Last night the 47th Annual Country Music Awards was broadcast live by ABC. Lately, Twitter has been making lots of moves so that live TV broadcasts synonymous with their social network.
So how did the #CMAawards do last night?
Well, they hit a four-year high in terms of traditionally measured ratings, whatever that means.
First, a little history: The CMA was founded in 1958 in Nashville, Tennessee and the first awards ceremony took place in 1967 – it wasn’t even televised. The next year, the awards were recorded and then televised a few weeks later. By 1969, the CMA Awards had transformed into a live telecast event.
Here’s what the CMA did to promote interactivity with its audience:
The CMA website promoted superstar collaborations of different performers mashed up with links to their Twitter feeds.
You could tweet to unlock premium cameras backstage at the awards, giving audience members a 360 camera of all events. Using Livestream, the CMA gave viewers five different cameras covering the action throughout the event — from the artists arriving on the red carpet to backstage. This included audience camera, backstage camera, arrival camera, interview camera, and more.
On Facebook, the CMA shared country stars’ photos from their experience at the awards and red carpet photos of musicians were added as they arrived
Posted photos from the musical sets throughout the night. All of the artists were tagged within posts and they even made use of the hashtag #CMAawards within the Facebook platform.
On Facebook, the CMA notified fans that they could Shazam Jason Aldean’s performancefor a free download of a never before released acoustic version of his song “Night Train.”
Gave audience members a chance to guess who would win awards for a chance to attend the awards in 2014 — co-sponsored by Spotify — and encouraged more traditional viewers to just download a ballot and follow along with who they thought would win the awards.
The CMA had artist Scotty McCreery take over the Twitter account for a portion of the show and used hashtag #ScottyTakeover.
Instagram photos and videos were used and integrated into Facebook posts and twitter posts to show everything from rolling out the red carpet to the crowd filing into Bridgestone Arena and the aftermath photos of taking down the equipment.
Hosted an application so that you can take your own picture with a CMA Award, browse past award winners, and this years nominees. watch the live stream from your devices. Available through both the Apple App store and for Android through Google Play – looks like the app will be usable again for the CMA Country Christmas special as well as the CMA Music Festival June 5-8, 2014.
Really awesome integration of the CMA Awards Nominees Social Stream on the CMA website. It aggregated all of the conversation among the stars into one place, in case the audience isn’t already following someone online.
The CMA Twitter account manually retweeted of artists during the show, asked audiences who they thought would win, and featured live announcements of winners. They even retweeted some fans. That’s pretty amazing to see considering some only had 19 followers, which means the CMAs didn’t put influence of viewers as a priority and instead made all of them equally important.
Not too shabby, eh?
Did you watch the show? What aspect of the social promo were you impressed by?