Twitter has reshaped the business landscape, especially in the media sector. But the television business may be the most besotted of any with the transformative potential of the social media platform. Measuring how Twitter activity correlates with ratings remains an elusive process. Nielsen, the dominant ratings company, has announced and then delayed the much-anticipated rollout of its multiplatform measurement services, which would help assess what Twitter buzz is doing (or not) for shows. Meantime, it has its co-venture with Twitter, but the Twitter TV ratings charts are routinely topped by shows with narrow appeal to general viewers. Recent cases in point include the American Music Awards, a solid performer for ABC but not nearly to the level of the record-setting Twitter frenzy the show caused; as well as Lifetime's controversial Aaliyah biopic and VH1's sequel to the 2002 movie Drumline.
Recent weeks' traditional ratings charts, measuring total viewers in the "live/same-day" window, typically feature as many as six shows that are nowhere near the Twitter Nielsen Top 10, among them NCIS, NCIS: New Orleans, Big Bang Theory, 60 Minutes, Blue Bloods and Madam Secretary. (Conversely, the Twitter chart always has about half of its top 10 populated by less widely sampled shows, given that the formula for the ratings concerns itself mainly with the frequency and volume of tweets.) Some readers may immediately notice that one network is responsible for all of those six shows on the top-rated-but-less-widely-tweeted-about list: CBS. Long billing itself as "America's most-watched network," CBS is home to many top-rated sports, news and entertainment shows, but the message from top brass, including CEO Leslie Moonves, has been slightly more muted when it comes to touting Twitter. Compared with ABC, which touts the Twitter mojo of programs such as the all-Shonda Rhimes-produced block on Thursdays that is anchored by Scandal; and NBC, which has developed the live Sound of Music and its followup, Peter Pan, in part because of their ability to harness the power of Twitter, CBS is less social-minded. That's not at all to say digital doesn't play heavily into the network's strategy--it just set the industry abuzz by throwing the switch on "over-the-top" digital network CBS All-Access, and on a corporate level Moonves has moved to acquire CNET, MarketWatch and many other digital assets. But a franchise such as NCIS is inherently not a social-media asset--arguably, it appeals to a wide swath of people expressly because it's less overtly concerned with courting the Twitterati. And this is CBS, whose median viewer is 58.7 years old. On a worldwide basis, the original NCIS is the most popular show in the world with 57.6 million viewers in 66 countries. So its stance is certainly not hurting its profit prospects.
Moonves isn't afraid to be outspoken in his skepticism of the new new things, including social media and its close cousin, binge-viewing. At a Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York in September, he said, “bingeing hasn’t become the be-all and end-all. It’s a very cool thing to do, I get it. We want to be careful. Our bread and butter is still advertising.” Speaking of those all-important advertisers, Moonves isn't completely old-school when it comes to defining how his network gets credit for delivering numbers. He has promoted a 30-day metric, or "C-30," to go with the far more common C-3 and C-7 measurements, which he says would more accurately capture how shows and brand messages are experienced. But there is a distinct lack of consensus around how all of this data will shake out. One thing seems clear: when encountering touts about biggest and most active Twitter audiences, viewers would be right to question what that means in terms of who was actually watching the show. That picture is still taking shape.
