particularly dense areas of discussions and helping the brand to identify both what is being said and also where it is being said.

Buzz tracking really is a powerful tool for a brand, both because of the information it can reveal, but also because of the issues it raises that a brand needs to deal with. Tracking and monitoring what people are saying about your brand, products and services will allow you to know, in real-time, when something has happened that needs rectifying, or when something is said that you can use to amplify positive word of mouth about your brand. Knowing the extent to which your brand is being discussed positively or negatively provides a benchmark for you to monitor, and if you track it overtime you will start to see the impact of things you do and say, as a brand, on how people are discussing you.

And this information is very powerful. Both for making immediate decisions, and for planning and monitoring in the long-term. When a brand has a bad experience, and people are talking negatively about it (as happened to brand X-Factor on Saturday night), an effective buzz monitoring strategy will alert you to this shift in sentiment and allow you to identify what has caused this. You are then able to decide first if you want to respond and then how. You can then monitor the impact your response is having and amend or strengthen is as necessary. This information drastically shortens the time brands need to respond and so can have a very positive effect on your ability to resolve what is happening.

In the long-term, buzz tracking allows a brand to understand seasonal changes in it’s image in social media, and to show the impact that various on and offline activities have on these discussions. Work that we have done at FreshNetworks for brands in the travel industry, for example, shows that people tend to be more positive about travel brands at certain times of the year (typically when they are thinking of going on holiday or when they just return) and has helped to show the impact that TV advertising campaigns have had on the positive sentiment expressed about a brand online.

So buzz tracking is a powerful tool for any brand, both for what it tells you and for what it allows you to do. It is an information resource, and one that, if used correctly, can give you a real-time understanding of what is being said about your brand and how people are feeling about it. This kind of information is the ammunition any brand needs to inform its own social media strategy and how it should react on a case-by-case basis. Rather than have to wait to see how an issue plays out over a few days, brands can now get a real understanding of how people feel in real time and then respond to it.

Image by iwona_kellie via Flickr

We’re going through quite a momentous period of change in the UK at the moment. Slowly but surely, the analogue TV signal is being turned off. In it’s place we have digital TV. This is a huge change, not just because people need new equipment to receive the new signal, but also because this change lets us consumer television in the way we have always wanted.

No longer do I have to start watching a programme on the hour. No more must I be in on a Wednesday night to catch the latest episode of The Apprentice. No longer is my TV schedule dictated to me by the broadcasters. They may think I want to watch game shows on a Saturday evening, every Saturday evening. But perhaps I don’t. Digital TV gives the possibility for real choice and control over what you watch and when you watch it.

This reflects a change in consumer behaviour we are seeing across media. When users (consumers) are given the chance to personalise and control their own experience, they use this. This is natural – not everybody wants to do the same things in exactly the same way. And so whether it’s allowing you to personalise a site’s homepage (as with the BBC), tag content in a way that makes sense to you, or choose what you want to see when, personalisation is key.

When we are planning and designing online communities with our clients we work hard to understand the target audience, the people we hope will be members of the community and benefit from being a part of it. However, it is important that some degree of control and personalisation is given to the user – be that letting them arrange their own profile page, choosing which view they see when they join the community, or just giving them an easy and simple way to navigate the site according to the content that matters to them most. Finding ways to allow this kind of personalisation (be it simple or complex) will enhance the community member’s experience. And watching and analysing how people personalise their experience helps us to understand them more too.

Users like personalisation. They like to have some control over how they navigate and use the online community. As their other media consumption becomes more tailored and within their control, their expectations here will only increase.

We return this week to our series of Online Community Examples. There is a lot of talk about the way ‘old’ and ‘new’ media combine – how newspapers are using Twitter and how television broadcasters and production companies are working with online media. So this week we take a look specifically at examples of online communities in the TV industry

Online communities in the TV industry

The TV industry has a relatively long history of online communities – both fan sites and sites sponsored by the brand itself. People like to discuss both within the fantasy of a programme (fan plot lines, character diaries and so forth) and also discuss the content itself – evaluating what happened, talking about the acting, new characters or a twist in the plot. What is more, there is a real rise in people discussing TV programmes whilst they are being broadcast – people combining the online community experience and the TV experience simultaneously. This industry is fertile ground for online community examples, as the three case studies below show.

