#mesagraph

The World of Social TV

(This post originally appeared on my weekly column in the Financial Chronicle dated April 4, 2014)

I remember that watching the Wimbledon finals, the one-day internationals or the finale of a favourite show would be a reason for friends to gather together and share the experience. Beyond the direct interaction in the physical world that separated the action from the audience, the viewers were provided with a one-way experience. 

Today, television viewing is no longer the same. It has become a part of a dialogue. One of my favorite shows, Psych, wrapped up last week. Quite normal. It had good innings and the storyline was stretched and sweated. Another day in TV land except with this one, I was tweeting and Facebooking as I was watching the show. The producers and the cast also had an extended post show where the actors gathered and took questions that were posted on the social channels. There were different hashtags, a car used on the set was auctioned and there were some cute party games. The fans were thrilled, they participated in competitions, sent homemade video clips and there were thousands of comments and threads that took the show beyond its location within the TV box.

Welcome to social television where the technologies support and enhance the social interaction around television related content. According to research by industry analyst, TDG (The Diffusion Group), social TV use will grow significantly over the next seven years and will drive major changes in the business landscape for TV and online/over the top video.

Rethink programming

The TV experience is moving from a passive couch experience to a new kind of digital community experience where the audience gathers around to talk about TV content in real time as they watch programming. TDG’s report forecasts that the number of viewers engaged in social TV activities will more than double by 2020 and will exercise an outsized influence over the rest of the TV viewing audience.

This will force content providers, TV networks, advertisers and channel operators to adapt to a world where the audience and their opinion increasingly becomes part of the program.

Innovative shows like American Idol have been frontrunners by allowing voters to influence content programming. Advertisers who spend millions of dollars during key events like the Super Bowl take into account real time discussions and invite viewers to post using hashtags that are incorporated into the ads and within conversations. Take the brilliant campaign orchestrated by @BBCOne to promote the third season of the much-anticipated Sherlock Holmes. By inserting the hashtag #Sherlocklives directly into the premiere episode’s programming, they tipped their hat to their audience which resulted in more than 365,000 mentions.

A Viacom survey states that “viewers engage in an average of 10 TV-related activities on social media platforms on a weekly basis, including: interacting with friends and fans (72 per cent); following/liking a TV show (57 per cent); sharing or recommending (61 per cent); watching full clips and trailers (61 per cent); searching for info and show schedules (66 per cent); and gaming or signing up for freebies (49 per cent). Out of 24 social media activities tracked, three distinct types of motivations for TV-related social media use emerged: Functional (searching for show schedules, news, exclusives); communal (personal branding, connecting with others); and playful (gaming, entering contests).

Twitter acquisitions

Both Twitter and Facebook are investing in the social TV data market in a big way to mine the real time conversations around brands and TV channels. On Monday, Twitter announced its intent to acquire two startups.

Mesagraph, a French start-up, has a platform that provides advanced analytics showing how people engage with TV shows and brands. UK based start up, SecondSync, ironically a partner of Facebook, develops audience measurement metrics to quantify engagement in depth and in real time. SecondSync also boasts of a Twitter leaderboard with a monitoring system that starts 30 minutes before the programme and ends 30 minutes after.

Twitter also announced that they would be taking “Twitter TV measurement to even more regions of the world through an expanded partnership with Kantar, a media monitoring and marketing agency to develop tools and Twitter TV measurement standards in the UK and Spain. This work will now expand to the Nordics, Russia, parts of Africa and southeast Asia.” Twitter also plans to work with Kantar on a programme called Data of Now that will apply Twitter’s public, real-time data to new research products in advertising effectiveness, consumer insight, brand equity and media measurement.”

Going all out, Twitter has partnered with Nielsen to launch the Nielsen Twitter TV Rating (NTTR), which complements the Nielsen TV rating. This is to further help its partners effectively measure the social engagement of their programming.

The new world of big data leading to big insights, content being influenced by audience and advertising morphing from push tactics to persuasive engagement has arrived with a big bang.