MTV Movie Awards: Website, SEO, Social Media Critique

The 2011 installment of the annual, silly ceremony airs live tonight at 9 ET on MTV.

The award show, which features funny category names, a ridiculous number of promotions for upcoming films and crude moments, is always good for a laugh.

But how did the MTV Movie Awards do in it’s Internet Marketing efforts? Let’s take a look.

MTV Movie Awards: Search Engine Marketing

The first step was to find the website. And we, like just about everyone else, turned to Google for the task.

Not surprisingly, we searched for “mtv movie awards.”

Here is what we got:

This isn’t exactly hard-hitting research here, but it’s probably what 99% of people are searching for to find information on the award show, so it’s good enough for our critique.

And MTV, not surprisingly, did very well.

As you can see, they own the top six non-news spots. Wikipedia, which is a search juggernaut, ranked seventh.

Also of note is that MTV purchased the top ad spot. Interestingly the headline is “MTV Movie Awards 2011 – Nominees, Performers, & Presenters?”

Not sure why the question mark was there, but it looks like MTV’s landing page was the the home page and targeted “MTV Movie Awards 2011″, “MTV Movie Awards 2011 nominees”, “MTV Movie Awards 2011 performers” and “MTV Movie Awards 2011 presenters.”

One other thing to note. Even though the website’s url is http://www.mtv.com/ontv/movieawards/2011/, MTV purchased the domain movieawards.mtv.com, which gave MTV their keyword in their domain name. Basic, but smart.

So, let’s crack open the website and see what they did for onsite SEO.

MTV Movie Awards: The Website

The site required eight seconds to render when first loaded. That’s not terrible, but it’s definitely not great either.

Our first impression when the site loaded was that it looked like a cookie-cutter WordPress theme with the MTV logo sprinkled throughout. Blog was definitely what we thought.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re MTV, you want strongly branded websites. What is that background? Why stock photos with no MTV presence? Is this a content website?

The color scheme is OK, but the all-caps all over the place came off as harsh and distracting.

Also, like many of the sites we see, there was no call to action.

What do you want us to do when we get to your home page?

Our guess from looking at this site would be that it was to read more about the awards show, but that just seems weird.

Wouldn’t MTV want us to vote on the awards? Or maybe follow the updates on Twitter/Facebook? Or get SMS alerts?

We would think the primary goal would be some sort of connection to the show.

Things got worse when we looked under the hood.

Here are the Keywords that MTV had on their homepage:

mtv movie awards 2011, golden popcorn, award, film, actor, actress, celebrity, celebrities, artists, performers, music, shows, watch online, video, photos

There are 15 Keywords there — way too many — and two that MTV has any hope of ranking for: mtv movie awards 2011 and golden popcorn.

And MTV isn’t very strong for golden popcorn, either.

The fact that MTV thinks it could rank the site for the keyword “award” is ridiculous. It doesn’t even appear on the first five pages of Google. In fact, the Darwin Awards and the Telly Awards rank higher than the MTV Music Awards.

And you have to question why MTV would even want to pursue “award” as a keyword. Does the company really think people looking for news and information on The MTV Movie Awards are going to search for just “award,” when seeking such information?

MTV Movie Awards: Social Media Marketing

We stayed within Google to start looking at MTV’s Social Media efforts for the award show.

Pretty mundane. Most of it, when we checked, was about Twilight (specifically, the Breaking Dawn trailer) or the poor quality of the show or how the Heat/Mavericks game is more interested.

We did notice a hashtag “MTVMusicAwards” but, again, there was nothing special going on around this tag and an official MTV presence was largely non-existent.

So then we tried to go find a Twitter account for the award show. We found the account @MTVAwardShow but this account didn’t look official and hadn’t been updated since the 2009 award show.

So next we tried @MTV. Bingo.

MTV chose to use the main account with almost 2 million followers to promote the show.

Great call. We’re not fans of spinning off Twitter accounts for every event. We never understood why ESPN, for example, would create a separate account for the ESPY Awards.

Another good sign was that MTV appeared to be pretty active around the topic, updating information and responding to fans’ questions.

We would have liked to have seen more updates about the time of the show and why we should tune in.

Remember, Twitter is like car radio. The chances that someone will get your message the first time you say it are pretty low.

At this point, the account should be Tweeting about once every 30 minutes — minimum.

We also noticed that it was using the #AwardShow hashtag, which didn’t seem to make much since, especially since the #MTVMovieAwards tag had sprung up organically.

Finally, we didn’t notice much cross-network integration outside of some links to the website.

So we went off to find some Facebook stuff and got really disappointed.

Again there was no MTV Movie Awards page (which we like), but we had not previously “Liked” the MTV Page.

We should have been greeted with a landing page that directed us to “Like” the page with a reason to do so.

Instead, we got the comment wall, which is what everyone sees by default.

Fortunately, things did get a bit better from there.

The images were all MTV-Branded and the updates almost all contained media — images or video. They were all relevant to the Movie Awards and there were many asking for comments, with the bait that some would be featured on the red carpet before the show.

If you want a good laugh, check out the MTV YouTube account.

OK, so it’s not the official MTV account. In fact, we couldn’t find an official MTV YouTube account, which we’re almost positive stems from the 2004 lawsuit between Viacom and Google.

This is a huge shame since YouTube would be an amazing channel for MTV to leverage.

Summary

Overall, we would have MTV a C+ on their efforts for the MTV Movie Awards.

The website didn’t really have a strong purpose and lacked a strong MTV branding.

MTV appeared to rest on the fact that it has extremely high domain authority and didn’t do much Keyword Research or on-site SEO. By doing this, they potentially missed out on search traffic from people searching for presenters and specific movies being featured at the award show.

From a Social Media perspective, MTV had the basics down pretty well, but we would have expected to see more from MTV whose target demographic is all over Social Media channels.

How about some data visualization on what people are talking about? Can we get some celebrities to have a live chat on the Facebook wall? What about a contest where the owner of the account that produces the one millionth tweet, containing #MTVMovieAwards gets free tickets to next year’s event?

Those are some of our thoughts. What did you think of the MTV Movie Awards’ web presence?

Watch the Video

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nzAk1WErhM