By Stephanie Shkolnik (Digitaria, part of SoDA)

Decades ago, television was a delicate, communally appreciated experience predominantly used to broadcast mass market entertainment and important messages about current events.

Fast forward. It’s 2012 and social media has influenced the way people communicate and even consume television content.

According to EMarketer, 1.43 billion people will use social media in 2012, while 38.4% of the world's population will purchase smartphones. Discussion will spring up outside of the plot, diving into character traits, on-screen chemistry and feelings, shared in real time by the masses as if millions are people are in the same living room.

And that’s just the beginning of social television. Broadcasting can be extended on mobile devices, tablets and computers, as networks look to meet the ever-evolving SoLoMo consumer (social, local and mobile) at every touch point.

Networks are in the game

Networks that understand the value of real-time interaction are using the social graph to gauge effectiveness of their marketing dollars and understand audience behavior and interests. Shows such as American Idol have integrated pre-defined hashtags on television sets in the form of light watermarks, serving as call-to-actions for viewers to become a part of the discussion.

TV personalities are leveraging social to generate compelling user generated content. Jimmy Fallon features a ‘Late Night Hashtags’ segment related to current events to garner viewer participation – bringing ordinary people the opportunity to be mentioned on television. Fallon’s summer hashtag #WorstFamilyTrip resonated so well it trended worldwide in just 10 minutes.

Advertisers have also leveraged commercials to drive viewers to their social presence for awareness and promotional activities - often to publish user-generated content or participate in social experiences. According to Nielsen’s State of the Media in Sports (2011), brand recall was 33% higher for Super Bowl ads with a social media tag directing viewers to social channels.

TV specific social networks are on the rise

GetGlue allows people to check-in to television shows, movies, books and music to see what friends are watching and doing. Participants are rewarded in the form of both virtual and physical stickers, a gamificiation element that is integrated across screens, providing users with recommendations based on their interests to create the most relevant compelling experiences.

Leading up to the U.S. Game of Thrones premiere, 90,000 people checked into GetGlue, while 50,000 checked in during the actual premiere. As check-ins cross-populated to Twitter, social TV analytics provider BlueFins reported 60,000 comments were generated during the premier alone - signifying a direct correlation between viewership and social media engagement.

It doesn't stop at the TV screen

To maintain high levels of engagement when primetime television seasons conclude, networks are developing new ways to retain fan relationships through extensions of television. Gamificaiton is driving fan loyalty by rewarding social media interaction, as brands like CBS launch Fan Award programs online. Social enables viewer voting for their favorite categories such as "Best Use of Corpse,” where fans can simply participate through Facebook or Twitter hashtags to simplify the entry process.

Social television buzz is trackable

Alexander Daas, a luxury eyewear brand, went to market in Q4 of 2011, launching in conjunction with the American Music Awards. TV personality Jenny McCarthy wore the brand's eyeglasses on stage and within minutes sparked hundreds of conversations about her eyewear. By monitoring these discussions, the Alexander Daas team answered consumer and media questions leading to the introduction of the brand through social, generating nationwide awareness, sales and stronger partner relationships all tracked through traffic, sentiment and discussions.

Specialised services such as Social Guide provide comprehensive analysis of social television activity to extract insights and make them actionable - creating truly data driven opportunities based on fan interests.

Social television is increasingly becoming the norm.

By Cream Editorial

Brands are spending a lot of money on advertising and social media throughout the Olympics, and with good reason. The shift in the way that people use social media since the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing has been monumental. Social media has become a part of everyday life for many people so it makes sense for brands to use it to their advantage.

Over the past four years the number of social media users has dramatically increased, Facebook has gone from 100mto almost 1bn users, and Twitter registrations have shot from 6m to 500m.

The number of people using social media isn’t the only thing that’s changed, coverage of the games itself and the way people want to view events like the Olympics has undergone a significant shift. This infographic from The Wall (below) is a great illustration of how social media has overtaken print and television as the most popular way to keep afloat of the games.

Twitter has become an integral part of the Olympics coverage. The BBC has shown athlete’s tweets across its broadcasts and on the BBC’s Olympic homepage. This demonstrates how important Twitter has become, in the UK it has become completely normal to see Twitter feeds on websites or television programmes or to be given a hashtag to use while watching TV.

The Olympics Hub provides an easy way to follow your favourite athletes and the games in general.  The hub allows users to sign up via Facebook or Twitter and shows visitors the top followed athletes for featured athletes for each day. The search facility filters queries by athlete, event, sport or discipline ensuring users find exactly what they’re after.

