In evaluating the 2010 Academy Award Nominations announcements from a New Media perspective, Oscar gets a social networking grade of "D". The criteria is based on reach, Twitter top tag entries, and search trend impact.
Considering the collective movie audience and television and marketing exposure, the 2010 Academy Award Nominations Announcement Event should be the top news of the day, dominating Google Trends, Twitter top hashtags, live stream views, and with all of that, total reach. Instead, Oscar's outdone by "Punxsutawney Phil 2010" or "Groundhogs Day".
That today, February 2nd 2010, is "Groundhogs Day" is no excuse for Oscar to be punked by a couple of groundhogs, but that's what's happening.
The seeds of this problem are various, starting with the fact the Oscar telecast is on one station, ABC early in the morning. If you missed ABC's telecast, or weren't forced to look at the Oscar Nominations by it being on, say, ABC, NBC, and CBS, you didn't know what happened until an hour or so after the event was done.
If three networks had the Oscar telecast, the resulting search activity, and thus the trend metric, would have been greater. But even with that, Oscar's New Media platform was too small to carry the search trend, and still is. Why?
The Oscars are not on Twitter.
That's right. A simple visit to The Oscars website shows what The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thinks about New Media. It's stuffed down in the lower right corner, where it reads "Connect with the Academy" and has a link to its RSS feed, Facebook page, and YouTube account.
That's it.
Heck, I'm all over the place - Oscar should be too. AMPAS does a massive disservice to its members and sponsors with this awful online production. A well-done Twitter account could gain as much as 1 million followers and cause a total hashtag domination, pushing Phil the Groundhog to second place or no place. But if Oscar's not on Twitter, it's at the mercy of other organizations to push its message and some of those, like Sony, don't have enough Twitter followers themselves.
At just over 7,000 followers as of this writing, Sony has less than this blogger on Twitter. So, it can't really carry its message in such a way as to impact a hashtag list in seconds, and it can't do it for AMPAS' to as wide an audience as is needed to create a lasting buzz that carries for days.
And when Oscar does have a New Media platform to use, it does not have the right strategy. The live stream was such that the chat was on Facebook, so your updates became the chat. Great. Now, my friends are wondering how much coffee I had to produce a pinwheeling set of updates. But beyond that, the live stream had only 15,000 viewers at best.
What Oscar should have done is worked with YouTube on the live event. That would have gained hundreds of thousands of viewers and netted a high search trend impact. Didn't happen.
On YouTube, Oscar's presentation is much better, but again, it has just 29,000 subscribers, when it should have several hundred thousand. The problem is AMPAS doesn't upload enough videos considering the material it has, and it prevents video from being embed on websites. Frankly, that's really a bad decision.
There's not a good, metric-based reason for AMPAS decision to basically prevent its own brand from being presented across the web. None, not one.
Did you see the Steve and Alec video? Only 908 people did as of this writing. If it were embedable, that number would be in the thousands. It would gain more video views that Oscar could then convert into YouTube Partner revenue.
To close what could have been a book, Oscar's dropped the ball on the one event that can and should serve as a catapult to high ratings on Oscar night. The problem is AMPAS does not take New Media seriously and may very well be the reason why I didn't get the press credential AMPAS sent for me to fill out.
Beyond me, AMPAS needs to fix its New Media problem for 2011. It's harming Academy members and sponsors and will continue to do so unless it turns this around ASAP.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment