Visible Case Studies »
Bringing Fan “Social Buzz” to Life
Few subjects excite social media users and bring social buzz more than popular music. Passionate opinions abound on Twitter, Facebook, and across the blogosphere, while multimedia communities like YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace allow people to engage with artists like never before. With social media tools at their fingertips, today’s fans are fast shifting the paradigm of how music is consumed and presented, as well as how fans and artists connect.
How to harness this groundswell was the question facing TBWAChiatDay, advertising agency for the Recording Academy®’s GRAMMY® awards. Recognizing that this new environment represents the future of their industry, the Recording Academy wanted to leverage social media to promote the 52nd GRAMMY Awards on Jan. 31, 2010. Rising to the challenge, TBWAChiatDay developed an innovative multimedia campaign called We’re All Fans (http://www.wereallfans.com/) that featured portraits of GRAMMY-nominated artists composed entirely of real-time, fan-generated content from YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.
As part of this campaign, TBWAChiatDay wanted a visible way to recognize artists who invested time connecting with their fans through social networks, while also motivating fans to generate online talk in support of their favorite artists. Their solution: The FanBuzz Visualizer—a real-time data visualization tool that acted as a “barometer of fandom” on the Web.
The Problem
To bring the FanBuzz Visualizer to life, the team at TBWAChiatDay needed a sophisticated approach to source data. How could they get accurate, relevant information, delivered in such a way as to be easily integrated into the campaign’s online infrastructure and quickly updated on a regular basis?
The Solution
Visible Intelligence® from Visible Technologies® , provided an ideal solution. Visible Intelligence’s flexibility allowed the agency to collect, refine, and share only what they wanted—and to do it quickly and easily.
First, the agency identified 20 artists to track. To ensure that the data represented just the active fan base and not news or PR material, they worked with the experts at Visible Technologies to develop a carefully selected universe of text, photo, and video postings from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, photo sharing sites, and blogs. They then needed to filter data for relevant content, and since some artist names were also common words (such as “P!nk” or “Common”), they needed to be exceptionally careful. To address this concern, the Visible Technologies team developed sophisticated custom data filtering mechanisms and search terms that delivered only artist related discussions.
TBWAChiatDay was then able to easily integrate the data delivered by Visible Intelligence into the FanBuzz Visualizer on the campaign Web site.
The Results
The FanBuzz Visualizer was a successful component of the We’re All Fans campaign, encouraging engagement by fans and garnering notice in the press for its creativity.
In just over 1 month, Visible Intelligence was able to collect nearly 2M relevant posts for display. Visible Technologies’ expertise in optimizing the Visible Intelligence platform gave the TBWAChiatDay team confidence that the information was truly representative of fan’s online engagement, while the tool’s friendly interface made daily updates easy for busy agency employees. The data also provided valuable insights into the online popularity of different artists and opportunities for driving fan engagement in the future.
It’s not just radio spins, concert ticket sales and digital downloads that
determine the popularity of an artist. The FanBuzz Visualizer lets music fans
know where their favorite artists stand, across social media, in real time.
While this is just the first initiative in which we’re using Visible Intelligence.
it’ll be a great tool to engage consumers in other campaigns.Patrick O’Neill Executive Creative Director, TBWAChiatDayLos Angeles