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Social TV Data Is Not The New Nielsen: How It Might Be Better

This article is more than 10 years old.

Television (Photo credit: *USB*)

There's a debate about how you watch TV that boils down to this: Are you willing to lean forward? Meaning, is the average viewer willing to engage with the television show in new, more active, ways. A whole industry is interested in that question, which spawned Social TV. So far, conclusions are few.

But some are bullish, including Markets and Markets, a research firm in Dallas, which released a report last week stating: "The global Social TV market revenue is expected to grow from $151.14 billion in 2012 to $256.44 billion by 2017, at an estimated CAGR of 11.2% from 2012 to 2017."

No, say others, who argue most will never tweet, let alone check-in, or chat, or vote, when they just want to relax with some TV. You might use an app that helps you find the next show, but that's about it.

Peter Kafka wrote a thought-provoking article for All Things D a few weeks ago that leaned heavily toward lean-back. The headline -- "What if Social TV Is Less Social Than We Think?" -- gives you a sense of where he was heading.

A few days later Somrat Niyogi also took after Social TV on Tech Crunch, but mainly because it's losing to Twitter, especially on live events. That's most notable because he runs Miso, a Social TV company.

But back to Kafka, whose main point is that even if Social TV apps are making headway with scripted television (GetGlue's recent report that it beats Twitter in many scripted shows was the fodder for Kafka's piece), that second screen engagement represents just a tiny slice of the overall viewership. He adds a caveat that live events are clearly social at a much larger scale but, then again, Twitter has that market pinned down right now. Hard to argue with any of that.

On the way to making his point, Kafka glances across another issue, Social TV data:

... there isn’t any official measuring system that tracks “social TV” chatter. Instead there are competing services, like Trendrr, BlueFin and SocialGuide, all of which make their own guesstimates to track commentary on Twitter, Facebook, etc. It’s entirely possible that the tracking services overcount or undercount commentary on any given show.

It's an interesting point, though one made in the same article that implies trust in Nielsen ratings -- and that has not always been a safe assumption. It seems Kafka is ready to lump Social TV data with Social TV apps. And it's true that no Social TV metric service has become the default guide yet. They do employ slightly different methods to find chatter. And it is entirely possible the services are missing or miscounting on some level.

But even the slice that he references in GetGlue's stats -- not to mention the broader metrics gathered across such Social TV apps, open Facebook and Twitter -- is a powerful new data set that broadcasters once paid more money to get in far less precise ways. And the people who gather and leverage that data argue they are on to something transformative.

In fact, says Magnify Digital CEO Moyra Rodger, producers and broadcasters are scrambling to catch up with the data as we speak.

"I still don't think producers, and broadcasters for that matter, are leveraging the data and the ability to monitor audiences early enough in the process," says Rodger, a long-time TV producer who's worked on TV-Internet confluence for more than a decade.

She's putting her company where her mouth is. This summer Magnify launched ALERT-TV+, which is helping those producers and broadcasters track and act on the social conversations around their shows. Her service reaches far beyond just counting interactions.

"Historically, that has been the premise for television production and distribution," Rodger wrote me recently. "Build the program, air it, and wait anxiously for the ratings.   ALERT-TV+ flips the process on its head, encouraging users to 'listen first, build, engage, and then measure.'  It means approaching content creation differently.  ... Find out where they are already gathering online, what they are talking about, what they care about, who is already advertising to them, what other content competes for their eyeballs and then develop the program concept, or adapt an existing program, to give audiences what they care about."

Mark Johnston, CEO of Fusion Television, says the usefulness of that data is fairly recent revelation.

"It's really over the last year that I think we've seen more practical opportunities to engage these new tools," Johnston says.

Fusion, which produces lifestyle reality television such as Homewreckers and Divine Design for broadcasters around the world, was the first customer trained in the ALERT-TV+ system. Measurement is only one factor in Social TV, Johnston says, and probably not the most important.

"We're going to engage our audience for the first time on this level," Johnston says. "We're dealing with subcultures, that's really what we're looking for. And when you can hone that laser to the point where you're speaking to one particular group, or even individual, that's a very powerful tool."

But that precision does not mean the broader metrics don't matter. Though the percentage of engaged social commenters may pale in comparison to overall TV audiences, that engagement has exploded in 2012 compared to 2011. That's not a trend to ignore.

Because the work Rodger does with producers and networks can extend to the entire TV transaction -- from creator to distributor to audience to brand.

"We found that social data is the leading indicator of what is happening and what we can react to in real time," says Dan Neely of Networked Insights, which measures social engage around multiple areas, including TV. "And also what we can learn from and pre-inform the decisions we make in marketing."

In fact, Social TV data already measures the connection between the show and the brands that support them.

"TV is the single biggest marketing investment brands make," says Tom Thai, VP of marketing for Bluefin Labs. "So when we talk to the brands, when they do spend money on TV, they want to ... drive conversations on social. Because they recognize social is very powerful. When they spend money on TV, the end result is a consumer is exposed to a TV commercial, they get an impression. Now the advertiser wants to take that impression and turn that into social amplification."

And, unlike a TV viewership rating, social metrics can gauge chatter around that connection beyond air-time.

"If you want to recognize the value of your content," says Mark Ghuneim, CEO and founder of Wiredset and Trendrr, "whether your a studio, whether your a branded entertainment, whether your a network, you need to look at the natural tendency of the viewer. That includes delayed viewing, viewing in other places to start to capture the expression 24/7, 365."

Such measurements not only capture viewership, sentiment, brand loyalty, etc. -- it can also measure celebrity buzz for starts of particular shows, sentiment about certain kinds of marketing, the tone of the show, the greatest interest in competing subplots. Networks like that, Sean Casey, CEO of SocialGuide told me last spring.

"They’re definitely interested in the measurement parts, but the people in digital were also very interested in this data. They wanted to know what their audience was saying and who their most social audience was. Same with social media, same with marketing. And then we talked to people at the production level, executive producers, writers, and they too wanted this information. So we saw that Social TV is more than just analytics."

Neely readily acknowledges that the Social TV metrics are not the leading indicator of whether brands buy for a show or not. (That's still clearly Nielsen.) But, "it certainly could break a tie between whether we're going to invest between this and that."

Whether that makes up part of a multi-billion dollar industry remains to be seen. But it is valuable.

The question remains whether this activity can scale. If it can, valuations such as M&M's might not seem so inflated. That takes us all the way back to the beginning: Will you lean forward?

But what if that doesn't turn out to be the right question? There is a landrush of apps and services that are trying to make the connection between your television and your mobile device, the 21st Century remote. Creating a low barrier to engagement, much like Twitter does, could create a third category to consider: lean-between. If engaging is as simple as talking, and perhaps hitting a button, then it's no different than any living room ever has been.

And capturing something equivalent to the living room chatter, if whole nations and beyond were the living room, would be the best metric imaginable.