It had all the makings of a social media disaster. NBC invested nearly $1.2 billion for broadcast rights for the 2012 London Olympics, but before the first competitive event began an #NBCfail hashtag movement was underway.
It started on July 26 with a single post by a web developer from Peoria who was frustrated that NBC limited online streaming of coverage to cable subscribers. The next day, 215 others used the #NBCfail hashtag. As the network delayed airing some events to primetime, 6,000 #NBCfails popped up July
28. By July 29, that number grew more than three-fold to 20,000.
But then something unexpected happened. Even though the number of #NBCfail tweets continued to flourish, nobody seemed to care.
Ratings for the 2012 Olympics are up over the strong performance at the 2008 Beijing Games. The $200 million dollar loss that NBC projected it would consume has apparently transformed in to a small profit.
Now the social whiners seem to be talking to themselves. An @NBCfail parody Twitter handle has attracted all of 546 followers. @NBCOlympics, the network’s official Twitter handle, has more than 465,000.
In the contest between #NBCfail and NBC, the network is winning. I see three social media lessons:
1. Hashtags aren’t very sticky
#NBCfail is fun, but there isn’t any “there there.” That’s not surprising if you consider the findings of a recent study on hashtags by computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon and Cornell University. It shows that outside of politics, hashtags just aren’t that sticky. According to the study, while politically charged hashtags tend to spread, “such repeated exposures has a much less important marginal effect on the adoption of conversational idioms.” That suggests brands need to keep an eye on hashtag-based campaigns, but they don’t need to fear dire outcomes — nor should they hope for business results or changes in attitudes by executing a hashtag effort.
2. Nobody respects nasty
A good deal of the messages that preceded the #NBCfail hashtag were needlessly mean-spirited. Here’s one example: “NBC’s gymnastics coverage is fake, jingoistic, and stupid.” Or how about “Dear NBC – you may have heard that we Americans occasionally watch live sports on Sunday afternoons. You incredible doofuses.” Those kinds of attacks may hurt the brand ego, but they tend to undermine the credibility of the stream. And brands can expect something of a backlash from supporters and level-headed social watchers who will turn the tide back in their favor.
3. Sift gold from the stream
In a crisis being fueled by social media, a company’s greatest asset may the very hashtags themselves. Smart brands sift out the nasty comments and find highly valuable customer feedback in the streams. #NBCfail Tweets gave NBC real-time market research and insights on how to adjust behavior and messaging.
There are, by the way, two other explanations for why NBC’s ratings have held strong. First, the network’s coverage has actually been excellent. And second, the games themselves have been superb. Which establishes a simply reality: it’s a lot more fun to watch NBC’s coverage of the games than to read the endless stream of tweets flying the #NBCfail banner.
Greg Loh is the managing partner of public relations and public affairs at Eric Mower + Associates, one of the nation’s leading independent marketing communications agencies. Views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the opinions of EMA.
The statement in the last paragraph that “the network’s coverage has actually been excellent” is laughable. NBC is not providing coverage “of the Olympics.” Instead, it has been providing a cynical and mercenary stream of advertising occasionally interrupted by a few clips that have something to do with sports events taking place in London.
Let’s start with the supposed alternative being provided for those who want to see things live and during the day. Such as service should be an answer to those who complain about NBC’s cherry-picking the best stuff and holding it to be shown in the evening at some undisclosed point within a four-hour window.
Supposedly one can access the events live online via NBC’s Live Extra! feature, but that service is unreliable. Based on Flash it is known to crash or to stall to buffer more material. But more than that, it interposes ads at regular intervals that interrupt whatever might be on the screen, even at critical moments in the action.
Notoriously, Live Extra! went to an ad during the JPNvBRA women’s soccer game and missed a goal. There are other examples. Many trying to use the service were unable to see Usain Bolt’s historic 100M run (the greatest field in the history of that event) because the service crashed or buffered right as the race began. I have a good internet connection and fast graphics capability, Given the limitations and unreliability of the system, I abandoned use of it within two days. (By contrast, the services of the BBC are state of the art and totally satisfactory.)
The Live Extra! service also requires a cable subscription, which many who have “cut the cord” do not have. That requirement certainly serves the interests of NBC who is owned by Comcast, a major cable provider, but it does not encourage live viewing of events even within the buggy, ad laden service provided by NBC.
