So I stay caught up with Glee and How I Met Your Mother and Mad Men via the Internet -- but I still have my old television sitting around. Most of the time it just takes up space in my apartment, but it does in fact get broadcast channels.
See, these days, the only time I actually turn it on is for "event TV". Things like the World Series, the Golden Globes, the Olympics -- those big nights that only happen once, and that could be "spoiled" for me if I didn't watch while they aired. (Not everyone has learned this lesson: my boss keeps complaining that this season's football games have been ruined for him by logging in to answer Facebook messages and accidentally reading people's excited or disappointed newsfeed stories.)
So for these time-sensitive occasions, I dig out the remote and settle in to watch. But there's something new, now. I'm not just watching by myself, even if I'm alone in my bed. I watch TV with my computer in my lap, with Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr loaded up in my browser. When it's an Event TV night, there's always more going on -- I think of it as a backchannel. **
My TV-watching experience isn't just happening on one screen -- I'm also watching the commentary of millions of other viewers (and adding my own). Whenever there's something really big happening, it becomes a trending topic. I can refresh my own Twitter followers over and over again and see what 150 other people think about what's happening; I can search for "yankees" and find another 500 tweets every 15 seconds. I can tell which of my Facebook friends are excited about speed skating.
Lots of people are watching this way -- which means that there's the story on the television, and the story ABOUT the story on social media.
I bring this up now because last night I watched the GRAMMY awards, and this multi-channel experience was taken one step further. This year, the Recording Academy seriously stepped up its social media presence. They're on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, they rebuilt the official Web site… and more than that, they got it right.
Now, just for the record: I don't actually care much about awards shows, in general. I'm not the kind of person who fills out ballots with friends and tries to predict winners. There have been plenty of years when I haven't watched the GRAMMYs at all.
So when I say they got it right, I mean that I was so drawn in by their social media coverage leading up to and during the show that I spent literally EIGHT HOURS yesterday paying at least partial attention to the GRAMMY awards.
For many people, the GRAMMYs is Event TV for sure -- plenty of my friends and follow-ees were watching -- but in this case the backchannel I was watching went far beyond a small assortment of the people I happen to be friends with on Facebook, or a random snapshot of the Twitterverse. This time, there was a whole content-rich backchannel coming from the producers themselves, plus dozens of other resources they pulled together.
So not only could I read frequent updates from @TheGRAMMYs themselves, providing a recap of winners and letting people know what was coming next, but they also created a Twitter-list of GRAMMY nominees, most of whom were live-tweeting from the awards. Another list collected all of the bloggers they hired and scattered around the red carpet, who posted about celebrity sightings and about what goes on at the show during commercial breaks. On Facebook, there were longer posts with photos and video clips. The GRAMMYs social media team worked really hard to put the backchannel right up front, and in doing so greatly enhanced this viewer's experience. **
I see two big lessons that arts organizations should take from this:
1) Get to know your backchannel -- and get involved.
Are people talking about you online? Are you listening? Are you talking back? You might not dominate a list of trending topics like the GRAMMYs did, but you can still encourage a conversation. What if you created a hashtag for your next show and threw a note in the program asking your patrons to review it on Twitter?
This is what I've been saying at conferences for months: the first step of embracing social media is to turn yourself into the audience, and listen to what your patrons have to say.
2) Access is everything (or, Show Don't Tell).
My favorite part of the GRAMMYs coverage was the liveblog on Tumblr.
"Can you spot Lady Gaga’s giant silver hat blocking the front row?"
" I saw Mary J. Blige and Andrea Bocelli run through their performance a couple times on Friday..."
"Have a tip, question, or comment for me as I Tumble from inside the GRAMMYs production office?
Posts like these require being up-close-and-personal with the event in question. They go beyond reporting ("So and So just won for Best New Artist!") and let the audience see things they would never have access to otherwise. The most dynamic and engaging social media content doesn't get written between 9 and 5 at a desk in your office -- it's happening on stage. You can't leave your social media efforts solely in the hands of your marketing department, unless you make sure the marketing department has direct access to the art, and can post things patrons haven't seen or heard before.
Chad Bauman talked about this at his NAMP Conference session back in November. He came right out and said that if your organization has a blog, you should let the artists themselves be in charge of it, or at the very least put your marketing people in same the room with the artists -- and he also told a great anecdote about chasing down Edward Albee in the hall with a Flip video camera to get a quick interview with him to post on Facebook. That's what social media is for! Step away from the desk, step away from meticulously-written marketing copy and press releases, step away from scripted Twitter updates that tell, tell, tell -- and make sure the person or people doing the updates can be in a position to SHOW your fans why they should care about your org.
**A new book just came out called The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media and Changing Presentations Forever -- in it, author Cliff Atkinson writes about the phenomenon of live-tweeting during live presentations at conferences. Same idea; but his is a business book aimed at conference presenters, instead of at arts organizations. back
**For more on what the Recording Academy did with social media this year, read the excellent article on mashable.com. back
