Christina Milian serves as "Social Media Correspondent" for the famous NBC show "The Voice." Her mission is quite interesting: "Bridging the on-air experience of 'The Voice' with the online experience, and bringing viewers closer to the competition." NBC has just explored this new job with Pat McAfee who has been NBC's Social Media Correspondent for the Super Bowl XLV.
Some digital influencers are now endorsed to become Social Media Correspondents: Louise Roe for Louis Vuitton Paris Fashion Week day tomorrow, who'll be in charge of live-interviewing and live-sharing contents from the red carpet to the special premiere at Arts Décoratifs' museum. But these Social Media correspondents aren't all from the TV world, as Jessica Conatser is also Social Media correspondent for Milk Studios.
This trend has just started to rise, and could be one of the most important developments related to connected (or social) TV. Social Media correspondents demonstrate how Social Web has become the main hub for any content strategy. It's no longer about "live" versus "replay" programmes, but more on how they now need to be "socially edited."
- creating new ways to express a TV programme online: backstage access, special interviews, specific challenges
- widening TV audience to Social Media publics
- understanding new usages and how a programme is understood, amplified, within Social Networks.
The right experience must fit to a specific device usage. New correspondents must talk in a very specific manner to new publics (let's say, for example, that some people follow a TV show only on twitter: you need to deliver specific messages to make them enjoy it!).
Diverse strategies will emerge in our attention economy, in which social TV could well be the "meta"-channel:
- acquiring pre-existing talents, in order to benefit from their online communities. In fact, not so many people possess such a mass of followers
- investing in niche trendsetters, before they become too famous: social media monitoring will be key in order to anticipate what can be integrated in a programme
- shaping new influencers: but I think that it does no longer stick to digital culture, which is more an upside-down loop than a vertical dictatorship
Understanding the new paths of influence will lead to a better monitoring and understanding of social networks: digital influencers on Pinterest are not yet followed by main brands; Tumblr stars are not yet outreached. There's a need to better dive into digital culture, out of text-only follow-up.