Final Presentation - Presidential campaigns

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Social Media Monitoring Part 2: The Walking Dead

You can easily make the case that The Walking Dead (TWD) has marketed itself better than any TV drama ever. In part one of this analysis, we took a look at what makes the show so successful and able to continually excel going through its seventh season. We talked about the fact that even though it isn't the most popular TV drama, it has the largest social media presence.

Most of our discussion focused on TWD itself. But how does the show stack up against its peers? Let's compare the second most popular TV drama (TWD) to the most popular one, Game of Thrones (GoT). 

As mentioned in part one, TWD does better than GoT on both Twitter and Facebook. The Walking Dead has a smaller budget and waaaaay less famous actors to make up its cast. Comparing the two serves as proof that The Walking Dead team actively work to constantly keep people talking about the show, and do so incredibly successfully. Absent any effort to market shows, we would expect to see the most popular shows, or the most critically acclaimed, be talked about the most and also have the largest fan base. As mentioned, that isn't the case. Let's take a closer look.

Remember this graph from part one? It shows social media activity concerning The Walking Dead over the past five years. 

Here's the same chart, but instead of showing social media activity for TWD, it shows how the past five years have gone for Game of Thrones. 

The Game of Thrones chart looks cleaner, but that's about the best you can say for it when you're comparing it to The Walking Dead. For any show, you're going to see huge dips in social media activity whenever the show isn't in the middle of a season. That holds true for both shows, but not to the same degree. 

The drops in the first graph are a lot less dramatic. The Walking Dead enjoys significantly more consistency throughout the year. Also, look between seasons for the Game of Thrones. The horizontal lines between seasons are long and almost flat. Conversely, TWD experiences some relatively small spikes in activity between seasons. Their continued activity between seasons pays off too. TWD boasts very strong season openers. The beginning of each peak tends to be larger than the rest for the Walking Dead (especially the most recent one). That means they created a lot of excitement and anticipation for the show before their seasons start. As you can see, Game of Thrones doesn't do as well at that.

Don't get me wrong, Game of Thrones is my favorite show. It even does a really good job of marketing itself, posting to Facebook almost daily and making sure its actors regularly stay in the public eye. But that isn't the point. The point is that despite not being as good of a show by a lot of measures, The Walking Dead is still talked about more. 

TWD has set a new bench mark for how TV shows can market themselves. However, nobody's perfect. Despite its success, TWD still has some flaws. To get a more comprehensive understanding of how the marketing of the show is going, we can do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).  

Strengths:

Most of this analysis has covered the strengths of how TWD markets itself.  Since that's the case, we don't have to beat a dead horse here, but one point is essential to remember: The reason The Walking Dead is so popular, and is talked about so much, is because they enlist the groundswell to help. As a reminder, the groundswell is when people come together with their collective voice to make one incredibly powerful voice. TWD aims to have that voice talking about its show. 

You can expect to find posts like these on any TV show's Facebook page.

Every show promotes itself and tries to get people hyped up for their upcoming episodes. The Walking Dead though, does this and more.

Remember that drawing contest we talked about in part one? There's a friendly reminder the deadline is coming up to enter the contest. Pretty good drawing right? Some lucky fan is ecstatic that 16 thousand people like his/her picture online, and you can bet other artist-fans are eager to have their picture posted too. 

The next three screenshots were incredibly easy to find. Logging on to The Walking Dead's Facebook page yielded on of these pictures after about two whole seconds of scrolling. 

"Predict Carol's Fate." "Weigh in on the show's most shocking moments." "Where's Sasha (not me) going?" Posts like these, and how often they appear, make it clear that TWD is making a constant effort to facilitate a groundswell. Sure, any comments section on its own helps facilitate a groundswell, but no other TV drama makes such a concerted effort day-in, day-out to explicitly ask fans to talk amongst themselves. 

Finally, it would be wrong to not mention The Talking Dead. These are three random screenshots, taken at different times throughout the week, reflecting activity surrounding The Talking Dead, according to Social Mention:
 

Again, The Talking Dead is a show about The Walking Dead that airs after every episode. Look how consistent their activity is. Those screenshots are from a Wednesday, Friday and Monday, respectively. They have almost identical numbers throughout the week. Also notice the posts. They're all JPGs. It might be fair to assume that most of those pictures are entries to the art contest the show promotes so much. Or maybe, they're entries to be "the ultimate fan". 

