When you’re a TV junkie, there are usually a few TV shows that make an impact on your consciousness beyond just watching every episode each week. These handful of shows are the ones you won’t allow any distractions. Throughout the week, you bring the characters to life by dressing up as them for Halloween, comparing them to close friends and searching the net for interviews and pictures about them.
How does social fit into that passion? A few years ago, when Twitter was still a blip on the web, Carrie Bugbee, a pioneer user from Portland created a fake Twitter account for Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen. She amassed 11,000 followers in a short time, and in the process watched AMC try to shut it down — then recognize how important her “evangelism” was for the brand. The following season, digital agency Deep Focus created a successful campaign that allowed anyone to “Mad Men themselves” and create an avatar from the 1960s ad world for the social web.
A handful of shows have started evangelizing characters on the social web. One example we wrote about this summer was how DIRECTV was keeping Damages alive online (in addition to on-air) by creating Twitter accounts for each of the characters. This fall USA Network, 30 Ninjas and GLOW Interactive truly made “Characters Welcome” by creating #Hashtag Killer, a social game that ties to a fresh storyline. This execution, the most advanced exampled yet of characters from TV coming to life on the social web was made possible by “scripted social networking” startup SocialSamba.
There’s not much written about the startup whose mission is to create a “scalable way for brands, storytellers and celebrities to ‘friend’ their fans and tell them an entertaining story through posts, images and videos.” Co-Founder and CEO Aaron Williams says his “5-person and handful of contractors” company is “seed funded,” and that “we’ll be raising a series A in Q1,” because they’re “at the point where we’re ready to put some extra gas in the space.” While the company is still a bit under the radar, here are a few reasons why SocialSamba could become one the most important social TV companies in 2012:
A team with programming in their DNA:
Williams has a Master’s in Computers Science and describes himself as “the guy who wrote all the code” in previous roles. He’s excited about being the Steve Jobs side of the equation this time and is even more excited to be working with his 13-year friend Matthew Shilts, the CTO and Co-Founder who’s based in Minneapolis (they’ve both invested in each other’s previous companies). Williams described how there’s “some really good talent” in the midwest and “you don’t have to really fight with Silicon Valley.”
If you create a script for a TV show that script should extend to the social web:
SocialSamba has now produced three different products for the entertainment world. In addition to #Hashtag, they created a scripted social network for Covert Affairs where “you friended characters and they voted,” which resulted in a 25% engagement. For Dolphin’s Tale, a film that came out in June, they “wanted fans to get to know a little bit about the story before they went to the movie,” so they made a scripted social network about the rescue of the dolphin so “fans could get the full details of the rescue,” a part that was only one small scene in the movie.
“We’re a technology company, we enable a scripted playbook – we didn’t do any of the writing, it was done by the writers of the show or a third party that they use for these types of gigs,” William explains. “They’re the great story tellers, we’re the technology company”
Even more so, the scripts they’re enabling are creating a new kind of storytelling that doesn’t have boundaries that linear forces but instead forces more a game-like environment with the social web. The “scripts are not linear so we have branching,” that “feels like a game,” said Williams.
Working with writers and marketers:
“It’s the front end that we could do differently,” Williams explained. “The script on the back end is same for all of them. With the writers “the last thing we’re goinh to do is ask them to write,” in a way they’re not comfortable with. For Covert Affairs and #Hashtag they used regular script writing tools, which they provided a template for.
SocialSamba’s recipe enables the Psych junkies, the writers and even the marketers. They saw huge jumps on the platform when the network posted to their Facebook and social channels.
