Real-time social content is a perfect mate for live television programming because it greatly enhances the overall experience for viewers. Through the integration of real-time social content and live programming, people can watch reactions and commentary from a global live audience while they’re watching and hearing a show on TV. Chloe Sladden, Twitter and Beverly Macy, author of The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing have recently written about how real-time social content will create more engaging experiences for TV audiences.
With over 140 million tweets per day, it can be very difficult to find the signal of relevant tweets amongst the noise. This challenge has been highlighted recently by Steven Rosenbaum in his new book Curation Nation.
The problem of finding the most relevant tweets is even larger during big events. On the night of the Oscars there were over 1.2M tweets related to the show. We worked with the Oscars to filter and moderate the best tweets during the show, using our social curation platform, TweetRiver. We managed streams of topics, such as mentions by nominees and total tweets. This gave the audience a ‘left brain’ sense of what was happening.
Then, through a blend of automated and distributed human moderation, we were able to select the best tweets from celebrities, nominees, family of nominees, and the general audience. These tweets were featured alongside the stats in a visualized page we hosted for on E! Entertainment online. The best tweets were featured on the Oscars site and were retweeted by the Academy. As a result, the Academy was the most retweeted account of the night and reached millions of people.
Certainly there was a lot going on that night. Through social curation we were able to bring some signal to the noise and bring the best content to audiences tuning into their ‘second screen’ allowing Oscars viewers to watch reactions and commentary from a global live audience while watching and hearing the Oscars on TV. Read more in our Oscars case study >>
Sam Decker