Today, we had the pleasure of hearing from Carri Bugbee, a social media strategist and Social TV columnist. Through her work writing for The Social Media Monthly and Big Deal PR, Carri has become one of the leading minds in the Social TV space and even won a Shorty Award in advertising for being an outstanding content producer on Twitter for her work tweeting as Mad Men character Peggy Olson. Carri’s lecture was interesting and enlightening for us as she presented a compelling case as to how Social TV is serving viewers and adding value for networks, advertisers, and the general public.
According to Carri, Social TV is defined as technologies (software and hardware) and processes that allow connections and interactions between fans, content creators, and distributors of video content. Jack Myers (who actually responded to a tweet from @BrandonGruber during class) predicts that Social TV could be a $12 billion market by 2020. This illustrates just how significant the concept is for both businesses and us as job seekers in the near future. As you can see by the featured image of this post (see below), it truly is a growth industry in the social media space as companies are continuing to create unique tactics using Social TV to benefit viewers.
Carri started off defining the technology and showing the scope of Social TV, then gave a brief history of Social TV in which many students were surprised to learn that Twitter actually didn’t invent hashtags! Carri talked about how online buzz has become crucial to live events, particularly in regards to sports events and reality television shows/contests. She then discussed the idea of transmedia, which was a term most of our class was unfamiliar with, that refers to the idea of telling one story across multiple platforms (i.e. the Psych Hashtag Killer game and Castle’s use of Facebook to enhance the television show plots.) This discussion on transmedia was a key takeaway for the class and showed how using it can create a more immersive and enjoyable experience for the audience. Next, Carri presented a case study on her award-winning tweeting as Peggy Olson. Much like when we talked about the Bronx Zoo Cobra in class, it was interesting to see how AMC first took action to censor the account and then realized they could play off of it after the fan backlash. Lastly, Carri provided us with a wealth of information and advice to “get comfortable with social data and meta data – we’re all data marketers now.” But to limit takeaways even to this list would do Carri injustice; her presentation was loaded with great data, case studies, and opinions on this growing technology. I look forward to downloading it and dissecting each slide for nuggets of social media gold.
As far as class tweeting, the class persevered through what I would characterize as the worst day of internet connectivity this term. I know it stopped me from effectively live tweeting, but luckily our team did well. Here are some of the most poignant and popular tweets from class today. Enjoy! Thanks to Kelli for having such great speakers share their expertise! As always, the best tweets consisted of comments and articles found by students that truly supplemented Carri’s lecture in real-time.
