Some people just don’t have the time to watch all 7 films in the X-Men franchise. This is a completely unbiased, 100% accurate and heavily researched (well… sorta) summary of every thing you need to know about X-Men courtesy of Mashable.
Sunday’s premiere of the second season of The Walking Dead just crushed it in both ratings and social online interaction. The 90 minute episode broke a basic cable record with more than 4.8 million viewers in the 18-49 demographic and 7.3 million total viewers.
The television show also rocked in social online interaction. These stats and graphs are provided by Mashable:
The GetGlue check ins increased seven fold to almost 43,000 people. The social engagement online didn’t end there. Bluefin reports via Mashable that there was 82,000 social media comments from 57,000 different people. The show skews slightly male with 53.5% of the social TV engagement was from men vs. 46.5% women.
The show response was positive online with 74.6% of comments positive, 12.1% negative and 13.3% neutral. There were two peaks for comments, at 9pm when the show began and 10:30 when the first airing ended. The Walking Dead outpaced Modern Family, The New Girl and Terra Nova and was only second to the NFL when it came to social activity.
While I originally was going to devote this article about what free tools exist that publishers, fans, artists, writers and stores could leverage online to help promotions, I came across this article on Mashable about the breakout television show The Voice and it’s leveraging of social networking. I admit, I’ve watched the show and 1) have enjoyed the music and it’s format, but 2) I’ve been impressed with it’s use of social media.
As the article points out, it’s not the normal chatter on Twitter and Facebook. From the article
…what separates The Voice from other social television shows is that NBC doesn’t use social media as an awareness and marketing tool — it is core to the show as a whole, so the digital integrations are very organic.
The show is more than fan tweets, the contestants and coaches also interact, there’s a social media room, correspondent and staff to help the celebrities. NBC also realized that a special infrastructure needed to be built to leverage the volume.
NBC spent the time to figure out an integrated social media strategy. They figured out a plan that would leverage their assets of the contestants and judges, not just the usual pitch and hype you see. There was encouragement for the celebrity judges to tweet during the live show, interacting with the audience and especially each other, even when they weren’t on screen. This continued the “narrative” being shown on screen. What also helps is a digital maestro who helps move along the conversation online and on screen in their social media room where contestants await.
They’ve also thought through when to interact, placing tweets on screen when they feel there’ll be an influx of discussion and encouraging the use of the hashtag #thevoice which has a rate of being place in show related tweets 70% of the time. But the discussion isn’t limited to Twitter, instead the digital correspondent encourages viewers to also chat on Facebook and NBC websites. This combination generates upwards of 3,000 tweets a minute. NBC has also been working closely with Twitter to maximize their practices and analyze data.
The show knows it’s judges have massive followings and hasn’t been shy leveraging that. For instance during a performance of “Lady Marmalade” by Christina Aguilera’s team, the show was able to leverage her Facebook fans to add 10,000 new fans to the show’s page in a matter of minutes.
The most important thing, if you haven’t picked up on it, is the engagement and encouragement to interact with viewers and fans. The UFC has an interesting take on this rewarding fighters for their Twitter interactions.
Add in the counting of iTunes purchases as votes and this might be the first fully integrated show in history.
“The story of The Voice is not just an hour or two every week,” Yaron says. “It lives online all day and all week long, and it will continue all year long. This is a living, breathing entity, it’s not just show-based.”
So what can the comic industry learn?
Up next really will be the store/fan flip side as to how they can leverage tools to spur discussion and promotion from fans and customers.
