We’ve written about several recent examples of TV producers promoting a hashtag or Twitter account on-air — from Oprah to the Oscars — to facilitate a social conversation along with the broadcast. And last night, The Comedy Awards joined the experiment by plugging the hashtag #comedyawards in the corner of the screen.
(Photo from Comedy Central)
The show aired across multiple cable nets — Comedy Central and Spike TV among them — as well as streamed live online. Comedians Andrew Daly (“Semi-Pro”) and Jen Kirkman (“Chelsea Lately”) live-tweeted along with the event. To correspond with the hashtag, Comedy Central bought a Twitter promoted trend around #comedyawards — initially to promote the event, then as the show got underway, to plug TheComedyAwards.com.
Live event producers and marketers — especially around award shows — are increasingly warming to promoting hashtags in the broadcast, which is celebrated by the folks at Twitter. The Twitter Media blog is packed full of examples, with tweet graphs to show corresponding spikes. Here’s a recent integration inside a BBC newscast:
BBC News collected some of the best tweets for its website. Says BBC News Editor Trushar Barot: “One of our producers who was responsible for ensuring the best tweets went onto the page told me that having a dedicated BBC hashtag had made a huge difference editorially.”
In the world of marketing, TV integration is the best promotion you can get — especially as Twitter.com grows its ad products. What do you think? Should hashtags become a standard ingredient of live TV programming?
