This past March, Nickelodeon celebrated its 25th Kids’ Choice Awards. Fans cast a record-breaking 223 million votes, up 11% from 2011’s record of 200 million. To get to that astounding number, Nickelodeon’s marketing team developed a social media campaign with two goals. First, extend voting to new platforms to increase votes and chatter. Second, leverage nominees to rally their superfans to vote. Through our innovative approach to Facebook and Twitter voting, as well as a gamified fan approach dubbed "Fan Armies," we activated fans, influencers and celebrities with a KCA experience bigger and better than ever.Nickelodeon's 2012 Kids' Choice Awards deserve to win for Best Use of Social Media for TV and Best Use of Gamification in a Social Media Campaign because we extended the KCA experience to the places our fans live online, while triggering a larger audience through a gamified voting activation. For the second year, we brought the ultimate experience to Facebook, with a custom voting application that lived on the core Nickelodeon page, as well as all of our satellite brand pages. In addition to the canvas application, we also created an in-wall voting experience, which allowed fans to vote without ever leaving their newsfeeds. This approach aligned with the way Facebook users typically interact with content on the platform. We also created Fan Armies - a gamified experience where fans pledged their allegiance to their favorite nominee in the race to prove which star had the most passionate supporters. Since the nominees have an enormous social following, we activated those fans in addition to our own Nickelodeon fan base. By voting, tweeting, and recruiting friends, fans earned points that contributed to their nominee’s rank. Ultimately, Fan Army members voted 20x more than the average KCA voter. The key to extending our reach on Facebook was giving these tools directly to the nominees, allowing them to host our app on their own Facebook pages. Superstars like Katy Perry, Big Time Rush, LMFAO and Victoria Justice all took advantage of this feature. Ultimately, Facebook drove a staggering 18.3 million votes. We also launched voting on Twitter. With nominee-specific hashtags, stars like Justin Bieber, Big Time Rush and the Black Eyed Peas rallied their fans to vote 1.4 million times on Twitter. That early splash on Twitter was a catalyst for the night of show. The night of the awards, KCA was mentioned online once every second, and chatter increased 50x compared to 2011. Over the course of the evening we had 68 worldwide trending topics. By bringing the KCA experience to places our fans and nominees live online, we made 2012 the most social KCA yet. Our social efforts helped KCA rank as basic cable’s top telecast with total viewers (6.9 million) in April, and also secured the top spot with kids 6-11 (12.6/2.7 million) and tweens 9-14 (12.5/2.6 million).
Check out the case study video: https://vimeo.com/46062766, password = nick
