Look Back: 2013 Award Season in Social

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As we close out the first couple months of 2013, let’s take a look at the three biggest award shows and see how they activated, engaged, and amplified across social and mobile platforms.

2013 Award Season Social Campaign Wrap-Up

People’s Choice Awards: 118,000,000+ Social Votes

Award Season kicked off in 2013 with the People’s Choice Awards at the Nokia Center in downtown Los Angeles, but as the People’s Choice Awards is truly the only social awards show – viewers actually vote and determine the winners – the overarching People’s Choice Awards experience began much earlier. Back in November of 2012, the Facebook page launched an intelligent social voting experience that suggested nominees to vote for based on a user’s Interest Graph on Facebook (e.g. ‘You like Rihanna on Facebook, and she’s nominated for these four categories – vote now!’). The Facebook experience also enabled viewers to vote in all 40+ award categories through a gamified system, Like nominees on Facebook and Follow them on Twitter, and then share their votes with friends across social platforms as a rally cry to ensure that their favorite nominees get the most support.

Even before the first celebrity walked the red carpet, the 2013 People’s Choice Awards had been the most successful in award show history, with a staggering 118,000,000+ votes through social channels; over 110% higher than 2012 figures! Viewers had logged an unprecedented number of votes through the News Feed, through Twitter using #hashtag combinations, and through mirrored experiences on the Facebook pages of the People’s Choice Awards and show sponsors like Walgreens and Duane Reade. (Disclosure: this is a Stuzo client and solution)

The Oscars: Buzz Worthy

ABC and The Academy partnered to deliver an upgraded native mobile application for viewers as a companion experience. In addition to providing an inside look before, during, and after the show, the app allows users to log their votes, see friends’ votes, and compare how their picks – and friends’ picks – stacked up with the results on Oscar night.

In Facebook’s own words, “Hollywood’s biggest night is inherently social, and from the announcement of this year’s nominees, to the red carpet and the ceremony itself, people from around the world connected with fans, filmmakers and celebrities in record numbers, with 66.5 million Oscar-related interactions on Facebook.” The platform tracked buzz about the pictures, actors, and the show itself, which registered a 7.17 on the Facebook Talk Meter, beating last year’s Oscars score.

Twitter and Topsy partnered to design the Twitter Oscars Index, which tracked mentions of the show and nominees leading up to, during, and post-show. Topsy also layered the experience with light sentiment analysis of the top six categories, and showed which were inherently more positive than the average Oscar-related conversation using the same methodology that the Twitter Political Index used in 2012 for the Presidential race. By the end of the show, the top moment was Argo winning best picture, which clocked in at a TPM (Tweets Per Minute) of 85,300.

GRAMMY Awards: The Gig of a Lifetime

Every year, the GRAMMY Awards kicks off the night before with a show called GRAMMY Live on CBS – a concert headlined by stars and also features the winner of a nationwide talent search called Gig of a Lifetime. For months leading up to the show, musicians, bands, managers, and groupies could nominate their band through a custom social voting experience on the CBS Facebook page. Bands campaigned for themselves across social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo, to let fans know that they could be going to play at the GRAMMYs, and in turn, they created millions of social impressions that serve as earned media for CBS and the GRAMMY Awards. Once nominated, bands even had the ability to add a micro-app to their Facebook page that allowed fans to vote right from within the page, then share their vote to Facebook and Twitter. Thousands of bands entered, but in the end, it was Within Reason from Alabama who advanced through the regional voting rounds and went on to play their gig of a lifetime at GRAMMY Live. (Disclosure: this is a Stuzo client and solution)

Additionally, the GRAMMYs created a parallel campaign called #TheWorldIsListening. From the Recording Academy: “At the heart of the campaign was a newly created website, which allowed musicians to share their tracks via SoundCloud for a chance to have their music tweeted out by a panel of music icons, including Linkin Park, RZA and Snoop Lion. Social media has transformed the entire music ecosystem, affecting not only Music’s Biggest Night, but top-tier stars and major labels as well as independent companies and indie artists. And when the full impact of social media’s possibilities kick in, the results can be astounding.”

Are you interested in learning more about the above campaigns? Drop us a line for a one-on-one conversation with one of our Solutions Architects to discover how these brands created amazing custom solutions that created amplification and engagement around their biggest events.

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