Twitter Visualizations at the MTV VMAs
The Twitter visualizations used on MTV.com during the VMAs were pretty interesting. Design firm Stamen (more on their blog here) and social media monitoring company Radian6, are credited with showing VMA twitter activity around an artist or band growing and shrinking in real time according to the number tweets. The timeline remains live here.
The timeline is not overly easy to use. It tends to want to play instead of letting the user track second by second. It takes some doing, but you can see what looks to be more than 2k tweets when Kanye West takes the mic from Taylor Swift during Swift’s acceptance speech. I can see something like this being even more interesting when screen shots of what was happening at the time can be added into the timeline and associated with the tweets.
Regardless, it was a nice step toward increased TV interactivity and a complimentary, natural-feeling incorporation of social media. Leave it to MTV to do it right.
(Update)
I just heard from MTV PR. They provided some interesting stats around site traffic related to the VMA Twitter tracking…
“One day after 2.7 million unique visitors gave MTV.com its best VMA premiere day in the site’s history, **5.5 million people visited the site on Monday**, September 14, tying MTV.com’s second-place record for unique visitors, all-time. The **site saw 53.4 million page views**, marking the second-highest day overall for the site. 17.9 million video streams were watched across the site on Monday, a whopping 64% increase from the day after the “2008 MTV Video Music Awards” and the second highest stream total in MTV.com’s history.
Additionally, through the “Twitter Visualization” tool, MTV,** tracked upwards of 1.75M tweets about the show** by the end of the second airing (2:30AM EDT), and more than **2M total tweets as of midday on Monday**, September 14.
“During MTV’s VMAs, Twitter experienced three times our average volume of tweets, and twice as many as during the news surrounding Michael Jackson this past summer,” said Chloe Sladden, director of media partnerships at Twitter. “The unique level of viewer engagement MTV was able to inspire during the VMAs was impressive. We think Twitter can be the way television becomes more interactive and MTV is showing us the way.”
No doubt outrageous behavior by Kanye West on the VMAs drove interest in the content MTV was making available, but MTV’s unique social media integration was successful in drawing people from Twitter into the conversation as well drove viewership during the show and pageviews on the site after the show — to see what happened.
