Company: TV 2 Denmark
Company background: TV 2 DANMARK A/S is the company behind Denmark's most-watched channel, TV 2, and behind the country's most-watched channel family.
TV 2 aired on October 1, 1988, and less than three years later TV 2 had become the largest TV channel in Denmark. TV 2's range of programs includes news, documentaries and lifestyle, entertainment, sports, Danish fiction, current affairs, films, morning television and children's television. Additionally, TV 2 DANMARK operates the TV channels TV 2 NEWS, TV 2 ZULU, TV 2 CHARLIE, TV 2 FRI, TV 2 SPORT, TV 2 SPORT X and the on-demand service TV 2 PLAY as well as TV2.DK - one of Denmark's most popular websites.
TV 2 DANMARK A/S has approximately 1,300 employees located in Odense and Copenhagen.
Contact: Lars Aaes
Title: Social Media Team Lead
Related URLs:
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?
Everybody is experiencing the increasing hateful rhetoric and harmfull sentiment that the comments sections across social media is subject to. But what can you do as a company to combat this problem?
In 2021 TV 2 Denmark decided to take a stand against harmful comments and hatespeech on social media.
As the biggest broadcaster in Denmark TV 2 have a unique position to reach the majority of the Danish population, and we wanted to use that voice to make a difference in the social media landscape in Denmark.
It all started with The X factor. The popular TV-show where talented amateur singers compete to impress judges and the audience to be the next singing talent - a show that TV 2 hosts in Denmark.
In the 2021 season of the X factor several of the contestants experienced harmful comments about their performances, appearance and style on social media. And that prompted TV 2 to react.
We wanted to take action. Not only on behalf of the contestants in The X Factor, but to address the wider problem of the increase in harmful comments on social media.
Through the Khoros platform, we identified that the amount of negative comments and harmful sentiment had increased in the comment sections across our social media channels in 2021 compared to earlier.
And to shed light on the problem we launched a campaign across all our different platforms with one simple message: It takes courage to put yourself out there - stop hatefull messages on social.
The goal was to educate the Danish population about the challenges everyone (especially celebrities) face on social media. And to highlight that it is not okay to post harmful comments without regards for others.
We also wanted to position TV 2 Denmark as a brand that takes the challenges of the Danish society seriously - especially the things we all share.
We chose to move quickly and activate the entire organisation including the news department, the sports department, our morning- and evening-talkshows and, of course, Communications and Marketing.
And within a week we produced this branding-film from scratch featuring prominent Danish celebreties that have experienced online harassment and hatefull comments on social media in recent years (in Danish).
During that week we also published articles, made interviews with politicians and top athletes, confronted bullies on social media and broadcasted the message on TV, in the news, on social media and on numerous websites.
Here are a few examples (In Danish)
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
TV 2 and Khoros has been partners for a several years and we have used that time to built and refine our social media setup within the tools. In that proces we have created filters and labels within the Khoros platform that aided the creative development of the branding-movie by helping the team easily surface examples of destructive discourse from 4 million conversations across two years.
We also used the Khoros platform to identify a change in the way our users sentiments changed over the years, which formed a based for the insights the campaign was built upon.
We already had a solid prioritization system for inbound items in place within Khoros. But when we launched the campaign, we needed to prioritize and sort conversations quickly to ensure the biggest impact, and Khoros automation made it simple. Ultimately, our awareness campaign didn’t require substantial changes to our Khoros platform setup because we had been tweaking and refining it all along . But the campaign required that we activated all of our systems within the platform to their fullest potential to ensure that there were no loose ends.
“Our Khoros platform infrastructure meant that we could easily launch a campaign of this size without being overrun by the response.”
-- Julie Søsted Andersen, Digital Team Lead for Social Media at TV 2
When the campaign launched our prioritization system helped us handle the publishing across social media and subsequent community management that followed in the aftermath of the first announcement. Our community management team handled each and every comment around the campaign to make sure, that we lived up to our own message of stopping harmful comments. We wanted to show our users that we not only broadcasted the message of stopping harmful comments, but also took part in the fight ourselves by monitoring, engaging and talking to people online about the issue.
“When the volume of social media is turned up and there’s a specific topic we want to monitor more closely, the power of Khoros really shines, and we see that it doesn't take much additional effort to get a lot more value out of the platform.”
— Lars Aaes, Social Media Team Lead at TV2
And of course the Khoros tools helped us measure the traction of our campaign on social media and enabled us to listen to the sentiment around the campaign on our pages - and on different influencers' pages.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
The focus on the harmfull messages in the comment sections on social media spread like wildfire in Denmark. And within a week we had reached more than 1.800.000 Danes on social media alone (The population of Denmark is roughly 6.000.000) between our own platforms and multiple influencers who chose to share our message.
On top of social media the message had been picked up by several major news outlets in Denmark:
And it even reached our parliament and the prime minister of Denmark:
We ultimately wanted to change the behavior of the Danish population and cement TV 2 Denmarks position and brand purpose as "All that we share" in the Danish population.
And it worked!
We saw an immediate effect on our social media pages. Our users began to be nicer to one another - and call out others users who would post negative comments.
In the comments section, audience members now tag our moderators when discourse becomes negative, which has forged stronger bonds between the brand and our audience.
Because TV 2 built and refined their Khoros platform over a number of years, we were able to easily support the additional volume that came with the campaign. In 2021, post-campaign, the TV 2 News team fielded a substantially smaller number of messages that they needed to filter or delete.
- 2,000 YoY decrease in dangerous comments per month since moderation campaign
- 99% of comments caught in the “delete” filter deleted
- 16% increase in dangerous comments deleted per month
And you know you have done something right, when you receive private messages likes these:
"You are doing a great job. Well done even on the stupid comments. Its great to see a good social media team (or person) working in that way. Keep up the good work".
Of course the work does not end here. The fight against hatefull comments is a commitment to the future and something we will keep going as a part of our brand platform moving forward.
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