From the category archives:

Offline Promotion

Hashtags and TV

by Tinu

I just finished reading an article called Why #hashtags Belong on TV.

In case you don’t know what hashtags are, Twitter says “The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.”

Here’s a quote from the article:

With on-screen hashtags, networks are tapping into existing conversations. TV shows regularly appear in the Twitter trending topics during prime time. Special events, such as awards shows (#oscars) and sporting events (#sb45), are especially popular for live tweeting.

My comment:

Cable networks with smaller audiences like Bravo have been heavily promoting hashtags, and have gone so far as to have 15 – 30 second spots during commercial breaks featuring what was taking place in the Twitter stream during the commercial, as far back as 2009. And though it seems like it’s not a significant enough portion of America that uses social media at that level, the viewers who gather around those hashtags make much more of an impact on the shows with smaller audiences.

But it’s even deeper than that. A few short years ago, if network executives wanted to take the temperature of the market, they either had to

  • wait for the market to respond – usually in an unfavorable way,
  • organize in-take research such as focus groups, or
  • get third-party data from organizations like Nielsen’s TV Ratings

The one thing all these research methods have in common is that there is a time delay.

With hashtags, even if the segment of the market they’re measuring is small – they can now get immediate feedback. People will tell them how they feel about the show while they are watching.

Think about how valuable it would be to your business, to get access to real-time research on what your prospects and customers think about your product and services as they are using it. Think about how much faster you can improve your products, make changes, provide support, respond to, or even predict market trends.

We’ll come back to that momentarily. There’s another point we have to review first.

Through developing Twitter communities, Bravo is also developing more rabid fans – there’d be a furor if any of the Real Housewives shows were to go off the air unexpectedly. (Well, except Miami and DC. Boring incarnations – but again, guess how they figured out the market reaction.)

Twitter is how they found out what the viewers were thinking. And don’t think Twitter doesn’t know how powerful the hashtag is for TV.

[click to continue...]

{ 0 comments }

The 4:30 Am News- Opportunity and a Lesson?

by Tinu

Another day I’ll go into why any serious content producer needs to be reading the newspaper, especially since they’ve been making so many changes in the last year.

For now, let’s talk about the new 4:30 am news broadcast.

The article I’m clipping from was both in the Metro print version of the Washington Post, as well as the online version. It’s entitled “A plethora of local news for early risers.”

The more news a station produces, the lower the overall cost of its news operation becomes.

“It’s one of the more efficient things a station can do,” said Allan Horlick, WUSA’s general manager.

And, when a station airs a syndicated show, say “Cops” reruns, or a network-produced news program at 4:30 a.m., typically it has to turn over a large chunk of the advertising time available in the show to the company that has provided the program to the station.

But when a TV station airs a locally produced newscast at 4:30 a.m., it gets to sell all the ad time in the show. Ka-ching!

And local newscasts attract more viewers.

This immediately brought three questions to mind.

  1. Why are people waking up so early?

    2. 4:30 is the actual butt-crack of dawn. I know because when I was an assistant teacher at a day care in Fort Washington, that’s what time I had to wake up if I was going to get out of bed by 5 am for my 6 am to noon shift.

  2. Is there an opportunity here to explore great advertising rates for the types of businesses an early riser would typically run into?

    3. Breakfast diners? Coffee shops? Perhaps even targeted to people who leave work early due to getting there early? Or to folks who are probably getting online early as well?

  3. What am I not doing in my business that could increase revenue with just a little effort?

    4. One of the things I learned last year is that sending out a newsletter more often – even one that doesn’t sell every time – increases sales, even though I often forget to link to a sales page or even mention one.

    It doubles my blog traffic to tweet out a link from a blog I wrote for that isn’t connected to Twitter for auto-updates. And adding my blog to Facebook ensures a steady stream of often responsive visitors.

    There have got to be other places a small change can make a big impact.

We’ll talk about these points and others as we go on to discuss how the offline news impacts us, and how we can impact it, throughout the month of January. In the meantime, read that article. It reveals some of the marketing ideas behind network news choices. Feel free to share anything that you find helps your business.

{ 0 comments }

← Older Entries