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Social Media and Conan O'Brien
By Pace Lattin (c) 2010

The way I see it, NBC has little chance of survival in the next
ten years. They've proven themselves so caught up in the normal
TV schedule way of thinking that they fail to understand their
audience, what little of it is left.

Their lack of knowledge about social media, how it's formed and
how it can control the conversation is part of their failure in
this situation and may very well be part of their failure as an
organization.

Conan O'Brien on the other hand was able to harness the internet
and social media to make a stand and, in the end, become more
famous than he ever was before.

I'm going to explain this slowly, for the folks at NBC, if they
are reading this. Let's think of Conan O'Brien & Jay Leno as a
brand, and that the internet is the next big media thing, where
there will be millions and millions of Americans making decisions
about their life based on what they read on the internet. When
people run a search on this website called GOOGLE, they get
thousands of pages of choices that they can read about the topic
in which they are interested. That perhaps in the future, someday,
consumers and people who watch television (aren't they the same?)
will be able to type in "Conan vs Jay" and get real time results
that help shape their thinking about the subject, and therefore
create brand identification and/or brand alienation depending on
what happens.

Now for the rest of us, who understand Search Engine Marketing,
Search Engine Optimization and a bunch of other three word
phrases with Affiliate, Marketing, Search and Interactive in
them, here is some more high level explaining.

NBC, as a company, is still very much focused on Television
being the predominant source of entertainment in the next ten
years and hasn't done much thinking beyond that. Despite paying
people like Jay & Conan ridiculous amounts of money, their
audience base plummeted each year as more and more people
turned to independent internet entertainment. So they never
considered exactly what might happen, if they started to make
changes in their schedule, move Jay Leno back to his previous
slot and basically kick Conan to the curb.

Jay Leno, as funny as he might have been, isn't exactly a
representative of a young, fast-paced, growing generation. He
might get some people to stay up and watch the news before
falling asleep during his monologue - but on the whole, no one
can say he has his finger on the pulse of... well... anything.

You say, and perhaps the executives of NBC say, "we need to prop
up our affiliates and their news shows, before we lose them." So
what? Television as a medium is on the way out, or at least
changing. I don't know anyone who actually watches the news at
11, let alone cares that Jay or Conan are right after it. The
news has no relevance, since most of us have already learned
about it 6 hours earlier from some blog or websites. As for
humor and jokes, we've already spent most of the day on YouTube
instead of doing our job, watching some kid falling down five
flights of steps while eating a cheeseburger. Jay Leno isn't
going to keep our attention for more than one minute, while we
wonder what his chin would like in 3-D.

So, what does this have to do with marketing? First of all,
Conan O'Brien has managed to come out looking cleaner than a
toothbrush at a Palin family reunion. When you google results
regarding his dispute with Leno, you find tons of commentary and
articles supporting him, putting him out there as the champion
of the people, the underdog, the teabagger of comics.

While it's more than likely he will just appear on another
network, there is also a chance that he will take this momentum
and create something completely unique on the internet. Anything
he does on the internet will immediately be covered with
millions of links, tweets and AIMs - all pointing to his new
project. With the NBC money that he is walking away with, he
could easily just make his own website, his own comedy channel,
his own comedy network and become very wealthy on just the buzz
surrounding his name.

I sincerely believe that Conan knew exactly what was going to
happen, and used the internet to his advantage. Many of his
writers and publicity team are very young, having grown up on
the internet. They knew that if they needed good publicity they
would only have to turn to the internet in order to get the
point across.

They used social media to secretly create "I'm with CoCo" groups
while at the same time constantly making sure there was new
"buzz" to pass around on twitter. From posts on Craigslist of
Conan selling himself to the highest bidder for favors to late
night tweets from the writing staff to their fan base, they knew
that they could always win the war with an audience - that
frankly is a lot more internet savvy than the Leno fan base.

Anyone engaged in social media marketing, needs to look closely
at how Conan did this, how he made it seem to be organic and
natural and then allowed it to seemingly take its own course. He
knew how to create buzz, but more importantly content for
internet buzz fodder. He knew that the one-liners that could be
posted on Twitter were a thousand times more powerful than any
ten minute monologue that could be spoken by ...urhmm... that
other guy.
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