November 11-12 will see the Futures Of Entertaintment 5event, held at MIT in Cambridge, MA.  FoE tends to bring together a great mix of marketing/brand type people with some academics who bring a different perspective to the subject. The program includes discussions with titles like Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society, and Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories. 

Sam Ford, Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, is one of the featured speakers and he was kind enough to share some of his thoughts about the futures of entertainment…

Rick Liebling: FoE seems very academic in nature, looking at many of the speakers. How does that affect the approach to the event and the dialogue that is created?

Sam Ford: Our goal with each conference is to have panels that are a mixture of academic and industry perspectives. We want to create an event that is as much an academic conference as it is an industry event and to reap the rewards of what happens when you bring the perspectives of academics from a variety of disciplines who study the media into conversation with one another and with representatives from a range of media and marketing companies. It creates a unique environment where the goal is neither to present a paper or research project (the focus of many academic conferences) nor it is a place to display a slide deck or present a corporate case study. We frown on presentations and don’t use PowerPoint or Keynote unless someone has something specific they need to show in order to further the discussion. And no one’s coming to read papers. We want to take advantage of one of these few opportunities to have the people who study media in a room with those who make media, and we want to put the focus on the dialogue that can happen when these groups come together and are willing to have a dialogue to one another, to listen to one another.

As a result, we have had research collaborations arise that came out of this event and the community surrounding it. We have had new businesses launch from people who have met at Futures of Entertainment. I believe it’s a unique event that draws an audience of academics interested in dialogue with industry representatives and marketing and media industries people who want to listen to and learn from those involved in media studies.

Rick Liebling: Crowdsourcing, gamification, social TV… Are these trends simply fads, or mainstays that content producers need to understand and incorporate?

Sam Ford: We try to stay away from focusing on fads and focus our panels and discussions around larger cultural patterns. I’d say that some things currently being called, or which have been labeled as, “crowdsourcing” could be trends that wax and wane, the purview of “trendspotters” who get people excited about a shiny new object, only for everyone to realize after the fact that it was hype. The same has happened with gamification and social TV. To define these patterns too narrowly and expect one small, gimmicked version of this to be “the way” this trend will take shape can be a mistake. That’s the purpose for our event. To step back, look at what’s developing, and discuss the larger cultural patterns underneath what we’re seeing. And that’s what we see as the role of the academy in this, as media studies academics are often trained to look at developments within their larger historical context.

Rick Liebling:  Where is the most innovative storytelling happening right now?

Sam Ford: It’s perhaps not surprising to see indie media makers driving some of the most innovative storytelling. That’s why we have a large number of people speaking in this year’s panels who are indie musicians, filmmakers, journalists, serialized storytellers, etc., and people who are studying spaces like soap opera, where series are moving to the web. You’ll also notice that we have a greater number of panelists from outside the U.S. than ever before: Brazil, India, The Netherlands, Finland, Chile, Mexico, the United Kingdom…Our goal is to bring together media creators from Harry Potter to Christian music, from Mexican television to the U.S. journalism industry, to learn from people who are driving innovation. And it’s key to realize that, while some media markets outside the U.S. (like Brazil) might be fostering some of the most innovative forms of storytelling and while indie creators have more flexibility to try new models and methods, we have media and marketing industries more willing than ever to engage with audiences in new ways and find new ways to tell stories. That’s why we’re happy to collaborate with the likes of Viacom Media Networks, Petrobras, The Alchemists, and Samsung as our sponsors of the event and draw on a variety of speakers who are in, or who come from, more “traditional” media companies.

If you’re interested in checking out Futures of Entertainment 5, you can still register here.

Loyal readers of this blog (both of you) will now be familiar with my use of the term Intermedia. I first used it in my post Intermedia – The Next Phase in Consumer Engagement, which received a lot of positive feedback. To continue this line of thinking I developed a post on Intermedia strategy that the good folks at Mashable were kind enough to publish.  Here’s an excerpt from Social TV: How Content Producers Can Engage Their Audiences in New Ways: 

As social media matures, new opportunities are arising for content producers. Social TV, for instance, hasexploded in 2011. While terms like “cross-media” and “transmedia” have only started to become part of the media lexicon, technology advances are creating new opportunities for content creators and audiences to engage with one another – an experience I call “intermedia.”

