Specifications
Chute offers tools for collecting and displaying photos and videos for brands, publishers, agencies, and developers. Users can aggregate, manage, and curate user-generated visual content with customizable displays and hashtag campaigns and display and interact with real-time user-generated media during live events. It also offers users the ability to use visual media created on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook within real-time content marketing and ads.
Cost
Monthly cost is based on the volume of content displayed and starts in the low thousands.
Ownership
Privately held.
User
Lyndsay Iorio Signor, director of social media marketing at NBC Sports Group, has been using Chute since the spring of 2013.
How do you use it?
We used it for our NHL playoffs this past spring, and we’re planning to use it for the NFL season.
The schedule for the NHL playoffs on NBCSports.com draws a lot of traffic. We used Chute to make it more of an interactive experience by providing the audience with rich media from NHL teams and players, and by letting them upload their own photos.
Our team at Chute helped us design what the page was going to look like and how it was going to function. Then they delivered the code to our internal team.
It was really important for us to be able to moderate everything coming in from the general public. We didn’t moderate the pictures coming from the NHL teams’ public Twitter and Instagram feeds. It was a little bit of a pain because we wanted to moderate every user-generated photo, but it was our choice to go through thousands of photos.
When I logged into the Chute dashboard, it showed me a stream of content for every team in the playoffs. We started with 16 teams and it listed everything out team by team. Once I clicked into a team, I saw all the pictures that were being pulled in. Medium size thumbnails of all of the user-generated content were in an inbox in the dashboard. I could select individual ones I wanted to allow through or select all and click to upload to our page.
It was very easy. If I hadn’t used the moderation tool, I don’t know that I would have actually ever had to go into the Chute dashboard. As part of our agreement, the Chute team was updating the schedule as things were happening, but they made it easy so we could have done it ourselves as well.
If I was confused about anything or if pictures didn’t seem to be going in quickly, I reached out via email to our project manager at Chute, and she got back to me promptly. There weren’t many issues at all once the experience was up and running.
How does it serve your business needs?
Social is part of everything we do here in terms of digital, on-air, and social strategy. We were able to use content we were pulling in through Chute on all the platforms we wanted to use.
NBC News recommended the program to us because Chute had made it really easy for them to allow people to submit photos via hashtag or just click a button and upload. The hockey playoffs are one of our big events, and we want to have a way to utilize social on the social platforms themselves, on-air and online so it’s a real 360-degree experience.
Hockey games are played every day during the playoffs, and they’re on cable and broadcast TV. Part of what makes hockey so exciting is how excited the fans get. We wanted to find a way to celebrate fans, so we tied a user-generated experience to the schedule page, which is a place on the website we know people are going to for information.
We also posted tweets asking people to submit photos through Twitter and Instagram using #StanleyCup. On air, we would tee up our two favorite photos of the night and ask viewers to submit photos. So it was a cyclical call to action across all of our channels. It’s really important for us to incorporate social across all platforms.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
It’s Web-based. Chute gave us codes for the page. It has the infrastructure already in place that makes it easy for us to pull in tweets, photos, and video and seamlessly put them into our own landscape.
What are the main benefits?
It’s incredibly easy to use. It has the capabilities to pull in user generated content, among other things, and it’s been made easy, so we just add a line of code into our site seamlessly. It is really good on the design front – everything we’ve been doing looks how we want it to look.
What are the main drawbacks?
The only drawback is the fact that we had so much media being pulled in that it was tough to moderate it in real time. This isn’t really so much a drawback of Chute. It was just a result of the huge amount of content we got.
It can also be a good thing because Chute can handle so much content.
What would you like to see improved/added?
Chute is planning to roll out ability to promote these experiences through ad units, and I’m excited to see that.
Competitors
Wildfire by Google: provides mobile and desktop content management of social network pages, message management and dissemination across multiple social networks, promotion execution across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, ad management and execution, and real-time analytics.
Offerpop: allows clients to easily run photo contests, referral programs, sweepstakes, and curated collections on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Cell Journalist: provides a platform for audiences of traditional media outlets (TV, radio, newspaper) to upload, view, and share images and videos.