Rate My Space

HGTV in the US set up their Rate My Space online community to accompany their broadcast schedule which, as their full name suggests is Home and Garden Television. The concept was originally very simple. Users could upload an image and brief description of a room or part of their house that had been renovated. Others could then vote for or comment on these images.

As we’ve discussed before, simple concepts can often be the best ones in online communities, and so it proved in this case. HGTV wanted to both generate engagement and discussions with it’s viewers, and to use the increased volumes of content to increase revenue from advertising on the site. And from an outside perspective they seem to have done both quite successfully. Just looking at the site you can see the speed at which images have views, votes and comments – the engagement they have created and the interest in the site is huge. And also there are reports of considerably increased traffic and advertising revenue from those parts of their site that have online community elements.

A further sign of the success of Rate My Space as an online community site is that it has now spun off a TV programme of it’s own. Users are asked to pick rooms on the site that inspire them and then a designer will come to their home and use elements from these to make over a room in their house. So an online community grew out of the broadcast element, and then a new broadcast element grew out of the online community.

Heroes

Heroes is a well-known case study of how a range of online community and social network tools can be used to support a TV show. It is also a good example of how a hub and spoke approach to social media strategy can be the most successful. As well as a central hub (NBC’s Heroes site) they had presences in a range of spokes – other social networks and sites where viewers and fans might be. This approach allowed them to engage with users in a place and in a manner that was appropriate to them, but also to bring them back to their own site where they could share their interest for the show and meet people like them.

The range of spokes employed by Heroes was extensive and impressive, from the Ninth Wonder fan site, through social networks like Facebook and MySpace, to widgets, games and a Wiki that explained everything Heroes. The benefit of this approach for them was that it enabled them to reach out to people where they were, often in very active fan sites, and then bring them back to their own territory where they could interact with them and get value from this. They also worked the other way – letting those on their site take widgets and content out to their other social networks and communities and spread the word for the show.

This shows that sometimes, in fact in our experience more often than not, a standalone online community does not get the most benefit possible from your target audience. You need to work with the other discussions and online communities out there and build a hub and spoke model of engagement. Engage where people are but as a way to bring them back to your site, where you can both get most benefit.

The Sex Education Show

Channel 4 in the UK has run two frank and educational series on sex and sexuality as part of their public service remit. The first, the Sex Education Show, gave advice and information on sex issues. The second, the Sex Education Show vs Porn, looked at how the portrayal of sex in porn compares with real life experiences. Both shows were successful and both were accompanied by a strong online community: Sexperience.

The subject matter of the programme was clearly sensitive, but also highly suited to an online medium. Subjects that can seem sensitive or difficult to discuss face-to-face can be much easier to talk about online. Especially in an online community where you know you are with people like you. You have the benefit of the level of anonymity that online can bring, with the reassurance and community feeling that you get in a well-nurtured online community. And this is why on Sexperience you get a range of discussions that would not happen elsewhere – discussions on penis size, premature ejaculation, and sexually transmitted diseases.

An online community can be a safe place and can be a place for people to share information, ask questions and suggest answers on a common theme, subject or issue. The Sexperience site does this well – encouraging and nurturing discussions on sensitive subjects alongside videos, blogs and forums that support this content. Factual programmes and in particular programmes that deal with more sensitive issues or subject matters are prime targets for successful online communities. You can add real value and real service, and you can encourage people to engage at a level they might not otherwise.

See all our Online Community Examples

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Image by ★ maize via Flickr

One of the real benefits of social media is that it means that it can now make good financial and business sense to engage just a relatively small group of people, either online or offline. Traditionally, brands often needed to reach a large audience to make a marketing or advertising campaign viable. The best campaigns would get advertising slots during the most popular prime time TV shows, or pay for space in the biggest circulation newspaper for their target market. Big was good. Reach was good and getting yourself in front of as many people as possible was good.

None of this has really changed. It’s still important to get your brand and your marketing in front of as possible, but now rather than getting  this reach with your original message you can get it from people sharing, responding to or embedding your content. And we know that people trust peers much more than brands or ‘experts’ so the impact of getting reach in this way should be significantly better.

