Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

It is not far from fact to say that Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter play a big part in what we read and see online.  Whether it is a celebrity death or travesties committed around the world, people find that they get their information about what is going on faster by seeing what their friends post and tweet about rather than conventional news sources.  Marketers for television networks and movie studios have taken notice and working to tap into this.

Many of you may have noticed the hashtag that is shown at the bottom of many TV shows recently.  If you do not have It is small, unobtrusive, and has great value to the studio. Turn on USA or Comedy Central most nights and you will see a hashtag in the bottom left of the screen with the title of the show that is currently on.  Watch a trailer for a movie, and you may see a hashtag which in some way indicates the name of the movie.  Posting with the hashtag shown to you on tv allows the studios to get a better glimpse as to how their show is doing in the public’s eye, how many are actually watching the show, and allows the show better publicity.

This has been seen to get actual real results when done correctly.  Comedy Central found that through the placement of their hashtag, their roast of Donald Trump brought about a huge surge in tweets, it actually reached 4,064 tweets per second at one point.  This caused a huge PR win for Comedy Central.  So much of a win, that scribbal wrote a post about it.  The hash tag did not even use that much of the screen, as shown here:

Learning from this, this year’s roast of Charlie Sheen had the #SheenRoast hashtags prominently displayed all over the place: from the corner of the screen, to the resulting webpage, to all advertisements I saw before and after the fact, including this image found on a redirect page before the show:

They also put each of the roaster’s twitter handles underneath them when they went up to the podium, as another way to track participation, but that’s for another post.

There are even whole companies that revolve around tracking these hashtags. Hash Tracking  allows you to enter a hashtag and see how much activity revolves around that hashtag.  This could be useful to see how long people are still talking about a particular event or how popular a television show still is.  This could also be useful to studios in the long run as they could use these services to sell more premium advertising space on the more popular television shows, and allow advertisers to see what kind of people are tweeting about the shows where their products are being advertised.  At the time of writing, which is a month after Charlie Sheen was roasted, there were 52 tweets, which generated 13,814 impressions, reaching an audience of 12,989 followers within the past 24 hours according to Hash Tracking. This data shows that people are still talking about it even almost a month after it aired.

Like all things, there is a proper way to do things and an improper way.  The reason for the massive success of showing hashtags in these shows are that they are easy to recognize and easy to type.  They are also unobtrusive yet prominent when shown on the screen and they do not take away from the experience of the non-currently-tweeting watcher.  They are also on screen for long periods of time so people have time to get on twitter and tweet them or remember them later on.

There are also many ways I have seen this done wrong.  One unfortunately popular source of bad showing of hashtags seems to be with movie commercials and trailers. Assuming I had a computer on and nearby, I wouldn’t be able to type in twitter.com and post a status before the commercial is already long gone.  They flash the hashtag as fast as most other car, airline and credit card commercials flash their small text.  This is not the way to get people talking about your movie.  In fact, I forget what the hash tag is by the time I’m done typing out my tweet.  They also seem to put hashtags in movie trailers when I am at the movie theatres.  I don’t think I need to tell you, if I can’t remember the hashtag after a minute of having to load up Twitter and write my post, I am surely not going to remember it after a full movie and the time it takes to get home.

An old advertising mantra can be adapted for hashtags.  That adapted mantra is that a bad hashtag is still a good hashtag.  I find that when I go on Twitter or Facebook, some of my friends that I follow are often saying things that only make sense if you are watching what they are watching at the current moment, but they are not posting hashtags to say what they mean.  Because I know these friends I know they are talking about some sports game that is currently on.  However sports’ games do not have hashtags that they promote frequently so my friends have nothing to rally around.  These tweets do not promote the game nor their favored team with any recognition and are thus lost.  One way they can get do this is having a hashtag with the team names and the date (ex. #yanksvbluejays916  or #subwayseries2011).  Since it costs only a few seconds to create a hashtag and there are examples of sports teams doing this for the big games (ex. #NBAPlayoffs) I don’t see why we have this for every game.

Promoting the use of a hashtag can do wonders for your studio’s publicity as well as giving you an honest, easy and cheap way to get a poll of how your television show or movie is being perceived by the general public.  But in order for it to be used by the majority of the people you are trying to reach, it has to be displayed and displayed correctly.  Bad placement of a hashtag can result in at best bad tweets or at worst no tweets.