yap.TV was a startup building a feature-rich, attractive social television application for the iPad, iPod and iPhone that not only allowed users to share their TV opinions with each other via native chat or external social media, but with the use of Twitter’s API, itself was also able to track the social conversations occurring around every program in real time. There was only one problem: the yap.TV creators were part of an increasingly competitive market, one of the most competitive in all of technology entrepreneurship – there were dozens of similarly themed startups in the space and both WIRED and the MIT Technology Review called “social TV” one of the most significant technology trends for 2010.
SocialRadius executed a blogger and traditional media strategy that not only ensured that app updates would be covered by the most enthusiastic and influential app bloggers, but also crafted a campaign that would use yap.TV’s predictive social metrics around programs such as American Idol to generate more traditional entertainment interest and help break through the cacophony of the emerging social TV sector. This strategy garnered larger cultural and digital trend interest from the likes of The New York Times, E! Online, the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters, not to mention three consecutive weeks of coverage from the Wall Street Journal. By the end of the year, USA Networks was using yap.TV’s platform to power its own iOS app.”
