Bringing online alive

Imagine writer Damon Jones recently spoke with Katie McQuin Roberts, Aardman’s Online Community Manager, about social media strategies. For more on social media strategies and harnessing the Internet as a means of promotion, see our special feature in Imagine’s winter edition, out December 19.

Damon: Can you provide me with some examples of innovative social media strategies you’ve used?

Katie: We’ve been building a thriving community of Shaun the Sheep fans for the past four years, using a central hub of games, competitions, forums and monthly newsletters to engage fans with the show.  We currently receive over 300,000 visits per month and have over 140,000 registered members.
 
Setting up a Shaun Facebook page has allowed us to communicate with our older (13+ years) fans in their own space, telling them what is happening with the show and getting their feedback, but also providing a place for fans to interact with one another and share their creations.  Reaching one million fans on Facebook earlier in the year was a big milestone for us.  To say thank you to the fans we ran a competition on our Facebook page to win a special piece of artwork created especially by the creator of the series, plus aired a free episode for all our fans to enjoy.  In one month  100,000 people watched the free episode and an additional 150,000 new people joined Shaun’s Facebook page.  The page is still thriving with over 1.7 million fans to date and everaging 3000 new likes per day.
 
We’ve also branched out into the gaming world - when series two of Shaun the Sheep launched in the UK we created a brand new game, Home Sheep Home, to celebrate the launch and to drive traffic to our website. Instead of just hosting the game on our website, we allowed other gaming websites to spread it amongst their communities, the theory being that this way people could spread it further than we ever could on our own.  It’s now hosted on over 7,000 websites recently hit 100 million plays worldwide.
 
We learned that people wanted to talk about their experiences with the game, sharing hints and tips and uploading videos to YouTube of their best scores and times.  With the launch of Home Sheep Home 2 on the horizon, we’re planning to set up social spaces on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to try and build on the popularity of the first game and create a hub for Home Sheep Home fans.  This is the first non-broadcast project we’ve supported with social media and it’ll be exciting to see how it goes!

Damon: Could I also ask how you devised these ideas, and what needs they might satisfy in your audience?

Katie: The aim of our social media strategy has always been to bring Shaun fans together and enhance their enjoyment of the show online, plus reward them with exclusive content that they wouldn’t find anywhere else, including behind-the-scenes features, signed merchandise giveaways and a first-look whenever we’re creating new episodes. 

The thinking behind the one million fan celebration was very similar.  We wanted everyone who had ‘liked’ Shaun the Sheep to be rewarded with something special they couldn’t get elsewhere on the web, as well as dangling a juicy carrot to entice new fans to our page!  We decided that the combination of a free episode and an exclusive competition would fulfil both these targets.

Damon: How critical do you think it is to raise the profile of a show via social media, and what are the most tangible benefits of this approach?

Katie: I think modern audiences, especially the younger audience that we target, expect to be able to interact with their favourite shows online, so it’s incredibly important to have a social media presence, and potentially detrimental to ignore it.

A key benefit of social media for Aardman has been turning casual viewers of our shows into lifelong fans, who will contribute significantly to our viewing figures and buy our merchandise.  Once someone has registered an interest by liking our Facebook page or following us on Twitter, there is the potential to get them more personally involved with our brand and increase their awareness of our shows.

This is especially important as there are gaps in the broadcasting schedule when we are creating new episodes, so we use our online channels to keep the buzz going all year round.
 
Damon: What trends have you noticed in this medium? Can you offer any predictions on its role in the future?

Katie: Social media usage has become much more widespread over the past couple of years.  Integrating your show with social media seems the ‘norm’ now, rather than just an experiment for the brave few!  I think this will be taken much further in future, with ideas for a show and the social media support being conceived simultaneously, allowing for seamless integration between the two.  I also think we will see more ideas starting online and moving to broadcast afterwards.  It’s something that’s naturally started to develop here at Aardman, since we’re in the fortunate situation where the broadcast and digital departments share the same tea facilities!

We’ve also found that audience habits are changing all the time, so it is important to move quickly to make sure you’ve got your show in the right social spaces.  Originally we had Shaun fan pages across Bebo and MySpace, but it became apparent quite quickly that Facebook and Twitter were taking over. It’s been the same case is Germany – we started off using the popular German social network MeinVZ, but quickly switched to Facebook when Germans began to adopt it as their main social network.  Facebook has been very good at growing and evolving with audience habits, it will be interesting to see how long this can continue into the future.

Damon: How often do you add new content and features to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter?

Katie: We’re adding content to our platforms most days of the week through a mixture of different mediums – from responding to questions and comments from fans, uploading photos, making announcements and posting links to new features on our websites.

It can be a fine line between annoying your fans by sending out too many promotional messages and losing your audience by not being active enough – it’s our aim to sit, ninja-like, in the middle by posting regular, entertaining and relevant content.
 
Damon: How do you interact with your audiences? Does any of their input actually feed back into the development of your shows?

Katie: Interaction with our audiences is very two-way process – we post out news and ask questions about our shows, but we also respond to questions and queries from fans.  Input from fans is incredibly important – we’ve used it in the past to judge the reactions to new characters, judge the success of new series when they have launched and use the results to inform future series development.

We also use it to influence our merchandising choices – for example, we surveyed our Timmy Time Facebook fans to see who their favourite characters were so that we could make them into plush.  In Germany, fans were recently asked to vote on their favourite episodes of Shaun the Sheep, which were subsequently made into a “best of” DVD that is out in the shops now.

Damon: Do you ever pilot new concepts or series online, using your followers to gauge reactions to them?

Katie: It’s not something we’ve tested extensively, as translating the storyline and humour from an online short to a long-form broadcast show has proven to be very tricky.   Our biggest success online has been “Angry Kid” – a series of one minute shorts that act as a peep-show into the mind of a pre-pubescent teen.  Although the show was originally conceived for TV, we launched the series of 1 minute shorts on AtomFilms.com in 2000 and they have achieved over 22 million downloads to date. Although the series was later picked up by broadcasters, it felt like the short-form medium was more suited to online viewing.

For budding animators looking to create a buzz around their work and network with peers, what do you feel are the most effective ways for them to use social media at this stage in their careers?

Creating a portfolio by setting up a YouTube channel and a blog (such as Tumblr, Blogspot, Wordpress) is a good start – having a presence in established communities will help get your content out there and allow people to start interacting with it through comments, likes, shares etc.

It’s then a case of building up a community of contacts through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, who you can share ideas with and will hopefully help spread your content.  Twitter is an especially good place to do this – animation companies, brands, bloggers and fans are all on a level playing field, making it easier to start up conversations, volunteer your services and show off your work.  Once you’re up and running the most important (and potentially tricky!) bit is to make regular updates, keep the buzz going and get people excited about what you are doing!