RTL4 launches the social media experiment Tweetweek

Ever wanted to take a sneak peek behind the curtains of your favorite show? Well, this week might be your chance. Today Dutch television station RTL4 is starting a big social media campaign called RTL Tweetweek.

 

From the 25^th of February to the the 2^nd of March, numerous RTL-celebs will be posting exclusive behind the scenes info on Twitter during their shows. Notable shows include: 'Ik Hou van Holland', 'GTST', 'Life4You', 'RTL Boulevard', 'RTL Nieuws' and many more. Every day you can see which programs are participating on the special website www.rtltweetweek.nl. But the content doesn’t stop there, RTL Tweetweek gives you more.

A great party, no?

Today is the first day after five days of festivities in Noord-Brabant. Most of the youngsters and adults alike will have great memories of these days, and the ones who really got the party going might have no memories of what they did at all.

No matter if you do or don't remember what you did during Carnival, luckily there is Fijnfisjenie. Fijnfisjenie is dialect which means as much as "It's a good party". Fijnfisjenie is broadcasted by the regional tv station OmroepBrabant, and features the most beautiful processions, the best comedy and of course carnival music, all mixed into one show. The show can be seen online here. That's all very nice of course, but what does it have to do with your own experiences during Carnival?

RamBam uses social media in a quest for love

Today is Valentine’s Day, the international day of love. Cynics may call it a carnival of commerce, but the fact remains that it can be a great theme for television (or blogs for that matter). The Dutch investigative journalism program RamBam thankfully exploited this fact during last night’s episode.

Every week VARA's RamBam investigates topics that seem fishy and tackles them in a ‘creative and humorous way’. Yesterday’s installment showed their search for Nanda, a girl that their reporter Noel Deelen had met via the dating website www.frunniken.nl. After days of sms-contact they arranged a meeting, for which Nanda failed to show up. This led Noel to jump to the most logical conclusion available: something terrible had happened to the love of his life, which prevented her from meeting him. He started searching for her in her (so-called) hometown, and even contacted the owner of the website, but all to no avail. And that’s when social media came into play.

Woody Harrelson’s reddit fail: Marketing gone wrong

One of most important things about marketing things on social media, is trying to make it as natural as possible. When it feels too forced, it might have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. Case in point: Woody Harrelson’s AMA (an abbreviation of Ask Me Anything) on the social news website Reddit.


Doing an AMA isn’t necessarily a bad move. Giving people the opportunity to ask a celebrity anything can be a great way to spark excitement for a future project. If it goes well, that is. Apparently, Harrelson’s PR department forgot the definition of “anything”, which is why Harrelson ended up frustrated when his attempts to plug his next movie Rampart fell on deaf ears. Because, can you imagine that people want to talk about other things besides Rampart? Geez!

The virtual water cooler

Television programming is big business. Every year, networks around the globe spend millions of dollars on the production of tv-shows. For example, the pilot of Pan Am cost ABC an estimated 10 million dollars, and that is just for the first episode. They don’t do this because they are the television equivalent of Paris Hilton and find the spending of money oddly satisfying.  No, they expect to make big bucks through commercial breaks. Companies are willing to pay vast amounts of money to have their advertisement air during a hit tv-show. 

Not every developed pilot becomes an instant success however, and networks have to promote the show in order to reel in the viewers, and the money that comes with them.  Their goal is to generate positive ‘buzz’. This is a phenomenon where people talk about the show to other people, creating word-of-mouth marketing. 

Back in the day this used to happen  at the water cooler in one’s workplace. A wonderful place it was, this water cooler. It gave people the opportunity to take a break and share stories about their lives and interest with their colleagues, before having to return to the dullness of their work. But nowadays there are social media, where people can talk about their interests to their heart’s content. In a way, social media act as a virtual water cooler. Sites like twitter, facebook, reddit and so forth, can create the positive buzz that networks crave.

This blog will focus on the opportunities that social media provide for the world of television. We believe it is an upcoming phenomenon that will be employed more and more often in the future. On this blog you will find information about the different types of social media, in what way they can influence the world of television and how they are used.