Twitter goes to the MTV Video Music Awards
Could this finally be what breaks Twitter out of the early-adopter geek set and into the population at large? The microblogging service has partnered with the inarguably mainstream MTV for its upcoming Video Music Awards (or VMAs) …
Context & Ripple Effects
The VMA deal extends a pattern from July, when the Wall Street Journal reported that NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV were already experimenting with Twitter as a promotional channel for new shows. What changes now is scale: instead of a network account tweeting at fans, Twitter is being wired into one of television's biggest live events, on the theory that a mass-audience telecast is what carries a service out of its early-adopter base.
For MTV, the partnership slots into a busy August of digital repositioning — the same week it wound down its 15-month URGE music venture with Microsoft and announced Rhapsody America with RealNetworks and Verizon. It also follows the playbook MTV used with Gizmoz at the music awards last month, where the VMAs served as the launchpad for giving a young web service mainstream visibility.
First-order effects
- Twitter gets exposure to the VMA's mass television audience rather than the tech-early-adopter set, while its new Profile Search feature gives any influx of newcomers a way to find people to follow once they arrive.
- MTV gains real-time viewer commentary layered over its flagship broadcast, deepening the network's push to make its shows participatory rather than passive viewing.
Second-order effects
- Other broadcasters watching the experiment face pressure to treat live-event Twitter integration as table stakes for promotion, converting what was a novelty per the July network trials into a standard marketing line item.
- Rival social services vying for youth attention — including the portals MTV already partners with — must compete for equivalent placement at marquee events, raising the price of mainstream distribution deals.
Third-order effects
- If the VMA spike holds, live televised events become a repeatable customer-acquisition channel for consumer web services, structurally tying startup growth cycles to the broadcast calendar.
- Television and microblogging begin converging around the second-screen dynamic — the audience conversation becoming part of the broadcast product itself — which would eventually reshape how networks measure and sell engagement.
The trend: Television networks are moving from dabbling in microblogging as a promo tool to embedding it directly in their biggest live broadcasts, making shared real-time commentary part of the show itself.