Increasingly, social TV has viewers using platforms like Twitter to comment on and discuss their favorite shows. HBO’s True Blood, Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club and Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, or landmark events such as presidential debates generate thousands of comments, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands. As social TV gains momentum, savvy networks like Bravo, MTV and The CW are poised to take advantage by engaging their audiences in new and compelling ways.

Then intermedia was born, the offspring of social TV and transmedia. Social TV provides a space for audience members to discuss a show, while transmedia encourages content producers to create stories that move across platforms. Therefore, intermedia means that audience members and content producers engage each other between media channels, often with content from one platform affecting content from the other.

I hope you’ll swing over to Mashable and read the rest of the piece.

Time for another entry in my CEO Interview series, this time it’s with Aaron Williams of SocialSamba. This is a great example of why I love doing this series and why I hope the people I speak with find value in doing these: At first blush I wasn’t really buying what SocialSamba was selling. I even experienced one of their offerings and while I thought it was executed well, it just didn’t hit a home run with me. But I wanted to find out more and I must say, after listening to Aaron’s answers, I think he’s got something pretty interesting here, and an interesting use-case of Intermedia. Based on the metrics he’s talking about (see below), I’d certainly be interested in finding out more. I hope you’ll take a look at what SocialSamba has to offer if you’ve got a brand or property and are looking for stronger consumer engagement.

Rick Liebling: For those not familiar with Social Samba, tell us a little about your product(s) and who you are currently working with?

Aaron Williams: SocialSamba is a platform for scripted social networking – which means we enable fans to “friend” the characters they love from TV, movies, books, and brands, and experience what it’s like to be part of a social network with those characters.  It’s the same way you experience the lives of friends and family using Facebook, only the content from the characters is created by professionals, so it tells a great story.  We license our platform to the professional storytellers to create these stories – we have current productions live from the TV shows Covert Affairs and Psych from USA Networks, and the movie Dolphin Tale from Warner Bros.  Psych’s “Hashtag Killer” experience just went live this week – it’s 7 weekly episodes, and you can try it for yourself here.

Of course, your Mad Men experience and others have proven that great stories can be told using Facebook, Twitter and other social networks “out-of-the-box”.  The additional value we’re adding is that we enable these storytellers to script the posts, comments, images and videos once, and then we play them back for each fan.  This ensures fans are participants in the story (think choose-your-own-adventure where the characters call you by name and ask for your input), the stories are not lost in today’s massive social fire hoses, and the stories are an asset that fans can experience whenever they want.  It’s not a campaign and you’re not a voyeur with our technology.

Rick Liebling: What sort of results/ROI have those brands seen with your offering?

Aaron Williams: As of today, there are 3337 fan pages on Facebook with more than 1M fans (HT socialbakers.com).  Even taking out the silly pages, that’s a TON of fans who are looking for a deeper connection to their favorite characters and stories, and brands of beers, and cereals, and sports teams.  Our offering gives these brands the opportunity to go beyond the 1-2% engagement they can get from traditional social marketing campaigns (corporate image sharing, “hey look at us” wall posts, fan polls, etc.).  When these brands can tell their fans a story, and engage them not with the marketing of the brand but instead with the values and stories of the brand through characters, we see much higher engagement rates.  25% of fans of Covert Affairs engaged in their story, for instance, with 12% returning to the story 9+ times, and spending 6+ minutes in the story each time they came back.  That’s exactly what our customers want: deeper and more meaningful engagement.

SocialSamba lets viewers engage with the Psych characters.

Of course, they also want a solution that doesn’t hemorrhage budget.  We cover that two ways: lower costs and real revenue streams.  First the lower costs: being able to script the experience once means you get a story that can be available for a year and scale to millions of fans without having to pay for a writing team for a year, where most of the posts will just get missed.  And second for the revenue: we enable sponsorships, product placements and virtual goods, models that have been very successful across social.

Rick Liebling: Here’s where I’m challenged by what SocialSamba does: As someone who was a character in the Mad Men on Twitter experience, the real juice came from the improv element, we had to create on the fly. How does SocialSamba get around the canned nature of the offering you currently have?

