Harmonic Aftershock

Who Is The Authority With Social Ratings?

Since 1950, Nielsen has been the industry standard for television audience measurement. And, as such, the company’s practices go through a rigorous auditing process to ensure accountability.  The dollars and cents that are traded within the TV industry are based on Nielsen ratings. And networks turn to Nielsen as the de facto “report card” that ultimately determines the fate of their programming.

In today’s social TV world, a second data source (viewers’ own “social impressions” that they create while they watch TV) is being measured and reported by companies including Bluefin Labs, Trendrr, SocialGuide, Networked Insights, and Crimson Hexagon. They each have a proprietary measurement methodology and, as such, their results can often differ when compared.

I was struck by how many different sources measuring the “most popular” Super Bowl commercials all seemed to come up with different #1s this past year. It begs the question of who is right and which data set should advertisers trust?

Image by Hill Holliday's Bill Zrike and Jessica McNulty

Truth be told, there is no easy or single answer today. Stacey and I asked this question during last Monday’s TVnext insights panel. What was discussed cetered around choosing a social TV ratings partner that best lined up with given KPIs and one that does this kind of measurement as part of its core business 365 days a year. It was also mentioned that it takes lots of different kinds of measurement sources to get the most full pictures of how “successful” programming (including TV spots) were in resonating with audiences.

And it’s that last point that underscores why Nielsen will continue to be a dominant force in TV audience measurement moving forward and why the emerging social TV measurement companies are compliments (not replacements) to existing measurement practices.

Top 5 TV + Twitter Integrations from 2010

Twitter’s Robin Sloan recently spoke about the impact that the popular microblogging service is having on the Television landscape and how tweets give people a 360-degree look into content broadcasted on TV. In essence, we are experiencing a renaissance of live viewing as people want to be part of the real-time conversation that’s happening.

Here are my top five integrations of TV and Twitter from this past year:

#5: The 2010 World Cup
Although not real-time, the Guardian News’ instant Twitter replay made quite a lot of buzz during this year’s World Cup. It’s remarkable the kind of emotion a bunch of resizing circles can convey. Even better, is the story behind the project.

 

#4: 2010 Primetime Emmy Awards
This year’s Emmy Awards were the first time in 30 years that there was no west coast time delay. Not only did, host, Jimmy Fallon integrate Tweets into the live broadcast but NBC parallel broadcasted behind the scenes video on “the second screen” leveraging Ustream and its social stream Twitter (and Facebook) integration.

 
#3: Brand Bowl 2010
It seems every year people talk as much about the Super Bowl’s TV spots, around the water cooler, as they do the actual game itself. This past February, Mullen & Radian6 visualized the “virtual water cooler” through a dynamic Super Bowl commercial leader board based on real time Twitter sentiment.  It was a fun way to keep score of the brand advertisers at the same time of keeping score of the game.

 
#2: 2010 MTV Movie Awards and VMAs
MTV first visualized live Twitter activity during the broadcast of the 2009 VMAs. They stepped up a notch this year with both the MTV Movie Awards and VMAs broadcasts providing in depth Twitter metrics and multiple views/filters of the real-time Twitter activity.

 
#1. Modern Family Twitter Monitoring
Twitter doesn’t just benefit the content consumer but also content creators.  I love how Modern Family’s Steve Levitan and his writing team mines Twitter for real-time insights, “When the show airs live on the east coast we hit twitter and search Modern Family. What we find, is that people are watching the show and in real-time they’re basically laughing on Twitter. And we get instant feedback on what lines work.”

Honorable Mentions:
One honorable mention is the now defunct “Rick’s List” show on CNN. Rick Sanchez was one of the first news personalities to integrate Twitter into his programming and connect with his audience.  The other honorable mention, although not connected to TV, exemplifies the real-time web with what The New York Times did to visualize tweets during the mid-term elections earlier this month.

There’s something to be said about the power of the social web’s “unfiltered focus group.” It not only draws us in and makes us feel part of something larger, but it’s also fraught with invaluable insights. It’s why me and my colleagues at Hill Holliday love it so much.

“The Social Network” Movie’s Effect on Search Behavior

Since the premiere of The Social Network, there’s been a lot more interest in Facebook’s founders and the website’s origins. As someone who went to see the movie immediately on October 1st and then again 9 days later (and is craving to see it a 3rd time), I get the intrigue. For me (and I suspect many others), the movie powerfully fuels the entrepreneurial drive – much like I felt when I was in my twenties and first read, clipped, and kept in my wallet an article from Mecklermedia's now defunct Web Week titled “The 20 Something CEO.”

 

This “intrigue” that the film evokes is causing both the production and curation of related, yet non-fictional, content.  Bloomberg recently did an interesting documentary-style piece on Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. This is soon to be followed by an in-depth special program with Lester Holt on CNBC this coming January featuring brand new interviews with many of the people fictionalized in the movie.

And just yesterday, All Facebook curated a number of existing online-videos of the Facebook founders which prompted me to check out and compare their search patterns on Google. Since search is one pretty solid indicator of interest over time, the chart below clearly shows how search queries for each of the “characters” featured in the movie increased since the movie’s October 1st premiere.

What’s also interesting is the fact that spikes in searches have occurred every Sunday since The Social Network premiered (presumably because most people are seeing the movie on the weekend and feel the need, post-movie, to look up the founders and investigate what really happened). Note: The large spike for Mark Zuckerberg on September 23rd (before the Movie premiered) was most likely due to his philanthropic appearance on Oprah.

It’s also interesting that the relative comparison in volume of searches tends to match the amount of movie airtime each person got. Chris Hughes who I didn’t include on the chart was barely featured/mentioned in the movie and was more-or-less flat-lined in comparative searches. Ironically, he was a pretty big part of the founding of Facebook and has gone on to do some very noteworthy things.

In the end, there's no doubt that mass media drives search behavior.