I feel bad for the people who have to manage the Twitter accounts of major brands during live events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars because it can’t be easy to stay on your toes for 3+ hours.
For example, you never know about the spontaneous things that happen, such as the safety during the first quarter of the Super Bowl or Ellen ordering pizza during the Oscars.
Here are my recommendations for tweeting during TV events:
- Prepare tweets for every scenario. For example, “tweet XYZ if team 1 leads at halftime,” or “tweet XYZ if movie 3 wins best picture.”
- Monitor trending tweets, hashtags and Twitter accounts relevant to the event (e.g. actors during the Oscars).
- Like in crisis communications, create a list of everything else that could happen, from loss of power (2013 Super Bowl) to wardrobe malfunctions to flubbed lines to inadvertent product mentions, and then prepare tweets for them.
- Have a small team accessible (e.g. same room, conference call, Skype, etc.) that can make quick decisions on what to tweet for everything else that happens.
Now here’s a list of some of the good and bad tweets during these recent TV events:
- I wasn’t impressed with JCPenney’s tweeting with mittens stunt, in which the company purposely put out tweets with typos before revealing that it had been wearing mittens while typing. Sure it got people talking about the brand, but I’m anxious to see Q1 results if sales of mittens actually increased, because that’s the true measurement.
- On a related note, congrats to Kia, Snickers and Doritos for tweeting back at JCPenney on the fly (e.g. Kia’s “Hey @jcpenney need a designated driver?”).
- Ready for a shameless tweet? Try Papa John’s “Frozen wins, only at the movies. Our fresh, NEVER Frozen hand-tossed original crust pizza wins every time. #betteringredients.” I mean, really?
- I liked Pizza Hut’s “Did someone say pizza? We got you” in response to Ellen wanting a pizza delivered.
Here’s my favorite tweet, although it did occur two days after the Oscars. This comes from @TheSimpsons, who wrote “.@TheEllenShow Oscar® Selfie: A wider view. #thesimpsons”
