How Tweet It Is

Cable Finds Ratings on Social Sites

By Janice Rhoshalle LittleJohn -- Multichannel News, 6/14/2010 12:01:00 AM

For the premiere of its original movie Meet My Mom, Hallmark Channel gave viewers control of its Facebook site, adding a wall of user-generated video. The so-called “V-Wall” allowed its users to curate and publish videos, photos and notes through tabs on Facebook to celebrate moms and military families leading up to and following the movie’s airing on Mother’s Day weekend. (It was later repurposed to connect pet lovers in time for launch of the May original movie, You Lucky Dog.)

“With the Mom effort, we took in about 1,000 tributes; we watched our Facebook fans grow by 12,000,” said Pam Slay, senior vice president of network program publicity for Hallmark Channels.

Most of the biggest cable networks are going social, drawing Twitter followers and Facebook fans in the thousands.

Almost every network large and small is a robust player in this platform with the shows, the stars — and even some characters — joining in on the multiplatform conversation. Oxygen.com, for one, allows fans to chat with stars before, during and after the airing of a show, in real time. And smaller networks such as Logo, TV One and Hallmark Channel are pumping up the volume.

“It actually drove our parent company’s core [greeting card] business, because people were saying, ‘Don’t forget to get something for your mom,’ ” said Hallmark’s Slay.

Cable operators are also using social networks to better listen to customer needs and market new services, said Alexander Dudley, vice president of public relations for Time Warner Cable.

And hardware makers are on the case, too. Motorola is working on technology that would allow viewers to start an on-TV-screen chat session with others watching the same show.

“At its core, we see social media as how we can connect and interact and talk to our consumers,” said Tricia Melton, senior vice president of entertainment marketing for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies, who will oversee the social outreach eff orts for 11 shows scheduled to air this summer.

So far, networks have found that connecting to viewers via social media can help market new shows, cultivate engagement and, most importantly, boost ratings.

Facebook, for example, has almost instantly become an ”embedded part of our experience,” Melton said. “Facebook hit 100 million users in nine months. That kind of adoption is so incredible.”

In recent years, some of the most successful cable networks have used social media to have a two-way dialogue with their viewers, whether it’s allowing social media users to share their doings at the “Memphis Experience” festivals, where Turner promoted TNT’s upcoming detective series Memphis Beat, or at virtual parties hosted by such networks as Oxygen, VH1, Logo and Bravo, where fans can mix it up with their favorite reality stars.

“When we message on-air that the talent is going to be online and you can chat with them in real time, people will carve out time to make sure they are home to watch that episode,” said Dan Sacher, digital media vice president of VH1 and Logo, which have seen an uptick in fan interest for such live blog parties as Logo’s drag queen competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Viewers are also less likely to watch an episode on their DVR when they can interact with talent, “because you certainly don’t want to go on Facebook and find out that’s who got eliminated, or you’ve missed it,” Sacher said. “You want to be a part of the OMG moment when everything erupts on their social networks when that thing happens.”

In the finale week of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Logo hosted a live viewing party on its home page with the show’s famous drag-queen host, and others offering live tweets onair. Heavy retweeting that followed the telecast showed audiences were really getting into the conversation — something viewers would miss had they tuned in after the show had ended.

VH1’s Sunday-night block of programming (Brandy & Ray J: A Family Business, Basketball Wives and What Chilli Wants) is complemented by live “viewing parties” on VH1.com’s homepage, where the talent answers users’ comments via onair message. On Sunday, June 2, VH1-related terms were among the Twitter Top 10 for part of the night.

The results are hard to quantify in hard dollars, but the companies involved say the savings on marketing and advertising are real — and may have a stronger impact.

“For us, it’s a way to create a fan base we know we can message to over and over again without spending more media dollars without really knowing if they’re really even seeing our message or coming back,” said USA Network vice president of digital Jesse Redniss.

For instance, a network may spend $20,000 for a media buy on Facebook to drive fans to its page, Redniss said. “Once you’ve developed 10,000 fans from that buy, you can message to those people over and over and over until they drop off of your fan page list. To do that in the regular advertising sense, in which you don’t know if that person is coming back and becoming a loyal follower, is going to be really cost-prohibitive.”

