#LiveTweeting
Posted by colleencourtney on February 4, 2013
I find it interesting that so many television shows now place hashtags on the bottom corner of their programs. I’m guessing AMC doesn’t do this for Mad Men, and if they do, it’s against the creator’s request. But, AMC does do it for shows like The Walking Dead. One that comes to mind is #TheWalkingDaughter where The Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick urged viewers to tweet their comments using the aforementioned hashtag. I participated in that hashtag with some friends in hopes that our tweet would show up on The Talking Dead show later on. It didn’t, but I think it’s actually smart advertising. When things trend on twitter, it can pique the interest of others. People might think, “Hmm, what’s that about?” then they check out the trending topic and maybe they become intrigued by it enough to watch the show. Networks must value trending topics fairly well because they’ll sometimes spend money to have sponsored trending topics. If networks are allowed to post those hashtags for free, then that’s some great free advertising for twitter and the show.
Twitter hashtags can also be quite a curse as well. Shows air in the east and central times a couple to several hours before they air on the pacific coast and trending topics can really spoil some television shows. I’ll use The Walking Dead again as an example. Characters dying on The Walking Dead is pretty commonplace but whenever a character dies on The Walking Dead, it reaches the top of the trending topics pretty fast. I’ve clicked on the trending topics dealing with character deaths and have seen twitter accounts from the west coast or from other countries tweeting stuff like, “Well, I guess we now know who dies. Thanks a lot.”
Twitter trending topics can also be bad when it comes to movies. When movies first come out, especially scary movies, it’ll start trending with all the people tweeting their opinions of the film. If the film isn’t well received by the audience, it can really do damage to its future box office income if people hear its awful by fellow tweeters. So, twitter hashtags and trending topics can definitely be a curse and a blessing.
samford said
Colleen, your point about everyone not watching on the same timeline is one of the biggest challenges. In fact, one of the reasons for doing livetweeting is to try and encourage people not to DVR shows but to watch at the same time. Companies have various reasons to want to do this: not the least of which is that advertisers like it more, because live viewing means not skipping the commercials. But it does help foster this feeling that the premiere of a new episode is an “event.” It leaves a lot of people in media talking about “the second-screen experience” (although I’ve heard some good questions raised about exactly which screen is the “second screen”). To your point, though, spreadability is a double-edged sword…After all, once audiences start spreading word about your content, you aren’t in control of the context of what they are saying. And, sometimes, they are spreading it in direct opposition to the purposes you would like for them to…(to point out how bad it is, how much they disagree, etc.)
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andyarnoldpopculture said
Interesting thoughts.
I wonder how many viewers will see the hashtags and posts placed on the show as an annoyance, or intrusion. A distraction in the way of the story. Especially with the aspect of spoilers – and that subject is one that deserves a lot of discussion – I can’t see this trend catching like wildfire. The only upside is that people would watch to see if their tweet made it on the show, like you did. Admittedly, this would be a massive spike in viewers, possibly outweighing the negatives.
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