Looking at Oscar’s Social Media Strategy

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By John Cantwell

SocialTNT ran a great post the other day breaking down the social media strategy leading up to the Oscars. Some highlights of the pre-Oscar digital buzz:

• A dedicated YouTube channel with more than 60 videos of classic Oscar moments - popular acceptance speeches, etc. - and behind-the-scenes footage.
• For the first time, the Oscars had an official live blogger - Joel Stein.
• The Oscars Facebook widget.

All in all, it was a pretty comprehensive digital marketing push. Still, SocialTNT points out that a bunch of things could have been done better:

The Oscars YouTube channel was launched only five days before the Oscars aired, which, SocialTNT argues, didn’t give the videos enough time to go “viral.” I’m inclined to disagree on this point. The lead-up time for digital marketing pushes is much shorter than it is for traditional mass media campaigns. People have short memories online. If the channel was launched any earlier, it would have already been old news by time the Oscars aired. (This article by Quarterlife co-creator Marshall Hershkovitz, which describes his experience promoting Quarterlife on MySpace, speaks to this idea.) Besides, there was no need for the content to ever go “viral.” The Oscars people were simply leveraging old content that they already owned. They were getting value just from being able to use that content in a new, cheap way.

(You may wonder why I keep putting “viral” in quotes. It’s because everyone seems to use the term in different ways. Some people think it relates to all content that’s easily shared - every YouTube video, then, is viral. Others think of it in terms of how it relates to the classically understood concept of viral outbreaks. I happen to be in the latter camp. Check out this working paper by Duncan Watts, Jonah Peretti and Michael Frumin for a far more cogent explanation of what I’m talking about.)

SocialTNT also points out that it would have been better if there was more than just one official blogger. No arguments here. If New Media and Web 2.0 are supposed to democratize information, what sense does it make to hire just one writer who has no true ties to the blogosphere? If anything, this would seem to antagonize los bloggers.

Third, SocialTNT points out that the Facebook widget was kind of a flop - the app was only downloaded about 1,000 times, and less than 40% of the downloaders were active users. SocialTNT points out some interesting alternatives:

Application adoption is really hard to break in to. Some suggestions for Oscar: let users earn points to send virtual gifts, or allow them to create mash-up montages of the nominees or past shows. Also, people love movie-compatibility quizzes.

Good stuff.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Oscars social media strategy evolves over the coming years, and if other awards shows/TV events begin to follow suit.

Update: This year’s broadcast was the least-watched Oscar telecast ever.