All of this is good news for us. Why? Because it now means that it makes financial and business sense to do activities and campaigns that target a small group of people. And this explains exactly why T-Mobile has spent what must be a not inconsiderable amount of money on entertaining just a few thousand people in Trafalgar Square last week. For those people it was, no doubt, an incredible experience. A free performance and event put on just for them and made possible by them. Not just because they were the ones singing (and so creating the content) but also because they would all be instrumental in the distribution of the content. Telling their friends about what happened, taking photos and videos and uploading them to social networks and online communities. So this was crowd-sourced content and crowd-sourced distribution.

And what can we learn from this? Well there’s nothing wrong with engaging a small group of people or putting effort, time and money into doing so. In fact if you enable them to share and spread what they have experienced, then you will probably get a greater return on investment than if you had just tried to engage the large group in the first place.

And for those people who take part in the event or experience, it can be something very special and very rewarding. The key is to make sure they get value from what they do, that they enjoy it.

Some more reading

• T-Mobile: Social Media Superstar? (markevanstech.com)
• ‘Hey Jude’ Singalong (buzzfeed.com)
• New T-Mobile “flash mob” ad in Trafalgar Sqaure (ameliatorode.typepad.com)
• T-Mobile Trafalgar Square Karaoke ‘Flash Mob’ (nickburcher.com)
• Everybody Sing Along! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Trafalgar Square T-Mobile Karaoke Flash Mob (viralblog.com)

Celebrity gossip is big business. That photo of a singer leaving a nightclub looking like they’ve had one drink too many. The snap of a usually immaculate actor on his doorstep at home looking slightly less perfect. Or just the story of exactly who had dinner with whom last Friday. It’s fairly obvious why this information is so popular. We like to see behind the scenes. We like to take the singer, actor, dancer or TV star and turn them into a three-dimensional character. We like to see them when they’re not performing for us – see what they’re really like, where they live, what they do. We want to know them as human beings, as well as knowing them for whatever it is they are famous for.

So celebrity gossip is big business – magazine and newspaper editors and paparazzi photographers both know that they can make money by showing part of a celebrity’s private life. By getting that photo that really lets us inside their life, or getting that piece of information that lets us know more about them. But there’s a real threat to this business. Celebrities are starting to retake control of their brand and image. And they’re doing it with Twitter.

There’s been lots of talk about celebrities on Twitter, and it’s certainly true that they are not all on Twitter for the same reasons. But some are using Twitter very cleverly. They are using it themselves, posting updates and photos, letting people know what they are doing and where they are. And people follow them because people are genuinely interested in this. For the same reasons celebrity gossip in newspapers and magazines is so popular, gossip that is started and spread by the celebrity themselves is also interesting. In fact, it is probably even more so.

Let’s compare two stories:

1. A newspaper has photos of a couple of TV celebrities arriving at another’s house one evening and speculates about what was going on, what happened once they went inside and the exact extent of their relationship
2. A celebrity says on Twitter that two friends (also celebrities) are coming round to dinner. Tells you what he’s cooking and then takes a picture of the three of them inside his house and posts that on Twitter too

Which is of more interest? Undoubtedly the latter. Why? Because there is something that celebrities have that newspaper editors and paparazzi don’t have – unrestricted access. If you are a celebrity you are able to take photos inside your house (which usually isn’t possible) say what you’re cooking for dinner, where you are off to, who you met the previous night, what you think of them. You can take photos and show them to the world -whether it’s of inside your house, you on holiday or just you stuck in lift (as happened to @stephenfry earlier this year). You have unrivalled access to yourself. And this is really powerful.

So Twitter lets celebrities take control of their own personal brand. Rather than having to rely on a fuzzy photo or a story from ‘sources’, we can now see what celebrities are really doing, from the celebrity themselves. This is of much greater interest. We can really see inside their lives rather than living it vicariously through gossip and third-parties. They can flood the market with so much direct access and information that there really is no need for paparazzi and gossip columns.

Of course, this offers a significant benefit to the celebrities themselves. They can share a lot. But they can also choose what they share. They can take control.

Twitter is hugely powerful for letting us see inside people’s lives, what they are doing and who they are doing it with. For celebrities and celebrity brands this has a powerful force.

Some more reading

• Update: Celebrities (Still) Love Twitter (takepart.com)
• The 14 Types of Twitter Personalities (mediacaffeine.com)
• Twitter: The Celebrity Edition (centernetworks.com)
• Stephen Fry on the joys of that microblogging service which saved him from bats (thenextweb.com)
• Are the Obamas Bad for the Paparazzi Economy? (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)