GOING ‘GEO-SOCIAL’
And plenty of advertisers are interested in what programmers are doing in the social space. “It’s no longer just about eyeballs, because through social media, you really want to get your users or fans really engaged around your brand — and ideally to the advertiser’s messages as well,” said Bravo senior vice president of digital media Lisa Hsia.

The channel took its digital platform up a notch earlier this year through a partnership with Foursquare, the social networking startup that allows users to share their locations with friends.

The Foursquare-integrated “Guides by Bravo” application, available on various mobile platforms, allows users to sign up and “check in” at various locations across the country featured in Bravo series, including The Real Housewives franchise, Millionaire Matchmaker and Top Chef, for a chance to win prizes.

Syfy is also looking to pair with Foursquare to leverage the buzz for series like Eureka and Caprica from July’s Comic-Con by engaging convention goers in various activities, including a scavenger hunt. “Geo-social is the new buzzword in this ever-changing media landscape, and we’d like to see how we can develop in it,” said Blake Callaway, the channel’s senior vice present of marketing.

It can be trickier to execute a social-media strategy around a movie than a series, said HBO vice president of brand strategy and digital platforms Alison Moore.

“We want to make sure that it feels organic to the audience that is going to be participating in social [media],” said Moore. For HBO’s Grey Gardens — a telepic based on a 1975 Albert and David Maysles documentary chronicling the lives of the destitute aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — a passionate fan base was already in place. “There were people signing up to be fans of that early just because of what they heard [of the film] and, of course, [star] Drew Barrymore,” said Moore.

Still, most anything on television can find a home in the social space, said Discovery Communications director of digital communications Gayle Weiswasser.

“For example, [for] the Science Channel, we have 50,000 followers on our Science Channel Twitter account and we’re very robust on our Facebook, and it’s because we use this tool less to drive tunein and more as a resource to share science news,” she said.

Grant Imahara, a host on Discovery Channel ’s MythBusters, goosed fan interest by Tweeting to the host of CBS’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

After a series of backand- forth Tweets, the Mythbusters host agreed to build a robot in honor of the comic’s followers on Tiitter, who called themselves the “Robot Skelton Army,” said Imihara, “if Craig could get me to 100,000 followers. I was at about 85,000. Not only were we able to make this connection, all of the people that followed him and followed me could join into that party and it was like this fun little entertainment thing.”

In less than 24 hours, Imahara had amassed 20,000 new followers.

Of course, the primary objective for any programmer is to keep viewers tuned in. And A&E Network senior vice president of marketing Guy Slattery said social media has become an effective tool to connect with what viewers want to see on-air.

“We let fans choose the top five shows they wanted to see in a marathon for [police procedural documentary] First 48 and it was one of the highest marathons that we’d had,” Slattery said. “What it showed to us is that who knows better than the true fans of the show, and we’re certainly going to do that again.”

FX has found fans of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia to be particularly engaged. And followers of the “Sunny Tweets” page, the Twitter space set up for the sitcom last season, are in a league of their own. To harness the passion for the site — which has been regularly active even since the fifth season finale in December — FX created an iPhone application to make Sunny tweets mobile.

Another Sunny trick: Using Google’s Sunny voice mail , users can leave messages for the Sunny gang or listen to messages left by others.

Keeping up with the pulse of the people is particularly relevant to Roland Martin, the CNN political correspondent and host of TV One Sunday-morning publicaff airs show Washington Watch. Martin maintains a daily dialogue on Twitter and with 70,000 of his closest “friends” on Facebook.

“You can use it as your own personal focus group about what’s going on in the country,” he said.

And yet as important as social media has become, there is still no precise metric to determine how effective it really is.

Oxygen Media tried to track its social outreach through OxygenLive. com. The real-time site launched the first five episodes of last season’s reality series Bad Girls Club only on the East Coast.

Once Oxygen Live launched on the West Coast, ratings jumped 57%, said Jennifer Kavanagh, vice president of digital media at the channel. “So that was a real a-ha moment for us,” she said.