Social media will transform content, says MTV’s Frank

Taking singer Beyoncé’s announcement of her pregnancy live at the MTV Awards as her kicking off point, Kristin Frank, digital manager at MTV and VH1, said that this event had demonstrated the power of social media.

Frank said that someone from MTV’s social team had Tweeted the announcement from the Awards event as soon as the singer made her announcement. She said MTV immediately started creating content for social media, “building on the virality of this one minute”.

Delivering the opening keynote at the IP&TV World Forum, Frank said that MTV published a number of news stories and social content immediately after the event, using its Share First product to spread and share news of the event via Twitter or by sharing animated GIFs captured by MTV and distributed via Tumblr.

“At the height we had over 9,000 Tweets per second,” she said. “It was a really well executed event across all platforms.”

MTV has 103 million Facebook fans, five million Twitter followers and is the number one brand on Foursquare, Instagram and Tumblr, said Frank. She said MTV’s fans were also “deeply engaged” and could serve as “brand and show ambassadors”.

Young adults or “millennials”, numbering 100 million in the US today, were a unique demographic, said Frank. This generation wanted “radical imtimacy”, wanted to be “co-curators and co-creators” of the content itself and the performances of the acts they like. “Gamification of everything” was the third key trend of the millennial demographic, she said. A generation that had grown up gaming had ingrained gaming in the way they thought, she said. The next quality was their insistence on “absolute choice”, meaning they wanted to customise and individualise their experience. They also were looking for “authenticity” and believed that “solitude is death”, she said.

Frank said that MTV was applying insights learned from its research to build content around musical acts. Interacting in real time with acts via Twitter was one example. She said that MTV would evolve its social experience to allow viewers to influence the outcome of one of its popular scripted shows this summer. Fans of the show will be able to interact with characters in real time, impacting on the way characters evolved via secret videos, online diaries and so forth.