Once a season, The Talking Dead will invite a fan on to be part of its panel. Throughout the "season" they will continually prompt fans to enter materials online that prove they are the show's biggest fan. In addition to that, once a show, they'll invite a fan from the small audience to ask a question to the panel. The fan is then always gifted a couple of props from the episode that aired earlier that day. 

The show is completely about the fans, making them feel as much a part of the show as those directly involved in it. They share several of the top tweets from fans, conduct live quizzes (which can be accessed online) and display fan art. To add to the profile of the show, they also regularly invite celebrities on. 

Let's compare The Walking Dead's "post-game show" with Game of Thrones' (It's from their pilot episode so you don't need to worry about spoilers).

Again, Game of Thrones is awesome. Most shows don't even have material about each episode. GoT's "Inside the Episode" does draw a Stark (pun intended) contrast in terms of the show's commitment to the groundswell when compared to The Talking Dead. Both shows have producers discuss the meaning of the episode as well as insight into characters and plot. On Inside the Episode though, the fans are nowhere to be seen. It's completely about the show. The Talking Dead is much more about the fans and their input on the episode. If the groundswell focuses on Game of Thrones after an episode, its not because they were asked to. Walking Dead fans, on the other hand, are relentlessly nudged to talk about the show. 

Weaknesses:

It's a lot harder to find material for this section. The reason we're looking at The Walking Dead here is because they set a standard for how show's should promote themselves. 

One could make the argument that TWD's social media activity damages the integrity of the show. It can be said that involving fans so much makes the show less serious. It isn't about the drama as much as it is about the spectacle. In a sense that's true. "Inside the Episode" is a lot more serious than The Talking Dead. GoT is critically acclaimed and considered a classic drama. The Walking Dead is more of a cult show. The acting isn't always great and there are plenty of corny moments to go around. 

That's kind of the point though. The Walking Dead isn't trying to be a masterful piece of art. It's for the fans. In that way, it isn't a weakness. However, this does account for why Game of Thrones is a more popular show. 

Opportunities:

Maybe we can look at this as a weakness, but it makes far more sense to think of it as an opportunity. In part one, we looked at how The Walking Dead is doing globally.

It was very surprising to find Chile at the top of the list. It was perhaps even more surprising to not see the U.S. even in the top five of the list. To be clear, the search term entered into Google Trends for the above chart was "The Walking Dead". Look what happens when you trade that "W" out for a "T" (The Talking Dead):

First of all, there aren't even enough countries to make a top five. Interestingly, The Talking Dead often has better numbers on social mention than The Walking Dead. The Talking Dead is consistently in the 80th percentile for strength. The Walking Dead often finds itself with those high numbers, but sometimes the numbers look like this too:

When we look worldwide, the story is different. What do the countries in the above chart have in common? They're all English speaking countries. Why? Because unlike The Walking Dead, The Talking Dead doesn't have subtitles and isn't dubbed. 

You can call that a weakness, but did anyone really think TWD would be so immensely popular world-wide? This should be thought of as an opportunity to make the show even bigger than it already is. The reason it's important to note The Talking Dead's superior Social Mention numbers is because they show promise for how the show can grow. Imagine if those superior numbers extended to non-English speaking countries (which make up the top five countries in that earlier Google Trends chart). 

Obviously it's difficult to arrange TV deals to put The Talking Dead on air in other countries, but it would probably be worth the effort. At the least, the TWD team could facilitate Youtube shows in other languages (or something comparable). A quick search online shows that there is a desire for this to happen. Fans of the show are usually hungry for more after each episode, there isn't a language barrier for that. The Walking Dead has a huge opportunity to boost its international profile either by adding subtitles to The Talking Dead, creating new talk shows in different languages, and/or just involving international fans as much as they engage their English speaking fans online. 

Threats:

Lastly, we'll talk about threats. The above video is a rant from a fan who discussed how much he hated the season 6 finale and why. Every show is subject to these kinds of online rants. They're absurdly easy to find online. The Walking Dead is perhaps more vulnerable to these than most shows.

Including the groundswell offers a ton of perks. There's always a downside though. If you invite the world to talk about you, you can expect that not everything being said will be positive. The comments above were the top two comments on that post. Those posting the comments got a fair bit of support too. As you can see, they're pretty critical of the show. More importantly, is the way they're critical of the show. They aren't dismissive of the episode or critical of the show entirely, they're offering feedback. Their criticisms demonstrate a deep knowledge of the show. Yes, they're critical, but these fans are also clearly invested in the show. Rather than being concerned about comments like these, one can see them as an indication that the effort to engage the groundswell has been working.

