- Moderator: Craig Minassian, Rally Producer and President Minassin Media
- Steve Grimes, SVP COMEDY CENTRAL Digital
- Don Steele, VP Digital Marketing, MTVN Entertainment
Steve tells us that Comedy Central had no idea for doing the effort - and they had no concept/warning outside of the day of the announcement. Trying to plan the event was somewhat difficult since it was all amorphous. But Steven wanted to get an iPhone App from the beginning - and was told it takes 6 months to get the app approved. Whoops!
Realized they had to work with the various social media/app players. Connected and worked with foursquare, Facebook, etc.
Don: question - how to inform people? Instead of selling - address their needs (where to park, where the traffic was, etc) and knew they needed to have an email list AND an SMS list. Had 125K people join a new email list; 300K join the Facebook group.
Everything they had to do had to inform - not to sell.
Steve: since there was two “events”, everything had to be doubled. RTRFear was to be a Bizarro Glen Beck event; RTRSanity was to be a more serious affair.
Craig discusses the normal modes for rallying could not happen.
Don: when they cal from Comedy Central, people usually get back to us. We simply wanted to execute perfectly. We did not know who was going to be there, which guests, how to share pictures, etc. Best practices were learned from connecting to people at the major companies (e.g., Foursquare, Facebook) to learn how to do it better. Our fans were telling us what to do - and we needed to ride the wave.
Steve: the Facebook numbers were actually true to the numbers - kept trying to figure out the discount metric. They guess that 150K at the Mall and another 150K trying to get there was demonstrating the numbers/RSVPs were quite good.