Aaron Williams: One person’s canned experience is another person’s Avatar.  The fact is that a majority of the entertainment we enjoy is “canned” (in the sense that it is produced once and played back a zillion times), and fans are happy with that because they get a great story.  I firmly believe it’s the story that matters.  Improv is great also, and completely open ARGs that are created on the fly are a freaking blast, but they definitely aren’t the only way to experience a great story.  So, I just don’t agree that we need to get around our canned nature, we just need to tell kick-ass stories.  All that said, we’re also not 100% canned – we offer our customers an “actor” console where writers can provide direct responses to specific fans as the characters (our customers will use this feature if they want to target the top 5% of their fans and give them customized content, but it is not required).

Rick Liebling: Facebook and Twitter make perfect sense for this sort of thing, are there other platforms people should be thinking about?

Aaron Williams: Sure – mobile!  (Hope that’s not too obvious?)  Let me be more specific: SMS, voice mail and apps are kind of overlooked for these kinds of experiences, but they are absolutely ubiquitous and wonderfully “social”.  We’re very excited about having characters leave voice mail, send SMS, and leverage location and augmented reality as part of the story.  Check-ins to sponsors can change the story as well.  When Jack Bauer sends me a voice mail and tells me to get to my local Starbucks and diffuse the bomb through an augmented reality app … I’m in.

Rick Liebling: What’s going to be the tipping point for SocialSamba? Is it a matter of a certain show jumping on board with you, or is it just a matter of greater Social TV adoption by consumers?

Aaron Williams: Of course there are the “whales” out there that would validate our vision all on their own, but I’m not as concerned about being recognized as first-to-market with a specific brand.  First-to-scale is all that matters for us.  (There were farming games on Facebook before Farmville.  Zynga kills it with scaling.)  We’re executing like hell, continuing to meet our goals, and delighting our customers.

Social TV is going to change the face of televised entertainment in the next 16 months.

Bold statement, but one I stand by. Sooner or later, in order to survive, shows will have to start engaging fans in an Intermedia environment. Why? Because without viewers there aren’t sponsors, and without sponsors there aren’t shows. Right now, it’s getting harder for brands to see the return on TV advertising. We all know the many factors that are now affecting the television industry and eroding audience share: DVRs, The Internet and a multi-channel universe to name a few. As a result, marketers have seen the bedrock of their advertising plans, the :30 TV spot, lose relevance. New solutions need to be found to return to the “appointment television” model that worked so well in the TV era (50s – 80s). Social TV may not solve all the problems, but it is a real answer.

Social TV creates that appointment viewing. When the viewing experience transcends the single viewer in their living room and includes hundreds, even thousands of others, it becomes an event, and Americans love an event. That’s why the Super Bowl, American Idol, The Oscars and the Olympics draw so well. They’re events in one form on another.

The term Social TV covers a broad range of applications and activities, so I thought it would be interesting to create an essential list of the major players in the industry. I’ll admit this isn’t exhaustive or definitive, so please include in the comments anything or anyone you think is important that I missed. Maybe we can expand this list of 31 to a list of 50!

Disclaimer – I haven’t used all these tools and services, and there inclusion should not be construed as an endorsement. Where possible I used descriptions pulled directly from the sites.

THE PEOPLE

Cari Bugbee first gained notoriety for her participation in the Mad Men on Twitter experience. Now she’s running the Social TV and Film Group on Diigo and can be found wherever Social TV discussion is happening around the web.

Paul Farkas - Founder and CEO of SocialTV.com and runs the 1,000 member strong Social TV Facebook group.

Richard Kastelein – Founder of Agora Media, and curator of AppMarketTV page.

Mark Long – Manager of the popular (4,000+ members) Social TV Networking group on LinkedIn

Elspeth Rountree – Consultant for a variety of multi-national companies focusing on social television strategy. She created a similar guide that served as a resource for this post (Disclosure – I was about 90% done with this post when I found hers).

Steve Safran - Editor at Lost Remote.

THE APPS AND SERVICES

BeeTV - A place for people to interact and socialize about the TV show they are watching currently.

Clicker - The complete guide to Internet Television.

Dijit - Turn your smartphone into the remote control you’ve always wanted.

