Out of the thousands of social media communicators online, I find it ironic that one of the most successful adopters of the social media toolset has been Sesame Street. Of all the CEOs and executives in the world, Big Bird and the Cookie Monster seem to have figured out how to drive the Sesame Street brand into the new media space with childlike glee… but did they look at the “big picture” of corporate business? (PERSONAL NOTE: I love Sesame Street. As a father of a seven year old boy I can appreciate that he gets to laugh and learn from some of the very things I grew up with as a child.)

Sesame Street has detached some of its own video work into appealing directly to the online crowd, skillfully learning to take some of those age old ideas many web surfers grew up with and present them with some adult humor and whimsical entertainment. Surely as a brand name Sesame Street has to have just a little recognition with 39 seasons of broadcasting with over 4100 episodes (Sesame Street is one of the longest-running U.S. television shows in history) That strength allows the main SesameStreet.org site to produce over 800k visits a month (per Compete.com)

Looking at some of the projects Sesame Street has done, they have a YouTube landing page that has 80 videos that have produced roughly 1200 subscribers and 30,000 channel views. While these numbers are not “epic” in the world of YouTube, the viral effect of bringing Sesame Street online creates some new benchmarks for them.

If you do a simple search for the words “Sesame Street” on YouTube- there are dozens of videos that fans have loaded that often have an excess of 100,000 views each. The amount of branding and air time that they have garnished from this evolution to the online space is very interesting to see in such an established brand as Big Bird.

The crew over at Sesame Street has moved the entertainment company into several different projects that include the Sesame Street Podcast “a series of free portable video episodes featuring Murray Monster and all your other favorite Sesame Street Muppets. In this second series of Word on the Street podcasts, celebrity guests and fuzzy friends explain the meaning of words like “octagon” and “insect.”

Unfortunately Sesame Street has some problems online too…

Strangely enough, the CEO of Sesame Street (who in my mind is Big Bird, however the Executive Producer is Carol-Lynn Parente) has a slight image problem online. If you Google Big Bird - there is an unfortunate image in the results (top center of page) that has Big Bird making a rude gesture. Considering he is the public image of the company, the image may be offending his target audience of parents and children.

As we scroll through the results, if Big Bird really was a real person… he also has a YouTube video with the title of “Big Bird- The Muppet Unmasked” that dives deep into his personal life. As a public figurehead that video may be something that he wants to carefully look at and consider the stock ramifications. According to Google, the term “Big Bird” has an estimated click rate of 6 to 8 times a day. That means at least 180 to 240 sets of eyes are being exposed to the wrong message… and a good potential number of those eyes could be children. In actuality that number could be ten times higher in terms of raw searches for the term “Big Bird”

In the real world however, chief executive officers are not the only people involved in running a successful company. Every great CEO relies on a team of professionals to produce results.

So if Sesame Street has a Vice President… we have to look at Cookie Monster too. His friendly furry blue face makes most people feel relaxed and at least a little light hearted, yet right at the top of his image search results is an angry monster saying “What the hell is this crap?”

With a subconscious glance, our visual search has exposed the bi-polar second man of Sesame Street. He has a deep and dark side that many of us didn’t know about, which is further detailed by his YouTube video “Cookie Monster vs Martha Stewart” Who would have thought that the friendly blue running mate had such a two-sided personality?

Understanding the darker secrets of our public facing figures is critical for any business. If Cookie Monster was running for political office or wanted to help his company through an IPO, there could be some very serious repercussions of not managing this issue beforehand.

The “Big Picture” is that web sites have become multi-locational brands. A brand, whether now exists on many different levels on many different locations. On the beneficial side of Sesame Street, the 800k+ monthly visits to the main site is quickly dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of views to hundreds of YouTube videos (and that is only one social community site) On the negative side we see potential brand damage against the highest ranked executives of the company.

I hope my more light-hearted analysis of social media branding and reputation helps connect the issues for you. Understanding how different elements of the online frontier interact with audience members is critical for companies moving forward in this environment.

For more realistic examples of the same issues, check out my other articles below.

As always- let me know if you have any comments or insight to Big Bird and Cookie Monster’s problems!