As President Obama addressed Congress on live television tonight, ABC News was prepared to capture live viewer sentiment via everyone’s favorite microblogging tool, Twitter. If you hit the ABC News homepage at http://abcnews.go.com/ earlier tonight, you’d have noticed a widget in the right sidebar featuring inbound tweets from viewers and a 300×250 banner ad stamped with a large Twitter logo, asking viewers to submit their reactions to President Obama’s address to Congress.
ABC Makes a Bold Move by Hosting Its Own Twitter Content
CNN partnered with Twitter earlier this year to show live tweets during the presidential debates and at election time, but most of the action took place on Twitter’s special election site. Tonight what we’re seeing is the other way around. Instead of Twitter hosting the content, ABC News is embedding content captured via Twitter into their own website.
ABC News is using a widget powered by Thingfo, aptly dubbed SocialSite. The widget grabs content from any number of social media outlets and then pulls it all back into your own website. While a lot of websites are still fairly static and non-interactive, the SocialSite widget feeds fresh social content from the users talking about you and your brand.
The only information being piped into ABC’s widget was tweets from Twitter users, but they have several examples on their website of pulling data from Delicious, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and more.
Follow Nightline on Twitter
If you click on the Twitter/Obama banner ad, you’re taken to a page where you can “Follow Nightline on Twitter.” ABC outlines their goals for the event, which is to have Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran appear live and respond to viewer comments, tweets and message.
Even beyond the call to respond, ABC News does a great job of spelling out how to find each of their staff on Twitter (@TerryMoran, @JohnDonvanNL, @CynthiaMcFadden, @vmabrey) including the Nightline producers and correspondents themselves (@nightline). Terry Moran has an impressive 9,000+ followers already, while the other members of the Nightline team average around 300 followers each.
If ever there was a time when any person felt like they could truly be heard by the media, that time is now. For a person or an entity that once felt unreachable, now they’re only a few characters away.
Another Lesson for Businesses
Though this is still a groundbreaking take on using Twitter in the media, a small part of me also isn’t impressed by ABC. CNN was the first to do it, regardless of the scale, and that’s what caught people off guard. Now that Twitter is finally starting to catch on and their competitors are using it, every news agency has to be on the ball.
What I’d really like to see is a B2C or B2B company featuring live Twitter content on their website and finding more innovative ways to adapt this tool into what they do. It would take a great amount of courage for a company to open themselves up to that kind of transparent communication, but its also a step I think a lot of consumers want to see companies taking.
How can company’s leverage Twitter to do more than just send “thank you” tweets and answer inbound questions? Can businesses really integrate microblogging and this level of communication into the very core of what they do?