That “bias towards cable” carries over into the broadcast and cable channels. During the day, the main broadcast channel has been treated as a teaser reel. More popular events are held to channels such as NBCSN, which again requires a cable subscription. Not event the gold medal match between the USWNT and Japan in soccer will be shown live on the main broadcast channel.
As to the atrocious evening “primetime” shows, they are roughly one-third advertising, more or less. Airtime is also taken up by retrospectives, interviews, irrelevant “features” (such as those on bagpipes or James Bond, which was just an extended advertisement for a show upcoming on NBC). When those additional elements are taken into account, there is precious little time left for sports events, well less than half of the airtime.
Sports coverage requires continuity to establish interest and drama, but NBC has chosen to show nothing but drips and drabs of a few events. A short snippet of a volleyball match might be shown, followed by a commercial, but then the return to the (taped) match, will have, without explanation, jumped eleven points forward in the match. That is not sport coverage. NBC has even used such selective editing, most notably in the women’s gymnastic team final, to “take out” inconvenient segments to create false drama.
In such a situation, the viewer will be lucky if NBC stays with one event for very long. Even then the narrow window on any event will be restricted to only a few athletes, virtually giving away, who will be the winners. Furthermore, if an event does not involve Americans, it will not be broadcast. The tremendous story of Jessica Ennis in the heptathlon — THE story in the UK — was totally ignored. Events such as the long jump, high jump, and decathlon have been squeezed into ridiculously short summaries.
By contrast, there have been compelling and dramatic stories all over the games, but if the already-known result does not end up with Americans on the podium its chances of being seen are next to nil. A viewer of NBC’s prime time broadcasts will have not idea that there are 36 sports in the games.
That is a tragedy because too often the USA tends to be provincial in its outlook. The Olympic Games are an opportunity to show that there is a much wider world of people out there, but that opportunity is being tossed aside by NBC in favor of reinforcing the idea that nothing beyond our borders matters.
To say that coverage has been “excellent” ignores NBC’s insistence to impose its own narrative upon what could be shown as naturally compelling events. They simply could not get away from Michael Phelps or from Jordin Wieber or from retrospectives to the Maginificent Seven while ignoring so many other compelling stories of the games of London 2012.
From reading interviews, I have seen that NBC executives see their job as “storytelling,” but what that means is imposing their own pre-established canned narratives upon sports stories that are in fact news. The approach is outright Orwellian. NBC is the Ministry of Truth in which Ignorance is Strength and they will tell you what to feel, what to think, and how to react.
There is also the questionable decision by NBC to hold the very best events to the very end of their program. Understandably, that insensitive technique holds the audience hostage to everything else that will come before, but to hold women’s gymnastics events to the late evening hours well past the bedtime of the many young viewers who might have liked to see Gabby Douglas verges on being mean-spirited.
What NBC is offering is not “coverage of the Olympics.” Instead they are producing some very warped form of “Olympics-based reality show” that is not sports coverage. Instead it is a vehicle designed to serve the interests of its customers, who are not the audience, but rather its advertisers. In addition to outright selling ads, it is transparent that NBC is exploiting the games as an extended promotional lead-in to its fall line-up. That strategy went over the top last evening when NBC shoved the first day of the decathlon into a less than five minute superficial summary and then shifted to a (commercial-free) preview of “Go On” which will be one of their fall shows. The eruption of indignation on Twitter at that moment was extreme.
NBC appears to be enjoying commercial success and high ratings, but that is not because they are providing superior sports coverage but rather because they enjoy a monopoly, exclusive broadcast rights, over material very much in demand and because they have used every imaginable device to ration that material into unsatisfactory clips buried within a torrent of advertising. I can understand why the business, media, and advertising industry admires their success. But that success has come at a high price for those who want to watch sports rather than soap opera.
The charter of the IOC says “The IOC takes all necessary steps in order to ensure the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience in the world for the Olympic Games.” NBC is failing in that trust; it is giving something to its audience, but that “something” is not “the Olympic games.”
Reblogged this on NicheValue: Nadia Vanderhall and commented:
Interesting thoughts to how social media can help or hurt you, if not used the correct way. What do you think about this?