Fav.tv - allows users to take part in discussion threads that bring in comments from their friends and others about specific shows, as well as relevant news articles about those programs.

GetGlue - Users check-in and share what they are watching, listening to and reading with friends; get fresh recommendations, exclusive stickers, discounts and other rewards.

Intonow - gives users the ability to almost instantly recognize TV content and then helps them share and discuss those shows with friends, both within the product and through other social streams such as Facebook and Twitter.

Miso - Social TV with a twist of Game Mechanics. Similar to GetGlue

Ooyala - Gives content owners the power to expand audiences and the deep insights that drive increased viewer engagement and revenue from video.

Shazam - Known for their awesome music app, they’re now diving into Social TV with some intriguing options for brands.

TV Dinner – Next generation Social TV platform providing rich, realtime conversations and interactions about television. Unlike traditional social networks where relationships are the connective tissue, TV Dinner seeks to connect individuals through their interests—creating a greater opportunity for social discovery.

Umami - Still in ‘coming soon’ mode, here’s what Gigaom had to say about them.

Yap.tv – Offers show fans many interactive features such as user-generated polls, integration with Twitter and Facebook, automatic check-in to see what friends are watching, and real-time private group chat.

THE CONFERENCES

2-Screen - Hosted by Mint Digital, 2-Screen looks at how second screen practitioners are creating in a landscape of simultaneous media and split attention.

Social TV Summit – Focused on Social Media and its effect on viewing content on TV, online, on tablets and on mobile.

Social Media World Forum Europe - Two days of interactive & engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking with a specific track on Social TV.

THE BLOGS & NEWSFEEDS:

Live Digitally – Dijit’s Jeremy Toeman curates all the news about Connected TV, Smart TV, IPTV, OTT, Social TV, etc.

Lost Remote - The first and only source dedicated to social TV coverage.

SocialTV:Digest - Covering the fast-growing intersection of television + social media. We curate the latest news and trends affecting the Social TV landscape.

The End of Television As We Know It - A collection of thoughts about Television, Internet, Open Video, New Media, Convergence, Culture and the future.

TVAppMarket - The Internet’s first portal dedicated to the convergence of players expected to meet in this convergence of media – the web developers, the broadcasters, the consumer electronic manufacturers, the Pay TV crowd, the content creators, Mobile community, VC’s, startups, designers, creatives and agencies.

Social TV Facebook group – Vibrant group sharing the latest news and commentary on all aspects of Social TV.

THE ANALYTICS

Bluefin Labs – Data and insights about TV shows and commercials, generated from public social media conversations about TV.

Social Guide - The first real-time Social Programming Guide.

Trendrr –  Comprehensive television insight solution that analyzes engagement around television and brands by processing real-time activity across a variety of social networks.

TV Genius - Offers accurate search, recommendations, and interactive TV guides. Combined with rich metadata, the software acts as a key differentiator in addressing the content discovery challenge.

Don’t forget to bookmark this post (and share it of course).

Recently I wrote about the idea of Intermedia – where content interaction happens between platforms through content producers and content consumers. I thought it might be helpful to create a chart to show what this might look like:

Spielbeg brings the dinos, you bring the tweets for FOX's Terra Nova.

It’s time to get up on your surfboard and ride the Social TV wave onto the beach. I’ve started writing about Social TV and it’s getting pretty clear that it’s going to be next year’s gamification (which was this year’s crowdsourcing). Mashable, as you might expect is all over this. Check out there Fall TV Goes Social piece which looks at how all the new Fall shows (the first installment looks at Monday night shows) are leveraging social media (some more extensively than others). My early winner: FOX’s Terra Nova, with a deeply immersive online game.

CBS is doubling down on Social TV this Fall as well. According to Mashable:

Starting Monday night, CBS.com will be running an online introduction to CBS’s fall schedule, called the Fall Premiere Show. After watching a set of 15-minute online previews, fans of CBS series — such as Hawaii Five-0, NCIS and CSI— can join live online chats with the shows producers. Each night this week, fans can login using Facebook or Twitter, ask the producers questions and discuss the show in real-time.

Next week, CBS will bring back its Tweet Week promotion, allowing fans to engage with cast and crew during the show airings. A great example of intermedia.