I found this great cartoon on the HubSpot blog several weeks ago and thought it was the perfect example of how NOT to engage users on Facebook. Users are generally involved in a nice conversation when some guy suddenly shows up to throw a sheep at them, completely derailing the party. How much sense does that make? Right - absolutely none, which is why we focus our advertising efforts on integrating brands into the natural user experience within our TVLoop and FanSection applications.
Most users go to Facebook to share content and interact with friends. To be effective, brands must inject themselves into the resulting conversation in a relevant and authentic way. That means becoming part of the product and adding value to what users are already doing. That’s not always easy, and it’s a challenge we’re faced with every day when respoding to RFPs or implementing brand campaigns. Luckily we have a very engaged audience of real fans - passionate sports and TV fans - to help us along the way. It helps to have an audience that already has a strong brand affinity for your product - in this case Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, the Dallas Cowboys, etc.
What do you think? How can brands be effective on Facebook?
Personally, I’m a recent convert to the growing fans of the show. I didn’t pay much attention to it last year, but recently I can’t get enough. Sheldon is rapidly becoming one of my favorite characters right up there with Dwight Schrute. So a big question I had when checking the TVLoop community is: Where are the rest of the Big Bang fans?
There are currently just over 25K total fans in the Addicted to The Big Bang Theory application, up from 13K at the beginning of the Fall TV season for a growth rate of about 90%. While those numbers are pretty good, the show never appears in the Top 20 Movers and Shakers list of fastest growing communities, and has under 7K monthly active users. While that’s an increase of 40%, it’s still pretty low compared to some of the larger applications. And finally, according to Media Week, Big Bang is #44 with regards to online buzz.
So what’s the story with Big Bang fans? Are they just slow to the online party, or are they primarily males who are a little less likely to embrace the TVLoop communities - TVLoop apps are ~65% female. As the show continue to grow in popularity and ratings, it should be interesting to see if it drives more fans and online buzz.
Time for the weekly Movers and Shakers list to look at the top 10 growing TV shows within the TVLoop community. Here’s the top ten for the wee ending February 7:
While there was some jockeying for position among the usual suspects in the top five or six, eight of the top ten were on the list the previous week. The newcomers are Scrubs and One Tree Hill which replaced 24 and Rescue Me. I assumed Rescue Me would drop out since the show doesn’t come back from hiatus until April. It’s interesting to see Scrubs back in the mix after dropping out for a week.
For comparison purposes, we’ll once again take a look at the Hitwise list of most visited TV show websites as reported by TV By The Numbers.
Once again, it was littered with reality shows with only Lost, The Office, and NCIS sneaking in as scripted shows. Now let’s take a look at the top ten cable show websites:
Again, reality-based shows, especially those from the Food Network, dominate the top ten. And none of the scripted cable shows from the TVLoop community made the cut.
When I wrote a post last week about Lost Untangled, the new Lost-oriented Web series produced by ABC, I was unaware that the exact concept has been in production for around four years by Benni and Rafi Fine. But after reading a piece from TubeFilter, I felt compelled to give the Fine Brothers their due since they’ve been producing their Lost parody, Lost - What Happens Next?, since 2004. Here’s the most recent installation of the series:
Here we are, on the web for over 4 years, having created one of the most popular web series with millions of views, and LOST of all places actually comes through with this brilliant form of additional content for their established show, and rather than come to the source, to us, the web creator hungry for the opportunity to break into television- no. They do it in house, and on their own.– Again to be clear we don’t know what happened here, but it is a shame networks and executives hungry for ideas do not search the web for existing content that could help their brands thrive.
Who knows what really happened here. ABC could have seen the Fine Brothers’ work and decided that it was a great idea that could be done in house to stay on brand message, or this could just be a huge coincidence. I would tend to go with the first option as Disney has a well-earned reputation for being fiercely protective of it’s brands and intellectual property. And rightfully so I might add considering the company has billions upon billions of dollars tied up in valuable brand assets. That said, it would have been nice to see ABC fully embrace the parody the Fine Brothers are working on as they’re obviously doing it well with over 4 million views to date on YouTube alone.
What do you guys think? Missed opportunity by ABC?
We hear from TVLoop members quite often. As is the case in most community management and member support organizations, most of that conversation is due to something going wrong. Most of the time it’s because they have a question or a minor bug has reared it’s ugly head after we pushed some new code. So when we get kudos from our members, we like to take a moment to pat ourselves on the back a little. This one comes courtesy of the Addicted to The Mighty Boosh application on Facebook.
Hi creator.
I’m sure most don’t appreciate this application. I know that my life certainly wouldn’t be as good without it so a simple thanks is in order. Please never delete this application. Its wonderful
I love you…but not as much as i love the mighty boosh of course!
With the exceptions of a few typos that I corrected, the above text is the exact email we just received via our customer support queue. Seems like a great way to start the weekend.