The official Olympic sponsors have been making the most of these changes and it seems to be paying off.

McDonalds is the most associated brand with the games. In the run up to the Olympics from January to July McDonalds was mentioned 90,911 times in conversations about the Olympics.

Samsung, with the help of Olympic Ambassador David Beckham, has also generated over 1,000 tweets about David Beckham and 22,519 general tweets and 15,210 blog posts mentioned the brand in association with the Olympics.

Coca-Cola has also been pulling out all the stops with its advertising in the months leading up to the games. Having been associated with the Olympics for 83 years Coca-Cola has launched its biggest ever Olympics advertising campaign for 2012. ‘Move to the Beat’ enlisted the help of Mark Ronson to create an original track for the campaign and he produced ‘Anywhere in the World’, sung by Katy B, to represent the individuals and sports involved in the Olympics. This campaign helped to ensure that Coca-Cola was one of the most recognised brands associated with the Olympics, 60,271 Twitter users also shared the image of the Olympic inspired Coca-Cola cans. 

Infographic via The Wall.

Can't get enough of the Olympics? Check out Cream's database of sports related case studies here.

I managed to get myself out of the sun and into the Social Media World Forum (or for the Twitterers amongst you, #smwf) this week and I’m certainly glad I did. The atmosphere was, unsurprisingly, very sociable and in fact quite refreshing. It was good to see that those who delve into the world of social media could mingle in the offline world just as well as they do online.

For the most part of the event, there was one predominant theme; consumer engagement. Regardless of platform or business type, it was made clear that in order to build on a brand successfully, consumer engagement was essential. Effective engagement with customers is about enabling contacts, understanding a customer’s context, delivering rich and relevant content and communicating with the consumer on all available points. With the rise in social media, communicating on all channels may be seen by brands as a challenge. The Forum highlighted that this should no longer be looked at as a challenge, and considered more of an opportunity.

Linking the different social media channels is possibly the biggest way to grasp this opportunity with both hands. And though the quantitative data can provide key ways to measure volume, measurements aren’t just about figures and facts. In one track, a speaker asked whether anybody in the room had studied story telling. Three people out of around 100 put their hands up. The point he was trying to make, to a room full of confused faces, was that in order to grasp the opportunities that come with social media, companies need to invest in people who are able to communicate, sometimes in less than 140 characters. 

Yes, objectives need to be met and targets need to be set, but ultimately brands need to invest time in communication; that includes reading what people really think about a product or investment. For some consumers, social media is the only direct access they can get to the brand. And for this reason, as time consuming as it can be, social media requires constant engagement and direction. In order to progress, a relationship needs to be built and social media has paved the way to make it easier to connect.

I am a firm believer in the benefits of social media for commercial use, but I do believe that communication is key to ensure the channel is used properly. It is a great way to spread a message across a wide surface, but rather than simply building awareness, brands need to focus on their existing followers and fans to encourage the best possible outcomes.

The airline industry and Twitter were never going to get along. As a method of getting about, air travel is dependent on so many variables that delays, cancellations and missed flights are going to be inevitable. Frequent flyers are used to all manner of disruptions called by fog, mechanical failure, ice on the runway and refuelling delays – and this assuming that the air traffic control staff aren’t on strike in one of the countries you have to fly over in order to reach your destination.

Social media has been around long enough now to allow a number of universal consumer insights to have emerged. In their worst form they appear as hackneyed phrases in most media awards entries. It seems that at any given time, half the marketing on the planet is driven by the revelation that "teenagers are passionate about music" and the idea that consumers want to "engage with brands that provide entertaining content".  

As whimsy as it seems to put Shippam’s Paste and engaging social media campaign in the same sentence, the brand’s twitter profile has amassed over 6,000 followers (‘Shippamates’) in less than a week, with followers increasing by thousands daily.

Alarming reports have surfaced of a gruesome double murder in Mexico that saw a man and a woman mutilated, disembowelled and left to hang from a bridge in the town of Laredo in apparent retribution for their activities on social media platforms denouncing the activities of drug cartels operating in the region.

Handwritten posters left near the bodies carried the warning, “This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the internet”

Many brands dream of spreading that perfect piece of viral content. A viral video that achieves a high number of views through the organic word of mouth, rockets the number of followers and ‘likes’ the brand has and thus increases brand awareness. But while the ‘virus’ approach receives impressive results, it doesn’t leverage the same powerful communication capabilities of social video. Many in the industry are even calling for the death of viral. Luke Aviet the UK MD of AOL Advertising and goviral recently wrote a piece in Campaign magazine discussing the new species of online video following the death of viral.