Nothing beats standing in a sold-out arena. Whether it’s watching your favourite baseball player hit a home run or singing along with thousands of other fans to Beyoncé’s latest hit, live events can be an exhilarating experience. Now social media has opened them up to a larger audience and fans from around the world can follow an event and feel like they are really participating.
Share the live experience
Social media can help bring the television audience closer to the event, and to each other, making them a greater part of the experience. In 2012 American Idol achieved this by creating a community website for its fans called Idol Nation, which acted as a kind of social media hub, gave a place for fans to come and talk to each other about the show, and highlighted popular community members.
It also launched a Twitter campaign, Flock to Unlock, which encouraged viewers to tweet to unlock exclusive content from sponsors and behind-the-scenes footage from the show. American Idol was so successful at augmenting viewer experience, that the finale reached a peak of almost 24,000 tweets per minute.
Later in the year, the 2012 MTV Europe Music Awards became one of the most social events ever.... Read more
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Ethical seeding: how to avoid accusations of astroturfing while generating buzz
There have been some truly atrocious examples of brands astroturfing: paying people or even using software to flood internet forums and social media with positive comments. Sadly, the practice continues, particularly in emerging markets. Seeding interest in a campaign should never involve using false identities to post. A good seeding campaign is transparent, and builds communities through genuine advocacy. So how do you avoid astroturfing, and seed a campaign ethically?
First, let’s look at some of the collateral damage that comes from astroturfing. Econsultancy recently reported that TripAdvisor had to lose the tagline ‘reviews you can trust’ because there is no way to be certain that the reviews are all from genuine guests rather than competitors trying to sabotage their rivals reputation online. However tempting it may be, it’s never a good idea to undermine competitors (from travel and book reviews to posting negative comments about rival products on blogs) nor to create a fake positive review blitz. Some have been known to pay third parties to write rave reviews, or in one case, have their PR agency post glowing reviews on iTunes.
Ethical seeding
But if you create an online campaign, or a new product, you want people to know about... Read more
