Social media specialist, Demand Media, said Tuesday that its Pluck social media platform has been selected by UK commercial terrestrial broadcaster, ITV, to enhance viewer engagement with the show, "This Morning," before, during and after its broadcast. The company also said that ITV plans to deploy the platform on ITV.com to add social elements to the shows "Loose Women" and "Coronation Street," and to the Web site's soccer section in time for the 2010 World Cup.
ITV has offered video content from "This Morning" on the program's Web site for some time now. According to Demand Media, its platform now allows users of the site to react to that content by posting comments via the Pluck Comments application. They can also now "agree" or "disagree" with other users' comments to spark debate about the show's content, Demand Media says.
Demand Media is also providing ITV with its "social bridging" technology, which it says will enable "This Morning" fans to directly connect their activity on the show's Web site with their other social networks, aggregating the comments they make on the site into their Twitter and Facebook feeds--thus, the company says, "extending the conversation to a far broader social networking community." "Watching TV has always been a social experience and now we are giving 'This Morning' viewers the platform to interact and engage with the program and each other online," ITV.com social media manager, Ben Ayers, said in a prepared statement. "With the Pluck social bridging technology, our viewers can share that engagement with each other and their wider social network. We've long been aware that conversations about our programming take place on Twitter and Facebook and the ability to integrate those platforms with commenting functionality is a logical extension." Added Stephanie Himoff, Demand Media's VP of sales and business development for Europe: "Viewers today want the chance to interact directly and share their personal opinions with others and ITV has given its viewers exactly that. ITV is our first UK customer to use social bridging but we think others will follow once they see the benefits of capturing all conversations about a brand across the social Web."
