How Social Networking is Changing a Major Music Television Network

How many times have you though of how great it would be to program your favorite radio, or music video, station? According to Chris Nelson, Country Music Television’s Director of Social Media, if you’re using social networking correctly, you're wielding that power right now.

Nelson most recently put together an extensive social media campaign for the 2012 CMT Music Awards, which aired live on June 6th. The campaign spread across multiple platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and incorporated both fan, and artist, involvement. With the CMT Music Awards, and the campaign, now in the rear view mirror, I caught up with Nelson to find out what worked, how the results of the campaign immediately changed aspects of their programming, and where the relationship between televised events and social networking may be headed next.

Adam Bernard: You had a lot of social media initiatives for this year’s CMT Music Awards. How do you figure out when you’ve reached the line of being actively interactive, but not so interactive that the actual event becomes lost in the mix?
Chris Nelson: You want to make sure you are standing out, but you are not overtaking the show. There’s always a sort of checks and balances with the producers, too. I think the really great thing with a show like Music Awards is everybody’s on board to do something that’s great for social. In that sense, every time we come up with a new tactic, something we want to try, it will certainly get thrown out there and then we’ll talk through it logically to figure out if it makes sense, or if we’re just doing it for the sake of doing it, which is certainly not the situation I want to put our programs in. Ultimately, if we’re driving social engagement, it has to be natural, it has to be something that people are going to do, not something that they’ll feel annoyed with, and then have that come out negatively on social when they talk about that show.

Adam Bernard: What do you feel was the best low cost/high reward aspect of this year’s campaign?
Chris Nelson: I think some of the things that worked really well included working with artists to be really engaged in the show. I think there’s a lot of value to that, particularly when you have artists interacting with other artists, so we tried to make that be a part of the show. We had a dozen or so artists who were officially live-tweeting. That’s come a long way since we first started trying to get artists involved. We expressed the value of what them tweeting live during a show brings to them, not just the show, as far as two, three, four times the typical daily growth rate of followers. That, and it drives a really strong conversation when fans see Blake Shelton interacting with Darius Rucker on Twitter, or whatever it may be. There’s a depth of experience that adds. We try to, of course, take advantage of everything we can do on the screen with tweets, hashtags, we’re live pinning, putting stuff to Instagram real time. Then directly in the venue we had signage trying to get people tweeting and posting, people who had a better perspective of the show than pretty much anybody else, seeing things happen in real time, and posting their experiences and boosting that level of conversation on social even further.

Adam Bernard: Did any of the results of the campaign surprise you?
Chris Nelson: A lot of the big surprise things were content related during the show. We did some measurement of figuring out what moments of the show struck really well. I expected Carrie Underwood was going to be one of the most talked about stars during the show because she recently joined Twitter and she has crazy rabid fans. It was interesting to see that our top two most social moments of the show, as far as conversation, were around Luke Bryan.

Adam Bernard: When you see something like that do you go into the next few weeks of meetings and say maybe we should create some more programming centered around Luke Bryan?
Chris Nelson: Absolutely, and that’s part of the holistic strategy around working with the different departments and really spreading things out and taking a lot of that new, valuable, information and figuring out what we can do. We got some footage backstage that we weren’t able to turnaround and edit in time, so we were able to leverage that to delay the hangover effect from the show and kinda keep the whole show going for the next week or so. We were pushing that Luke Bryan content, and we worked with our mobile team and we framed up some things specifically around Luke Bryan to carry over.


Adam Bernard: Without naming any names, when you see someone at the bottom of the list are you like “well, we’re not going to book them for next year’s show?”
Chris Nelson: {laughs} Well, I certainly think there’s a lot of good conversation around folks and I think the volume sort of depends on what they’re doing in the show, but I think the way that it’ll play in the next year might be what song do they have out, what role do they have in the show, and what can we build from there. We certainly try to figure out as much of that ahead of time as we can. We knew Luke Bryan was going to be performing, we knew he was nominated. We didn’t know what he was going to win, or what the reaction would be to his performance.

Adam Bernard: Do you think your list of artists, in terms of conversation... well, in terms of positive conversation, because saying “this dude sucks” is conversation, but it’s not good conversation, correlates with current album sales, or does it more so predict album sales?
Chris Nelson: I think social conversation, whether it’s positive or negative, reflects on a few things. It’s no secret that country music is one of the best genres as far as driving actual album sales. I think a lot of people have come to expect a certain level of experience with the artists they follow in country music. I think it’s much more of a familiar, friendship, kind of, and social amplifies that really well because you have that opportunity to have a one on one. That spans any genre of music, but I think in particularly with country you’ve seen a handful of artists who’ve really taken ownership of that one on one relationship with their fans. If you’ve ever been to a country show and the way that you hear artists talk about how they perform and why they perform, I think people have that sort of affinity to the artists personally. I think they know more about them. I think they understand what they’re about, their interests, they’re connected to them. You generally see a lot of positive engagement, which is really good to see.

Adam Bernard: Finally, all of this is interesting because social networking is a tool, but unlike most tools there’s no obvious way to use it. It’s not like a hammer, which you can figure out fairly quickly is for hitting things. How much of the tool that is social networking do you think we’ve figured out, and what kind of untapped potential do you think is still laying dormant?
Chris Nelson: I think there’s huge potential. I feel like there’s always something we figure out new and different. After the dust settled after Music Awards you’re letting yourself rest for a bit, but you’re always thinking that was great, but what are we going to do next year, because we know we have to do bigger and better. That’s a challenge I think anyone who’s doing major entertainment feels. I think that goes back to your first question, doing better and smarter, not necessarily bigger and outlandish. It has to make sense. I think part of it for us will be the maturation of platforms. Our Instagram account, the growth rate there since it opened up to Android, and with all the connection that’s more likely to come with Facebook, there’s more in the photo arena that I think we’ll develop over the next year and we’ll try to bridge that with our fans as much as we can. (We’re working on) different ways we can leverage on-air. The linear channel tied to off-platform can only get stronger as we go forward, so you’ll start to see more integration with the channel on-air with the channel that’s on the website, and a number of different facets growing in number and complexity on digital. That’s the way people expect it to be. To your point, though, there is definitely a level of too much. You just have to figure out what those really big opportunities are.