Conal Byrne, VP of digital media at Discovery Communications, and Michael Sorenson, VP of development and production at Discovery Channel, gave a crash course in seamless multiplatform marketing as part of the “Creative Distraction” panel at NYC Television Week, moderated by Michael Malone, deputy editor of Broadcasting & Cable.

The Discovery colleagues told the audience that coordinating their television and their online programming is pretty easy. The reason is that their mission statements are the same, despite the differences in audience.

“We are different from other television and digital companies in that our digital and social teams are really viewed as content teams,” Byrne said. Unlike other companies, where digital marketing groups work to promote the on air content, at Discovery the on-air and online teams work hand and hand from the very beginning.

The two discussed how they work with social media platforms and their digital teams to create an immersive experience for their programs’ super fans by capitalizing on their reality TV programming.

“The advantage is that in reality, more so than scripted, people have a real connection with these real characters,” said Sorenson. “Those super fans just want more; they want to see the moments they don’t see on the show.”

Catering to that desire has become a big part of Discovery’s online strategy. For example, in the case of Shark Week, they’ve found that their on-air audiences are willing to watch live-cam footage online, with some sessions lasting as long as 20-25 minutes. Sorenson credited this high level of engagement to providing an experience that is different from the one they get watching the programs that they love, instead of filling up the online space with show clips.

Additionally, the two say that understanding their audience and the social platform that caters to them best can be just as important as the content they’re promoting.

“With Skyscraper Live, we really dug in with Twitter to find the cutting-edge conversation that we could put on screen,” Byrne told the audience. “Shark Week is different because we wanted a back and forth conversation with our fans for seven straight days, and Facebook felt better for that.”

Planning for a television event like Shark Week and its online components is a yearlong process: when one Week ends, planning for the next begins almost immediately.

In 2014 their content teams worked with Facebook to create custom hashtags around individual moments in each show, not just around the shows themselves. They saw an increase of 11 million Facebook interactions from 2013.

Perhaps the ultimate example of how this online engagement has influenced on air programming in ways that hasn’t been seen on other networks came last year, when Discovery encouraged Shark Week fans to select the best moments of the week and created a show called Sharksanity out of them.

“They programmed the last show,” Byrne said. “We are absolutely in bed with these guys and we let them inform what we put on the air. We are so far from just being a marketing arm.”

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