I'm at the IPTV World Forum in London today and this morning I
saw a fascinating presentation by Tony Wang, Twitter's UK General
Manager.
Wang was talking about how broadcasters can use Twitter to
increase audience share and help viewers to engage and participate
with programmes. Informa - the organisers of IPTVWF -
have now posted the full video of the speech
online and below I've added some of the notes I jotted
down.
Broadcasters currently take 3 approaches to Social
TV:
#1. Spontaneous
This is the idea that when a broadcaster puts a programme on air
people will come to see it and talk about it regardless of whether
they've been asked to or not. As an example, Wang showed
us that something like the women's FIFA World Cup Final in Germany
last year, which did not have any particular social TV call to
actions from TV stations, was still heavily tweeted about.
#2. Organised
Wang then established some on-air best practices which increase
engagement and viewing by between 2 and 10 times.
These include:
- Mention a hashtag
- Mention an @ handle
- Have the talent (programme presenters) live-tweeting while on
air
#3. Artful
This gets the audience involved by letting them:
a) Gain a new Perspective
As an example, Wang showed us a video of James Franco and Anne
Hathaway coming out to the greet the audience when they were
presenting the Oscars a couple of years ago (see below). Franco was
holding a device to the audience to record what HE was seeing. He
later tweeted this video to give people a completely different
viewpoint of Oscar night - one that we've never seen
before.
b) Shape the Narrative
Wang presented clips from the recent South Carolina republican
presidential candidate debates where the viewing audience could
instantly rate, via Twitter, whether they thought the candidates
were answering or dodging questions by mentioning certain hashtags.
This provided immediate feedback and influenced the debate. Also,
people were able to send in questions which the debate moderator
was able to immediately put to the contenders. The collection,
presentation and analysis of the Twitter data was really
impressive.
More from the Forum later.