Hispanic Media's Social Revolution

Q&A With Telemundo EVP of Digital Media and Emerging Business Peter Blacker

By Laura Martinez -- Multichannel News, 3/17/2010 2:29:38 PM

Peter Blacker, executive vice president of digital media and emerging businesses at Telemundo, has a message for his advertisers: the Spanish-language network -- and sister cable net Mun2 -- is their chance to finally leverage the power of social media and join the throngs of Hispanics who are active on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. As Blacker and other top executives at the NBC-owned network geared up for this year's client-development meetings, the social media enthusiast gave Hispanic TV Update contributor Laura Martinez a sneak preview of how his network plans to get to the forefront of the "digital water cooler."

MCN: How does social media fit in the whole digital strategy at Telemundo?

MCN: How did Telemundo first go about using social media?
PB: It was about a year ago, in March 2009, when we chose the Latin Billboard Music Awards as sort of the first real test of having an official presence for Telemundo on Twitter. To be honest, a lot of people thought we were crazy. Even people within the company didn't understand Twitter ... they knew Facebook was big, but didn't know the corporate position of Facebook.

MCN: Wasn't [Telemundo president] Don Browne a big Twitter fan early on?
PB: He was and, actually, once he summoned me for a meeting to find out what our Twitter fans were and, well, we weren't on Twitter. At the time I thought it was going to be a teenage phenomenon. Luckily, we tried it out and started to see that people wanted to be our friends and learn more about who was going to perform at the awards. Moreover, [viewers] started asking us questions about our shows. Very quickly, we noticed a real interest and figured we needed to actively create social media presence for every single show that we do.

MCN: That was a year ago. What's happening now?

PB: We have over 180,000 followers across different platforms and on 17 different accounts (on both FB and Twitter), and that is not counting the "rogue" accounts, those set up or created spontaneously by Telemundo fans.

MCN: What will you do with all of this? PB: We have clients coming up to us and saying: "I need to be there but I'm a little afraid and don't know how to do it the right way." And that's when I talk to them about the fourth dimension of storytelling.

MCN: The fourth dimension?
PB: Because we have a very active audience that is connected to us through Telemundo.com, Twitter and Facebook, and because Telemundo has its own studios, we are working with the writers and actors [of our shows] to create an additional storyline. For example: for [recently launched novela] ¿Dónde está Elisa? a new character, Amador, has been created. He is a minor character in the actual TV series, but he is a major character in the digital word (Twitter, FB and Telemundo.com). Ultimately, all of this gives sponsors who want to be associated with social media a chance to sponsor a plotline -- and character -- that lives on Facebook, Twitter and Telemundo.com.

MCN: Young audiences might be very engaged, but they are also savvy when it comes to discriminating messages that just try to sell them something. How do you address this?
FB: It has to be a very delicate balance and there has to be a payoff or reason for the activity. For instance, if we're going to insert anything into the social media experience, it has to be something that really superserves our audience; to give them something that is really going to make their experience much more exciting. The beauty of it is that such experience can be brought to them by, say, an automaker or a cellphone provider. But we are not going to be sending them a Tweet saying, "Hey, you have to watch this show!" or, "Make sure you drive this car."

MCN: For a network like yours, what would you say is the ultimate goal of social media?
FB: The ultimate goal is to keep our audiences engaged and drive them to our TV shows. Think about it: you're creating a forum where your viewers can chat and communicate about all the things that are happening on their TV sets. That's what I call being at the digital water cooler. And we want to be there. The secondary focus is to drive people to our Web site.