While NBC exhibits a 10-year growth peak and 6% viewer lift over last year-nearly 21 million viewers-its successful airing of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association® Golden Globes Awards® may not be a surprise, especially given the event's "crystal ball" status in predicting winners for the later Academy Awards Oscars®. The Golden Globes is also now a harbinger of a significant trend in viewer social engagement, social PR and phenom of social self-promotion by the burgeoning artist as "brand personality." Golden Globes viewers were so engaged that they even crashed the Seamless website during the program.
Social sharing registered millions of impressions in English alone, but I was interested in discovering more about what interested Spanish-speaking audiences. Notably, the historic "Best Director" Golden Globes' nod for Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican director of the film Gravity (Gravedad), at Los Globos de Oro helped boost Spanish social engagement. However, this is only part of the story. The Golden Globes are a mainstream global event, and with U.S. Hispanics and Spanish-speaking "socialnaut"' social media engagement at an historic high- according to Pew Research more Hispanics (68%) use social media than non-Hispanics (58%)-I wanted to learn more about the cultural drivers influencing Spanish speaker opinions, sentiment and emotions.
For highly accurate recall in real time, I use NetBase for its deep cultural AND contextual linguistic precision. As the overall themes cloud below shows, Golden Globe winner for "Best Actress in a Comedy" Jennifer Lawrence and the comedy film American Hustle had significant Spanish social traction during the event. As much as Latinas love the actress (#JenLaw), they hated her dress-some dubbing it the "worst dress" and others comparing it to the Disney princess Serenita. Most loved Red Carpet dresses among Latinas? The elegant and sophisticated gowns worn by actresses Amy Adams, Emma Watson and Sofía Vergara.
While so many of us women look for el mejor momento (the best moment) on the alfombra roja (Red Carpet)-beyond los mejores looks-trending Golden Globes topics included Latino interest in the overall cinematic theme of winning films. This reflected a critique of North American society-its values, morals and principals-and cited, in particular, a common thematic thread of declining American human relationships and decadence.
This picture would be incomplete, however, without examining the brand story-
one of my favorite angles. Social media tells it all, specifically as a bellwether of brand health as defined by a brand's ability to satisfy the voice of the consumer, but also for gauging the degree to which the enterprise behind the brand has grown social legs. At events like the Golden Globes, the high volume of brand presence in the contextual data generally implies that the brand is driven by a strategic social marketing plan-where VOC rules on all levels of the social enterprise-and consequently is benefiting from greater audience and brand engagement, fan loyalty and box office returns.
In our NetBase Golden Globes brand cloud, personal brands and/or personality stood out significantly, giving testimony to the value placed on their social engagement. Major "Red Carpet" fashion industry designers (e.g., Balenciaga, Burberry, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Tom Ford, YSL) also stood out among Spanish social media fans-evidence of fashion's leading social edge engagement and the industry's soaring investment in all things social media. The fashion industry is increasingly committed to investment in social media and big data. From social intelligence and analytics platforms to integrated production and distribution systems that track VOC-right from the runway to design and production-data-driven social media helps to remove a large part of fashion's guess work over a fickle fashion consuming public.
But without backing by a social enterprise, or celebrities with a social business plan (e.g. Robert Downey, Jr. and U2), social buzz is nothing more than "white noise." By definition, social enterprise and celebrities with social plans are fully engaged with an enfranchised audience and are held sacrosanct by VOC.
More and more, fan and audience engagement is becoming the bailiwick of personal brands (i.e., actors, artists, athletes, musicians) who already know what many commodity brands struggle with in marketing to this day. The holy grail of future marketing lies in the moment of truth-where the brand, either commodity or personality-seamlessly delivers satisfaction.