E! Online (http://eonline.com) featured our new Box technology on its homepage during this year’s Golden Globes, Grammys, and SAG Awards, and now its latest “Chat About Oscars” Box is live for Oscars weekend. In it, visitors are invited to sign in with Facebook and Twitter to post commentary while a steady stream of Oscar-related social chatter and photos is imported and displayed in real-time, including a dedicated feed of behind-the-scenes tweets from E!’s own celebrity correspondents.

We are honored to be working with E! again on the biggest awards show weekend of all, and we’re proud to offer Oscar fans an opportunity to have their tweets and Facebook posts featured on homepage at E! Online. It’s like their very own Red Carpet.

Rekindling one of my favorite company traditions, and summoning my best Mel Allen impersonation, welcome to This Week in Chatter, or "These Weeks in Chatter", which is what happens when you haven't done one of these in a while. 

(#TWiCh is a weekly report of the latest activity and news around FanChatter and its growing network of social chat boxes. Click here for more information about the FanChatter box and all that it can do, and click here to request your own free box demo.)

Let's start with the newest news first...

I'm happy to announce that Chat About Grammys, our third consecutive red carpet event FanChatter box for E! Online, is now live and showcasing real-time social chatter about the Grammy Awards from the right column of the eonline.com homepage. We're honored to be working with E! again after successfully integrating fans into their coverage of the Golden Globe Awards and SAG Awards, and we truly appreciate their understanding of the collaborative read-write web. If you enjoy the celebrity thing, keep an eye on the E! Team tab all weekend for behind the scenes tweeting and twitpics from their army of official Red Carpet correspondents. 

During last weekend's Super Bowl, our #SBXLV FanChatter box offered chatter organized by the Packers, the Steelers, tweeting NFL Players, and chatter about the ads. It wasn't heavily promoted, or even promoted at all, but @quick13 found it on our homepage and tweeted that it was "a great way to follow all the info." Thanks. We thought so, too.

But it was the boxes appearing recently on other people's sites that we were most proud of, including...

UFC 126 Play By Play over at TheWellVersed.com, where @AndreasHale and @SimplyAnthony showed how two guys and a bunch of @ replies could revolutionize live event commentary under one tab while offering all the best real-time UFC chatter from both Twitter and Facebook under the other. I don't know who calls the action for the UFC pay-per-view telecasts, but they should be looking over their shoulder.

RunnerSpace.com used the box for social chat alongside their live streaming video feeds of the USA Half Marathon Championships in Houston two weekends ago, and then again for the USA Cross Country Championships in sunny San Diego last weekend. My fastest running friend @aeicher showed up to chatter on our fellow Minnesotans in the Half and as we both not-so-secretly wished we were running it ourselves. 

And speaking of Minnesota, the Golden Gophers showed how social they could be by bringing in a box for National Football Signing Day. There was one tab for  Gopher Signing Day chatter, one for official @GopherAthletics and @GoldenGopherFB tweets, one for NSD chatter from throughout the Big Ten, and one for NSD chatter from around the whole country. If you were a Gopher football fan -- or any football fan -- tracking with Signing Day, GopherSports.com was the place to be.

Of course, it was the Minnesota Timberwolves (here -- smack dab in the middle) and later the fine folks at Philly.com (here, here, here, here, and here -- scroll down lower left) who pioneered the use of the original box and continue to demonstrate its intentional utility as an always-on hub of social media activity that keeps people coming back again and again to see your official conversation curation. Now that they have the new and improved box version, they can easily customize tabs (like the Timberwolves are doing with #ALLSTARLOVE) and add more boxes, like Philly.com did adding #DOOP FanChatter to enhance their Philadelphia Union soccer coverage.

Finally, I'd like to thank the members of the media who have shown an interest in FanChatter. There was this generous telling of our story in the StarTribune, this memorable piece by @GRLitman for the WCCO-TV evening news, this fun interview with the Minnov8 Gang for their weekly podcast (which earned them their very own box -- see right column -- complete with a THE GANG tab full of everything you need to know about the Minnesota tech scene), this memorable piece by @GRLitman for the WCCO-TV evening news...

...and the folks at Finance & Commerce were kind enough to name me to their Minnesotans on the Move list for 2011. I'm honored, especially since I sort of happened into this entrepreneur thing with no training, a little vision, and a lot of tenacity.

So that's #TWiCh for the first part of 2011. I'll try keep it weekly from here on out, which will be easy if the box requests keep rolling in. Until then, enjoy The Grammys and happy chattering.

Marty

Successful Golden Globes Social Chat Box Inspires Sequel for SAG Event

Minneapolis and Los Angeles – January 28, 2011 – E! Online (http://eonline.com) has once again enlisted FanChatter to aggregate and inspire real-time social commentary about its red carpet event coverage. The event this time is the 17th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards®, a celebrity-filled gala scheduled for Sunday evening, January 30, in Los Angeles.

A custom SAG Awards®-themed FanChatter box will be featured on the E! Online homepage throughout the weekend beginning Friday, January 28, where it will showcase Facebook updates, tweets, and photos inspired by the event, including a dedicated feed of E!’s own celebrity correspondent content under the “E! Team” tab. Meanwhile, users are invited to sign in and post their own social chatter from the box without having to leave the site. 

