BBC Music Awards across social platforms

I’m a middle aged father of three but on the bus this morning, I was singing out loud. Overnight I’d become obsessed with the chorus of Steal My Girl. Bustling aside Farage, Brand and last night’s football, this memory of a brilliant pop single had been resurrected thanks to clicking on a small 20 second clip, lurking inside a tweet of One Direction live on stage at Earls Court whilst the five were still performing. This little moment was all part of the BBC’s overall strategy to try and make a live 2 hour music TV and radio programme work across a myriad of global platforms.

And we hope it did. The impact was impressive. Its easily the most tweeted BBC music event of the year, several tweets, thanks to One Direction are the BBC’s most favourite ever, we did several things we’ve never done before and yet again Greg James in a dress turned up in gifs all over the place.

Here’s how we tried to make it work, although the most important lesson, for any live music event, is to work with some really talented people happy to collaborate across various parts of the BBC. Last night was no exception with our social and digital teams from TV, Radio and our partners Somethin Else all contributing to a memorable evening.

1. The Vine booth helped created shareable red carpet moments

The Red Carpet is the traditional lead up to a live awards show. It can be quite boring and hard to stand out amidst straightforward pix and increasingly these days, fan selfies. Our objective last night was to create something unusual, something unscripted. Our friends in Strictly have had great success using Vine 360 booth where celebrities are spun round and filmed for a brief 6 seconds posing for the camera, notably a wonderful Lady Gaga moment.

Our dozen or so clips last night have now had an impressive total of 1.5m + loops or plays so far with Paloma Faith and Tom Jones falling over, Ed Sheeran walking off bemused and especially One Direction preening (1mK + loops alone). It showed the value of creating informal off the cuff moments that work natively on social platforms. In this case primarily on Twitter although there is also significant syndication value for us via embeds everywhere with the Vines also turning up in live blogs by the Guardian, The Mirror and Buzzfeed.

2. We published teaser clips within seconds not minutes

Throughout the night across our portfolio of accounts (BBC ONE, R1, R2, BBC Music, BBC Introducing) and in line with a strategy where full performances were available via bbc.co.uk/music.

We also worked last night with several foreign broadcasters (Palladia, RTE) who were running the show live and also share the series of teasers that were designed to be played natively in social platforms. We’ve done this before for Glastonbury and the R1 Teen Awards but found that the key is speed. Last night we used Twitter’s Snappy TV platform for the first time. Designed specifically for this purpose it’s a really interesting platform to output clips and gifs. Speed is vital on live platforms and it enabled us to publish online around 25

Planning for these live moments is also tricky but we also managed to react to ongoing social conversation and clip up footage in response. e.g.: Zayn Malik’s hair. Yes really.

3. A portfolio of different accounts but using same assets.

Given the breadth of the BBC, we have many social media accounts that cover a vast range of TV and radio networks and programmes. It’s important though to use this inventory and work as a portfolio. So our main 5 accounts last night (the TV/radio networks + BBC Introducing) used the same bank of gifs, vines, images and clips, that were being published in a steady stream from about 5pm onwards, each particular account treated the night very differently with their own specific tone and feel. BBC One focused on humour, referencing its big TV Moments (GBBO gifs, Sherlock in jokes), Radio 1 on its pop artists appeal (Calvin Harris, Ella Henderson, “the boys”) and Radio 2 on presenters and big artists of particular appeal to their audience (Take That, Tom Jones, Ed Sheeran, Paloma Faith)

However @BBCMusic was our key central account on Twitter and also Facebook for announcements, news and canonical information. This has resulted in a step change of performance for the BBC Music account with two One Direction tweets that are already the most favourited BBC tweets ever. The account has also had an impressive 100K+ retweets in 48 hours despite a fairly modest 20K followers.

4. Native Video players are good for reach…

Just like Snappy TV Video inside Facebook’s native player again produced early impressive numbers for us. The glorious Greg James spoof video was uploaded in full to Facebook and has already had 750K + views on Facebook in its first few hours reaching 1m+ users. An acoustic Ed Sheeran performance during the R1/R2 all stars show has 200K views.

5. The BBC Introducing moment

Last night was an important platform for BBC Introducing. How best did we organise a roster of radio producers and presenters at the same time to promote the platform? The portfolio of BBC Introducing accounts were all teed up to publish a tweet during Catfish’s performance outlining specific data about the number of new artists they had played in 2014. Nearly all did.

Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, and Catfish and the Bottlemen’s specific connections with BBC Introducing and the dates they first used the Introducing uploader were also highlighted in a specially shared graphics throughout the awards.

See a collection of the best BBC Introducing Tweets

6. Work with artists help promote the event

We work hard with artists and labels to ensure they mention the event. Obviously for something as unusual and high profile as last night then most artists will spontaneously do so. We also subtly encourage them, placing signs up in dressing rooms, mentioning and alerting them to their performances online and sharing their posts via the BBC’s accounts. And nearly everyone did. Most artists performing used the #bbcmusicawards hashtag, shared our clips or links on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Ellie Goulding, Coldplay, One Direction, Catfish “thank you for changing our lives”, Will I Am; “Me and Cody just rocked”, Ella Henderson “great night of great music”, Gary Barlow “great night and great crowd”, Calvin Harris “big thank you to this exceptional pair”, Labrinth “Ella - you killed it” and especially Ed Sheeran with 225K likes on Instagram for a photo of himself clutching his award, were all talking about the awards. Because they were a new incredible experience for many of the participants, but also because of careful preparation.

7. Tell the social story back inside your own space…

Curating and aggregating pictures, tweets and posts published elsewhere is now business as usual especially for our live events and this editorial format makes sense especially when you have a strategy of publishing across multiple platforms. We ran a live blog wittily highlighting the best pictures, quotes and tweets from wherever they were first published and also authored a variety of aggregation pages curating the best of the night.

Supporting a live event doesn’t end there obviously. The 13 performances and the full programmes are available for the next 30 days as per usual. We also exploited our music archive from 2014 to curate an iPlayer collection of some of the best BBC music programmes of the year. Most users will bump into Music Awards moments in many different ways in the next few days. However, hopefully not next me to though on the 73 bus. All together now . Na Na Na. Na. Na. Na. She belongs to…

Jem Stone is Editor, Social Media and Syndication, BBC Radio.