As another example, season 4 had a lot of fans complaining about the show. If you look at the Google Trend graph, you can see season 4 (the second set of peaks) was the weakest in the last five years. The Walking Dead, taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, naturally kills off a lot of characters. This presents a challenge for the show-runners who have to part from fan-favorites and chase story lines for newer characters that fans haven't taken to yet. 

Many fans haven't been pleased with one of the show's newest characters and main plot points, Negan.

Personally, I think he's a great character and actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan does an amazing job in the role. Given the way the show engages the groundswell, fan animosity towards certain characters or plot points can be problematic. Because TWD works so hard to create a perpetual groundswell, it's made quite a powerful one. The danger is that said groundswell can turn against the show. Now, again, obviously fans make a fuss about the show because they care. One threat though is that the show-runners feel pressured to make changes to the show based on these complaints rather than following through with their narrative and artistic visions. The show would be unlikely to do that now given the current season's ratings, but another showing like season four could pose some problems.

Conclusion:

If you're afraid about the success of your TV drama, take some notes. No TV drama engages the groundswell as well as The Walking Dead does. It may not be the best show out there, but damn, its popular. 

To recap, the most important thing TWD does is constantly keep the fans in mind. Everything they do to market themselves aims to make fans feel as though they are a part of the show. Art contests, competitive quizzes, a fan-centered talk show and inclusive social media posts, TWD has it all. There's a ton we can learn from this show.

We also discussed the opportunity for the show to grow its non-English speaking audience. Making the show available to international fan-bases is a great start, and its clearly paid off. There is a clear demand though for extra content in addition to the show. If TWD acts on this demand, it will likely grow even more. 

We should expect to see many TV dramas do much of what was discussed here in the future. The success of the measures TWD have taken to promote their show can be demonstrated with ample evidence. It's only a matter of time before others catch on.

You Can't Do It All By Yourself

We tend to think that extraordinary people simply do extraordinary things. Like the Great Man Theory in history, we often put way too much stock into one person's ability to accomplish amazing things.

 The Great Man Theory posits that for better or worse, people like Napoleon, Hitler, George Washington, Ghandi, Mandela etc... are single-handedly responsible for groundbreaking shifts in history. The theory puts little stock into context and the people around these "great men".

  



Too often, we see this same type of thinking in our businesses. In this analogy, the "great men" are businesses, or at least their top executives. In other words, there is an unwillingness to listen to the groundswell. Just as we saw with the GM example in chapter of 11 of Groundswell (2011), where the top executives didn't want to engage stakeholders through blogging, many executives invest little to no energy in listening to others. 

The truth is, people don't just accomplish things without any help. There is always a context, there are always contributions from others in one way or another. 

Not everybody is the best at everything like the President here. Most people in leadership positions can use a little help.

The groundswell offers said help for free. As Li & Bernoff show us, the groundswell can act as a company's personal adviser. The obvious way to do this is to take a similar approach to Salesforce.com and Dell. Salesforce and Dell allowed customers and stakeholders to freely share their feedback, criticisms, and suggestions online. Naturally, both Salesforce and Dell, like most other companies that listen to the groundswell, received countless good ideas about how to improve. Many of those ideas were implemented. No matter how smart or creative you are, no one is a match for the brainstorming power of the internet.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, showed us a great example of implementing ideas from the groundswell to improve his company. One Twitter user complained that he had trouble charging his car because people who were always leaving their cars parked at charging stations while they did other things, even though their cars are already fully charged.



Musk replied to the tweet, acknowledging that this was a problem. Within less than a week, Tesla

imposed a fee that charges drivers who leave their cars idle after they're done charging. 

The groundswell doesn't stop there either. Like we saw with Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation, there is so much to gain from listening to your employees. Sure, as stakeholders, customers are very likely to have key insights on how best to improve a product or service. Employees though, work within a company everyday. Nobody is more involved with a company than those who work in it. So wouldn't they know the most about it?

Let's take Mark Zuckerberg for example. If anybody would act as proof for the Great Man Theory, it would be him, right? Self-made, took a simple idea and turned it into an internet empire from his college dorm room. He's barely 30 and he's already a billionaire. One Great Man changing the course of history right?

