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Online Strategy for Conan's TBS Show Shows Social's Limits

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: October 21, 2010 / 4:13 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Especially after the success of his Twitter account, you knew Conan O'Brien was going to use social media pretty heavily in the promotion of his new show Conan, which launches on Nov. 8 on TBS. While the social media strategy uses every platform available -- including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter , Flickr and Foursquare -- it also shows the limitations of social media promotion. Being everywhere doesn't mean that everyone is watching.

Case in point: the just concluded 24-hour long stream from the stairwell of the Conan offices. Of course, it didn't just show people walking up and down the stairs, saying seemingly important things into their cell phones. There were bears doing aerobics, a dancing taco and interns playing Twister at roughly 6 a.m. Pacific.

But if the intent was to take the Internet by storm, it clearly didn't. As you can see if you go to the TeamCoco channel on YouTube, most of the short videos highlighting segments of the day-long stream have about 300 views. And, predictably, the ones with the most traction are ones in which the celebrities within the Conan cabal -- like Conan himself and sidekick Andy Richter -- tend to have the most views, except for the very opening segment.

It's a telling sign that with the exception of the dancing taco -- which actually does have views comparable to the celebrity segments -- often what viewers want from a live stream is much like what they want from live TV: "real" entertainers.

On the other hand, the TV commercials promoting Conan, which, of course, are also on YouTube, each have tens of thousands of views. True, they've had longer to gather steam than the videos from the live stream, but it's not just about that. The commercials had the benefit of airing in mass media, which feeds back into viewership on the Internet. The TeamCoco stream didn't have that advantage -- and while mildly amusing -- wasn't all that funny.

Which isn't to say that the show shouldn't have experimented with 24 hours of live absurdity. That's the strange thing about social media, you never know what is going to make something go viral -- and what isn't. Fortunately, for a show with the budget of Conan, social media is cheap enough that it can keep throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. Other parts of the social campaign include an ongoing poll of who the first guest should be and the Conan blimp -- people can check in when they see it on Foursquare, and track its whereabouts.

The good thing about the show's social strategy -- besides the fact that it actually has one -- is that even if the live stream didn't take the Web by storm, the "Team Coco" brand, and Conan himself, have plenty of traction on all of the major platforms. The Team Coco Facebook fan page has over 180,000 fans; the Twitter account, 58,000; and Conan's personal Twitter account, 1.7 million. The show has critical mass on all of the right distribution channels; the hard part for it, and any other household brand, is to create content that people want to watch -- and share.

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