What Did You Say About Me?

Everyone knows gossiping is a bad thing. Well, except for CW TV’s (a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS) new show Gossip Girl and its KickApps powered Gossip Girl fan site. The site launched a couple of weeks ago and it’s bubbling with activity. Check out the photos that have been uploaded and some of the blogs that Gossip Girl members are posting.

CW TV also created sites for two of their other shows: America’s Next Top Model and Beauty and the Geek.

This is a good example of how media and entertainment brands can extend the experience of a given show or event through social media. CW TV has effectively given their audience a venue to express themselves, share and discover new content and connect with like minded fans. By doing it under the CW TV brand, it enables the CW to create a stronger brand affinity with their audience.

So, tune into the CW on Wednesday nights, 9/8c, for Gossip Girl and hop online at 10/9c to talk all about it with other Gossip Girls.

While we’re on the topic of television, Eric, KickApps’ founder and Chairman, will be speaking on a panel at the Future of Television this week at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. He’ll be on a panel on Friday, November 9, at 2:00PM – 2:45PM with some great co-panelist. It should make for an interesting session:

Monetizing Consumer Generated Video: What Is an Acceptable Model for Consumers and the Television Industry?
The success of social networking sites MySpace and YouTube has created a buzz about consumer generated media. Does the mass attraction to these sites represent a power shift from a traditional top-down model of corporate media to a bottom-up model focused on consumer generated content? How can traditional media businesses connect with this consumer mindset? Can content created by consumers be the backbone of a viable business model? How do you recapture some of the profitability that goes away when people watch television differently than they have historically? This panel will discuss some of the most promising technologies behind ad-insertion, ad serving, on-demand technologies and back-end management technologies that are reinventing the relationship between technology and advertising.

Speakers
Eric D. Alterman, Chairman & Founder, KickApps
Ron Berryman, SVP, GM – FOX Stations Group, Fox Interactive Media
Sean Carey, Senior Executive Vice President, Sony Pictures Television
Michael Gordon, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder, Limelight Networks
Jon Vlassopulos, VP, Bus Dev, Strategic Planning & New Media, Endemol USA
Moderator: Lydia Loizides, Vice President, New Media Division, Paradigm

It’s a Slam Dunk

Planet Orange, the NBA’s Phoenix Suns’ online community, officially went live today.

iStreamPlanet developed the site and as part of the deployment, iStreamPlanet created a video player using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. We’ve now integrated Silverlight into the KickApps platform, so our clients can now choose from Flash or Silverlight videos for their sites and we also support Quicktime for Safari and the iPhone.

As we’ve talked about before on this blog, sports teams and leagues can and do benefit a great deal from social media and online communities. Fans gather in stadiums, arenas, sports bars, living rooms and online to share their. Using social media, teams can facilitate a highly interactive place for their fans to gather with other fans and express their love for their favorite team(s), thus driving a deeper affinity with the team and brand. This extends the reach beyond a given game, season and venue. Further, it provides teams and leagues with a unique way to keep in touch with their fans online and offline, through multiple channels, and opens the doors for revenue opportunities.

If you’re a fan of the Phoenix Suns and the NBA pop into Planet Orange and become a citizen. (I myself am a James Worthy era Lakers man, so as much as I love the fact that KickApps is powering Planet Orange…I’ll hold out for Lakers to come onboard and actually start winning again.)

UPDATE: Check out Mashable’s blog about this. Good analysis for what this means for the Sun’s and their fans.