Katherine Rosman reports in the Wall Street Journal:
With a slate of small, arty movie nominees and an old-school host who is more reliable than buzzy, this year's Academy Awards broadcast may not set any television ratings records. But it's poised for a shot at another title: It could be the biggest night yet for social media.
The awards show is working hard to pump up its social-media clout as it tries to leverage a growing phenomenon: More and more viewers are supplementing the experience of merely watching their favorite TV shows by joining in simultaneous running commentaries on Twitter and Facebook.
ABC, which will broadcast the awards Sunday, will have at least two people tweeting about what is happening backstage, including Shira Lazar, a Web-broadcast personality. The preshow red-carpet hosts will be asking celebrities questions that viewers have posted to Twitter. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the awards, has a new feature available on Facebook that lets users choose which films and actors they expect to win, and share their picks with friends.
In addition to the official cameras trained on the stage and audience, 20 cameras will be stationed in the red-carpet area and throughout the theater, including one at the lobby bar and a backstage "Thank You Camera" where winners can extend their acceptance speeches. Video from these cameras won't be part of the TV broadcast but will be streamed on Oscar.com and the free mobile Oscars app. A ticker on the site and app will let followers know in real time who is appearing on which camera. The idea is to give people more access to live celebrity footage that they can chat about online.
During the broadcast, viewer tweets using the hashtags "#oscars," "#redcarpetqa" and "#bestdressed" will appear on Oscar.com and the Oscars app. Karin Gilford, ABC's senior vice president of digital media, says an outside company has been hired to monitor the tweets that will appear on the Oscar site to weed out spam and offensive content.
Even snarky comments from viewers can be used to the network's benefit. "If everyone is going crazy about one event or moment of the telecast, we know what video clips to post to the site," Ms. Gilford says.
Last year during the telecast, tweeters took to the Web to discuss Oscar co-host James Franco's dazed and uncommanding comportment. Joy Behar, a co-host of "The View," tweeted about Mr. Franco and his co-host Anne Hathaway: "I'm surprised Anne Hathaway didn't get a hernia from carrying James Franco all night. #Oscars."
Last year's Oscar broadcast had 966,000 social-media comments, and overall, the social-media Oscar chatter was positive, according to Bluefin Labs, a social-media analytics company. During the Oscar telecast, 87% of all social-media comments were about the Academy Awards, and the third most frequently used term was "love" (after "#oscars" and "Oscars"). "Dress" was fifth. The vast majority of measurable "social-media mentions" are culled from Twitter because—unlike Facebook status updates, which often are visible only to a user's friends—most tweets are publicly posted.
Other big TV events have seen huge jumps in social-media activity lately. The Super Bowl garnered 12.2 million comments on social networks like Twitter and Facebook during the game's recent telecast, up 578% from last year's game, according to Bluefin Labs. The Grammy Awards racked up 13 million social-media comments during the broadcast, up 2,280% from last year. (The show also had a surge in TV viewers, likely due in part to the death of Whitney Houston the day before the awards.)
Media executives say they don't yet have the data to directly measure the correlation between volume of social media mentions and actual viewership ratings. "But we do know that social media drives engagement and can help sustain viewers' interest in what they're watching," says Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media of Disney-ABC Television Group.
For this year's Oscars, Twitter Inc. has lined up a group of TV and music personalities to tweet throughout the ceremony, including "Desperate Housewives" star Eva Longoria, "American Idol" judge Randy Jackson and comedian Whitney Cummings, the star of NBC's "Whitney."
Suzy Soro, a blogger, comedian and actress in Los Angeles, will live-tweet the Oscars from her feed @HotComesToDie. She says she appreciates the way that Twitter can level the playing field on a night when Hollywood celebrates its glamorous A-list. "It all goes back to Andy Warhol," Ms. Soro says. "When you live-tweet, you're onstage, too."
Even the after-show party-scene glamour will be socially leveraged. Vanity Fair, which famously throws an Oscar party, will have a staffer tweeting from the party, and video footage of the celebration will go online hourly throughout the party, says Chris Rovzar, Vanity Fair's digital editor.
He says the videos and tweeting will let readers experience the party without totally compromising the privacy of the A-list guest list. "It's a delicate balance of letting people know what is going on and not spoiling anybody's fun," he says
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