The actual story isn't so simple. We're all aware of how successful Facebook has been, but less of us are aware of what their culture is like. Turns out, over 99% of Facebook employees have a positive view of their CEO. There's a reason for that incredibly high number. 

A Facebook employee commenting on the website Quora recently said, “After I joined Facebook in 2010, I worked on a secret project, ‘graph search.’ Within a couple months, I attended two Zuck reviews to discuss the project.” The fact that the CEO of one of the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing companies is meeting with entry-level employees says a lot about the way Zuckerberg does business.

Zuckerberg has broken down traditional hierarchies at Facebook. His reasoning is that any of his employees could potentially have the next big idea. He trusts that they have a lot to contribute, and that trust almost always translates into results. 

Sure, Mark Zuckerberg has accomplished an incredible amount on his own, but the reason Facebook has been so successful is because its CEO is open to getting help. Zuckerberg has tapped the groundswell within his own organization, and it's paid dividends. 



The moral of the story is that people don't simply accomplish things on their own. No matter how impress any one person may be, that person always can use some help. In the digital age, this is more true than ever. Help is everywhere. It has never been easier to find. All we need to do is ask.

Social Media Monitoring Part 1: The Walking Dead

THE WALKING DEAD. Even if you don't watch it, you've heard of it. Based on the already popular comic book/graphic novel series, The Walking Dead (TWD) has taken America, and even the world, by storm. As of now, TWD is the world's second most popular show behind Game of Thrones. Despite TWD's smaller budget and less-well-know actors, it has dominated social media unlike any other TV drama. Compared to Throne's roughly 20 million Facebook followers, TWD comes out far strong with around 36 million followers. You can read along with the theme if you want:

Aside from being one of the most talked about and watched shows world-wide, the Walking Dead absolutely kills it in the social media game. Normally, fans of a TV show are just expected to tune in once a week. The Walking Dead keeps its fans engaged at all times. There is a concerted effort to create and maintain a perpetual groundswell. Look how active their Facebook page is. Let's pretend we're part of the TWD marketing team:

Just a friendly reminder the show's airing tomorrow... 21 thousand likes. 

Who wants to be a part of the show? Just tune in on Sunday to be part of this sweepstakes. Oh, also tell all of your friends about it

Hmmmm... people aren't talking about last week's episode so much anymore. Maybe we can give them something else to talk about. Oh! How about an art contest! 51 thousand likes.

Guys, just wanted to remind you about our art contest.

Look at how the TWD team are constantly engaging the groundswell. Only one of the four most recent posts was actually about the show. The rest were about the fans. Show us YOUR fan art. Do YOU want to be a zombie on the show? 

The way The Walking Dead engages the groundswell is genius. You know all those shows that involve fans? American Idol. So You Think You Can Dance. TWD took that concept and applied it to a TV drama. The drama genre has never engaged and involved fans as much as TWD has. They've created a feeling that fans are a part of the show, just like American Idol.

In addition to a highly active Facebook page, The Walking Dead has ANOTHER show that accompanies it (Not Fear The Walking Dead, which is a spin-off show). The Talking Dead airs immediately after every episode on the same network, AMC. Take a look:

"So, from @5Braydon on twitter: D'angelo, how do you think Negan will react when he finds out that Rick's group is planning to fight?" Again, they're making the fans a part of the show. Regardless of whether there was a Walking Dead talk show or not, people would still post about the show. However, having a show that explicitly encourages fans to post (with a chance of seeing their post on TV), doubtlessly prods the groundswell to grow. 

Given all this, do you still think The Walking Dead is lacking when it comes to engaging the groundswell? Well, here's some proof. 

This is a screenshot of the social media activity surrounding TWD from the past five years, courtesy of Google Trends. See a pattern? 
There's a reason you see double peaks/valleys resembling the "rock-on" hand sign. The walking dead airs half of a season, takes a few weeks off, and then airs the second half of their season. After the second half of the season, the show takes a much longer break before its next season. The Walking Dead gets an enormous amount of social media activity for its season premieres. The activity then drops off a little until it usually picks back up to a comparable level for the mid-season finale (which tends to be among the most dramatic moments in a season). Then, there is the mid-season break, which accounts for the steep U-shaped valley between "rock-on" emojis. Finally, social media activity is obviously weakest between seasons. 

If you go back and look at the last graph though, you'll notice an outlier. Look what happens at the far right of the graph. Whoa! That spike is almost twice as tall as any of the others!