This marks E!’s second collaboration with FanChatter in recent weeks. Its “Chat About The Globes” box was a hit during Golden Globes® weekend (January 14-17) as hundreds of thousands of visitors interacted with the feature to track and share user generated commentary about the winners, the losers, what they wore, and often what host Ricky Gervais was saying about them.

“There was so much chatter surrounding the Golden Globes, including great behind-the-scenes photos from the E! Team, and E! provided the perfect hub to find it all and jump in,” said Marty Wetherall, Co-founder and CEO of FanChatter. “Handling the massive traffic to the E! Online site that weekend was the biggest test of our technology so far, so it’s especially nice to be asked back to help with the SAG Awards.”

The Screen Actors Guild Awards®, which made its debut in 1995, is the only televised awards show to exclusively honor performers. It is also unique in the size of its voting body, as all SAG members – approximately 100,000 in number – are responsible for selecting the outstanding film and television performances of the year.

According to Wetherall, Facebook and Twitter are abuzz with SAG members discussing their choices. “Actors tweet and update their status just like everyone else, which we noticed as soon as we put together the SAG Awards box. They’re chattering about the movies and shows they’re watching and the decisions they need to make for their ballot, so it will be interesting to see how it all relates to the winners announced on Sunday.”

“Thanks to E!,” he continued, “we’ve discovered another way that tapping the social conversation can be uniquely relevant and engaging.” 

About FanChatter

FanChatter (http://fanchatter.com) offers a platform for media properties, sports teams, and other organizations to engage their fans through content sharing and generate more revenue through sales and sponsorships. It was a Y Combinator-funded startup in 2009, the first such company originating from Minneapolis, Minn. Its customers include E! Online (Comcast Networks), the Minnesota Twins (MLB), the Minnesota Timberwolves (NBA), the Country Music Association, and several others.

About E! Online

E! Online (http://www.eonline.com), based in Los Angeles, is a top entertainment web site, providing the latest daily news and celebrity inside information in a fun, irreverent tone. E! Online presents up-to-the-minute entertainment news, original features, gossip, music and movie reviews, live-event coverage, and E!-branded merchandise for film, TV, and music enthusiasts. It attracts approximately 2.5 million unique U.S. users per month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. E! Online, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of E! Entertainment Television, Inc. ("E!"), the world's largest producer and distributor of entertainment news and lifestyle-related programming. E! is currently available to more than 80 million cable and direct broadcast satellite subscribers in the U.S.

About The Screen Actors Guild Awards®

Lauded by critics for its style, simplicity and genuine warmth, the Screen Actors Guild Awards (http://sagawards.org), which made its debut in 1995, has become one of the industry’s most prized honors. The only televised awards shows to exclusively honor performers, the awards focus on both individual performances as well as on the work of the entire ensemble of a drama series and comedy series, and the cast of a motion picture. Other highlights of the Screen Actors Guild Awards include the Life Achievement Award, presented to an established performer for fostering the highest ideals of the acting profession and tributes to the varied talents within the Guild’s membership. The Screen Actors Guild Awards is the only national network television show to acknowledge the work of union members. Screen Actors Guild is affiliated with the AFL-CIO through the Associated Actors and Artistes of America (the Four A's).

                                                                                    ###

"I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition."

Larry Page
Co-founder and CEO, Google

Company’s Updated “Box” App Makes Viewers Part of the Action
           
Minneapolis and Los Angeles – January 14, 2011 – FanChatter, the mobile social fan engagement company, today announced a new release of its chat box technology that will aggregate, organize and amplify the real-time social conversation surrounding the Golden Globe Awards from a featured hub on the E! Online web site (http://eonline.com).

Heard a radio ad for Westinghouse Solar Lighting during my run today.

The guy says these lights are "powered by the sun... for FREE!"

Then he asks, about the sun, "How do they stay in business?"

Well, the sun has a lot of users.  They'll figure out how to monetize later ;)

marty@fanchatter

(download)

Click here to download:

DJ_AM.zip (479 KB)

I don't know much about DJ AM (Adam Goldstein).  I never saw him perform.  I never (knowingly) heard one of his mixes.  I remember he was in a plane crash and survived.

But I do know that he tweeted a rather haunting lyric from a Grandmaster Flash song on Tuesday, two days after he threw out the first pitch before a Mets game at Citi Field.

And it appears from the news that he died yesterday after doing some crack. 

Strange seeing tweets from a dead guy.  He was my age, too. 36. 

I heard it said this week that Twitter is not a social network, it's blogging for the masses.  It gets mistaken for a social network, but it really just lets everybody blog and comment so quickly and easily that our lives and thoughts become revealed to people, even the ones we don't know.

I also heard it said that Twitter founder Evan Williams predicted a new communications protocol and then made it come true.

That's an impressive feat.  And it's made reading tweets from a dead guy possible and collectively mourning his loss a social event.

So I'll join the millions on Twitter in saying RIP @DJ_AM. 

Content sharing is king.

marty@fanchatter

I don't know how many times I've been mentioned in my hometown paper.  Maybe once or twice as a high school athlete.  Then again, maybe I'm making that up.