How WWE Wrestling, USA Networks Characters Go Social

6 Social Sites Sitting On The Cutting Edge

Who is #bestintheworld for social TV? WWE is claiming the title, and are you the one who will dare to tell the wrestlers they are wrong?

WWE, aka World Wrestling Entertainment, launched a redesigned website this month, going "boots to asses" on incorporating social media. "We didn't want to build a chat room off to the side--we really wanted this to be a social experience everywhere," said Jason Hoch, senior VP of digital for WWE.

WWE is already a highly social brand, leveraging Twitter campaigns like the #bestintheworld hashtag for discussions of the rivalry between stars John Cena and CM Punk. AdAge pegged WWE Raw as the cable show with the most social buzz last fall. (Talent competition The X-Factor, boosted by Pepsi's social TV initiative, was the broadcast TV show with the most social buzz.)

Back in 2008, WWE introduced its own WWE Universe social network, which it operated for several years.

Now, the strategy is to bring all the interaction together on WWE.com, an iPad-friendly website which aggregates comments from other social networks, with social login connections that let visitors post comments to the website and their social networks simultaneously.

[ Learn more about the complexities of using one social account to log into another. SXSW: Social Login Is Magical But Tricky. ]

"When you go to the page for John Cena, you see everything created about him on all the social networks--Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare--as well as the content created about him by WWE. This is the first, best place to learn about John, it really is," Hoch said. New comments scroll up onto the screen automatically as you watch, as they would on Twitter or Facebook. The aggregation of all that content also allows WWE to offer a customized trending topics display, "like a mini version of Twitter's trending topics, but just on our site, just for WWE," he said.

WWE Trending Topics

"Really, who gives a crap about a new WWE website, except that they've rewritten the entire thing--it's not even just a website anymore," enthused Khris Loux, CEO of Echo, WWE's social software partner.

Echo calls its product a "real-time Web platform," not necessarily just for TV, although its initial customer base is heavily weighted toward media companies. "Our position is that every dot-com should be real-time and social because the visitor expectation is that the Internet is real-time, social, and personal," Loux said.Hoch said he learned about Echo in a previous role at Discovery Networks, after doing some experiments with audience interaction through chat for TLC's Cake Boss. When viewers asked questions, the producers would pick a few that were pushed to Cake Boss' iPad on the set. WWE is doing some similar things, "but it's even more powerful because this is a live event," Hoch said.

The WWE stars are encouraged to publish their own social posts--and to not be afraid of showing some personality while doing so. Cena's page features a lot about his love of cars, for example, which is something his fans know as part of his persona, Hoch said.

USA Networks has been doing something similar with the fictional characters featured in shows like Burn Notice and Psych. Although USA carries some WWE programming, this was a separate initiative, started in 2010 as part of the launch of Burn Notice. What began as a social app specifically for that show has grown into a platform for multiple shows, called Character Chatter, integrated throughout the website, for example on Ask Kirsten Nelson, which encourages fans of Psych to connect with one of the show's stars.

"When fans come to a landing page, they can see real-time conversation about the shows," said Jess Redness, USA's VP of digital. "We've now layered Character Chatter onto all the pieces of USA Networks."

Although there's no "hard data metric" showing that social activity boosts ratings, "it's inferred because when we see more activity in Character Chatter, we often see larger ratings," Redness said. While much of the social interaction flows through external networks like Facebook and Twitter, viewers get a richer experience when they come to USA's website. Also, because cross-posted comments are attributed as being from the USA site, "now people know where I am," he said.

Echo's Loux said one reason media websites need to invest in this technology is that so much of Web activity is migrating to social media in general and Facebook in particular. "That's all well and good, because these guys have really unlocked social--you have family, friends, and it's social and realtime--but as the traffic flows move to Facebook and Twitter, the revenue flows also more to Facebook and Twitter," he said. In order to prevent losing the revenue associated with their content, media sites need to figure out "how to be as social, as real-time" as the social media sites so they can be "essentially the Facebook of their content."

WWE Superstars

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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