How Syfy Turns TV Shows Into Social Phenomenons

Syfy is a US based TV channel which features a large range of programming featuring pretty much everything from science fiction to paranormal to drama and even reality. It was known as Sci-Fi until 2009. It recently got revamped and new online content strategies were introduced to keep up with the viewers’ ever changing TV watching habits. Basically they’ve made their shows and promotions very much related to social media.

For some of the shows, for example Haven, there is a social story line along with the main one. Two of the main characters of that show are very active on Twitter engaging with the audience in their on screen persona which is one of the reasons that the show is one of the top trends on twitter regularly. Also, other popular shows like Ghost hunters have a very strong fan base on social media. For the show Face Off, there was actually a live audience voting for the first time ever which generated tremendous social participation. This was a genius strategy. You would always want the audience to get engaged in your show as much as possible. Syfy comes up with these ideas because of the bi-weekly meetings which have members from every department and they share their ideas.

Before the production for a show starts, the show’s creators and marketing teams sit down and focus on ideas that complement the show depending on the target audience and the genre and try to be as different as possible from the others. Pretty much every social platform is used depending on the type of show again. Surprisingly, there is no dedicated social team at Syfy. The job is split up between marketing and digital teams but everyone at the network is engaged with social because at the end of the day, it’s a team effort. The Syfy audience is called igniters, the people who are first to find and try out new things with high standards so Syfy has to be at the top of it’s game all the time when it comes to social.

In the end I would want to discuss the most important part. How is this article going to impact the way I approach my digital story? This article has made me realize that in today’s world, you have to keep up with ever changing viewing habits of the audience. Your content might be good, but if the audience doesn’t know about it or the first impression is not good, they will probably not care. Marketing and promotion of your product is the most important thing these days and it should be done in a creative way so that it grabs the attention of your target audience. If you do this, it is quite possible that even if your content is not that good, people will still watch it. The best way to get people engaged these days is social media. What I plan to do for my story is that, since it is targeted at Asian students, our group will promote it on Facebook, Twitter and WeChat (For Chinese people) mainly. It will start off with a twitter handle, facebook page and wechat page posting the teasers. One more thing I was thinking about that why not make  a twitter page for one of the main characters of my film. My film is about problems Asian students face when they come to Australia. This way my target audience will be able to relate to my content more.

Google alert – Microsoft Edge Extensions

The Google alerts I subscribed for were Microsoft, Sports and Entertainment. I got some updates on all of them today and I’ll talk about the Microsoft Edge update. Don’t we all remember the good old Internet Explorer? We all used to make fun of it for being full of bugs and extremely slow. It was the browser used by us to download Google Chrome. Finally, after so many years, Microsoft relaunched their browser as Microsoft Edge along with Windows 10 to compete with Chrome and Safari. The new browser is actually quite good and fast but it still lacks some features like extensions.

Microsoft have finally announced new extensions for Edge. The roll out of these extensions is the first step they have taken to compete with other browsers. For now the extensions are desktop only. The mobile users will have to wait a little. More extensions will be rolled out during this year. There are some other updates as well. You can now pin tabs in Edge. To pin a tab, just right-click on a specific tab and select “pin tab”. Selecting “unpin tab” after right-clicking on any given tab will reverse this. A design feature that makes tabbing more usable in Edge is the absence of a close button, so you won’t accidentally close tabs. For peace of mind, tabs that are open when you close the browser will automatically reappear when you start Edge the next time.

Widgets

Widgets add a lot of value to your blog. They make navigation easy and provide links or feeds to others sites or pages. As a part of my assignment I’ve added the following widgets to my blog:

1. Twitter feed: It shows my real time twitter updates.
2. Instagram: This widget shows my latest Instagram posts.
3. Contact me: It has links to the various social media platforms I use. It is a very compact and useful widget.
4. Tag cloud: It displays all the tags I’ve used in my blog for easier navigation.

Comments and spam

Comment spam is something we all have to deal with if we have a blog. These spam comments can be very annoying and can also hamper the reputation of your blog. Spammers use different techniques so there is no one way of dealing with it. There are multiple ways to stop spam and make sure your blog is clean.

Following are some techniques to stop spam:

1) Comment blacklist: Included on your Settings > Discussion panel is a section called the Comment Blacklist. This is a list of words completely blacklisted from your blog.

2) Moderate comments: In the Settings > Discussion panel, turn on comment approval by the admin. Also there’s options for comment approval of first time commenters and the option to restrict the comments only to registered users.

3) Use spam plugins such as Akismet which is very useful.