The Walking Dead finished their sixth season with arguably one of the biggest cliffhangers in TV history (We won't go into detail. Don't worry, no spoilers). So that's one explanation for that huge spike. But that's probably too simple. 

Look at the build-up to that spike. Unlike the other seasons, the groundswell starts to stir a little bit before the season started. That's because they incessantly posted commercials and promotions like the one above. If you're a fan of the show, you probably remember seeing a promotion for the new season twice a day on your Facebook feed. 

Those promotions weren't just the same commercial every time either. They kept coming up with new clips, teasing fans who were desperate to know who met Lucille. You can't explain that enormous spike in social media activity without acknowledging that the show-runners were setting up the platform for a groundswell boom for months. 

Here's a look at the top searches in the past seven years (the same time span represented in the above graph):

See the word "Negan"? That's the guy with the scary looking baseball bat from the commercial. Notice that it's at the top of the search list. That means that a new character topped the search list even though he's only been on screen for about ten minutes. Safe to say, that cliffhanger got the groundswell pretty antsy for a new season.

The social media activity over the last seven years has been pretty consistent across all fifty states. As you can see, the whole map is pretty much the same color of blue:

The Walking Dead didn't get the same consistency worldwide, but they're probably not too upset about it:

Surprisingly, the U.S. isn't even in the top five in social media activity. So yeah, the social media activity is really strong for TWD in the States, but it isn't even their most prolific. TWD is taking over the world. 

Now that we have an idea of how TWD engages its groundswell over a long period of time, let's take a closer look at the numbers regarding how they manage their day-to-day social media activity. Here's their activity from February 21st to February 28th:

You can tell over the course of the week, social media activity is pretty calm. There are bumps everyday during peak social media hours Monday through Friday. Also unsurprisingly, you get a huge bump on Sunday (Feb. 26th) when the show airs. What is unique about The Walking Dead though, is that second peak on Monday. It's almost as high as when the show actually aired. It's almost impossible to keep people talking about a show all week. I mean, they do have lives, but to mimic social media activity the day after the show actually aired is quite impressive.

Let's take a closer look at activity throughout the week. These are snapshots from three different days of the week. One from a Thursday, one from Sunday, and one from Tuesday:

Thursday February 23rd

Remember the art contest? Artwork is one of the top search words related to TWD.

Sunday February 26th

Tuesday February 28th

OK, there's a lot of numbers to go over there. The first thing that stands out are the Sunday numbers. That snapshot was taken right after the show aired. Shouldn't we see the largest percentage for strength during the strongest social media time of the week? Social Mention defines strength as "the likelihood that your brand is being discussed on social media. A very simple calculation is used: phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions." 

It probably isn't as simple as they say. It isn't clear what is meant by "total possible mentions". Does "possible" mean the most activity the brand has ever reached? Is it an arbitrary number social mention devised? Is it weighted for that particular time? 

Unfortunately, the website doesn't answer these questions. However, it might be fair to assume that "total possible" indeed refers to the most activity a given brand has ever registered at a particular time of the week (or maybe year?). There aren't many other explanations for why peak social media hours are lower than random points in the week. 

If this is true, that means the TWD team can understand exactly how strong any one of their given episodes is. At 80%, February 26th's episode was decent, but definitely not one of the show's best. 



Another conclusion we can draw is that A LOT of people are talking about the show. The passion numbers range from 29%-32%. Clearly not much variance there (though I saw the number reach 59% at one point). Passion measures the strength of a brand's base relative to more casual followers. In other words, a high strength percentage means a lot of people post about a brand multiple times in a short time span. For The Walking Dead, there's definitely a strong base, but the high volume of social media activity drives the passion number down throughout the week because the percentage of people posting multiple times is reduced the more people post only once.

Overall, The Walking Dead has been extremely successful in engaging the groundswell. Yeah, it's a good show, but what's remarkable is how they've marketed it. There's a constant effort to keep loyal fans involved as well as to attract new fans. They even chased football fans at the Superbowl:


The Walking Dead has received criticism from fans and casual for a lot of different things. Bad acting, boring episodes, boring characters, slowing story line, the list goes on. Despite those criticisms, which have gotten plenty of shows canceled, TWD has persevered. By engaging the groundswell constantly, and in several different, creative ways, it had its biggest social media boom to date this season. Don't expect the momentum to stop here. The dead are coming.