Discovery Communications’ Shark Week borders on national-holiday status for its fans, and every year, the team behind it looks for ways to make it bigger and more amazing than the year before.
This past year, Discovery’s Gayle Weiswasser and Amber Harris and their team turned to social media to reinvent their series. The results were more than 14,000 posts and online media mentions about Shark Week, a worldwide trending topic, and 25,000 public Facebook status updates about Shark Week in the first week alone.
At our recent BlogWell, Weiswasser and Harris shared shared a few tips on how they did it:
- Amplify fan content. The Discovery team retweeted often, let fans upload their photos to Facebook and ran video challenge on YouTube.
- Look for simple partnerships. Discovery partnered with the Georgia Aquarium to do live streaming from their shark tanks. The concept allowed fans to tune in online and ask questions with an expert while underwater.
- Connect existing clusters of fans. Discovery took advantage of existing online Facebook fan groups by rolling them up into an official fan page – a move that benefited both the fans and Discovery.
Watch the case study:
(Note: Apologies as the presentation gets cut off early in this video, but there’s still some great ideas here and lots of interesting Q&A from the audience.)
And if you like this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell events in Austin, Texas, New York, and Washington, D.C.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by SmartBrief on SocMed, Kathy Meyer, John Adams, Carol Tice – Writer, Pankaj Sharma and others. Pankaj Sharma said: Andy’s Answers: How Discovery reinvented Shark Week with social tools – http://bit.ly/fasoKS [...]
Kudos to Discovery for staying on the leading edge of online technology to incorporate social media into the Shark Week experience. This is the type of marketing that ”Social Times” was talking about today, and Discovery is retaining their share of viewers by connecting to online possibilities that make people want to tune in to the show. More networks will need to follow this example to thrive in an increasingly online entertainment experience.
When Shark Week happened in August it was a great idea for blogging content. I did not know they had social media tools for it now, but you can relate many topics to Shark Week and due to it's popularity it was a great topic to cover (http://www.insurancemarketinghq.com/2010/08/shark-week-insurance-lessons/). On my insurance marketing blog we did a post on how the Insurance Industry can Learn from Shark Week, and it is still a highly trafficked post. Discovery Channel is doing a great job with the promotion of this one!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by DebbieZachry, Kelly Ahern. Kelly Ahern said: LOVE IT!! – How @Discovery Reinvented #SharkWeek with Social Tools http://bit.ly/g15UDQ #socialmedia [...]