TV isn’t dying, it’s getting social.
Of course you wouldn’t expect its death knell to be rung at an event put on by the Television Bureau of Canada (TVB), but the medium was praised for its staying power—and even growth—at Thursday’s TV Day conference. The consensus amongst the speakers was the rise of the internet isn’t boycotting TV watching—it is simply augmenting it.
Deb Roy kicked things off with a presentation that fit the event’s “Social Media Starts Here” theme well. Roy, an associate professor at MIT, is an expert in the field of social TV. He addressed how TV content is driving huge masses of activity on the social web, with the primary driver being conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
Addressing the increasing amount of global chatter that’s taking place as viewers talk online about what’s on TV (aka social TV), Roy asked the crowd how many knew what “nw” means in social media. Not many did.
It stands for “now watching” and it’s being used in tweets as “kind of a call to action” for people’s followers to tune into the same show. (For example, someone may Tweet “nw #modernfamily” during their Wednesday night couch time.) As someone who analyzes social TV professionally—Roy is co-founder of Bluefin Labs, an analytics company that shares social TV insights with brands, TV networks and agencies—Roy has seen “a tidal wave of this type of TV-related” online conversation.
It’s gotten so big, in fact, that he said several start-up companies have surfaced to tap into this growing phenomenon. One example is SocialGuide, a real-time service that collects online comments about TV and movies and then makes recommendations to consumers about what they should watch. Then there’s GetGlue, an app that Roy said is the TV-watching equivalent to Foursquare in that it allows people to check-in to which TV show or movie they’re watching and then get the chatter related specifically to the show they’re tuned into.
What’s happening with these sorts of services and the overall social TV trend is that “second screens are augmenting what is happening on the first,” said Roy.
In the U.S., he said social TV is growing faster than Twitter and Facebook with 8% of the population taking part. Between the two platforms, he said Twitter is growing faster than Facebook.
But how are brands adjusting to the social TV movement? Roy referenced a quote from Coca Cola’s CMO Joe Tripodi. While Tripodi is curious about impressions his brand’s marketing activities generate, he wants to look most closely to the expressions of its consumers “as a better measure of our success.” It’s an important shift in thinking to move from monitoring how many people are watching to monitoring how far consumers’ words reach via social media. “Using Facebook and Twitter, their words are heard for longer and have broader reach through them talking to their networks online,” said Roy. He added that people who talk about TV online are eight times more likely than average to also talk about brands online.
Another key angle of what’s happening with social TV is audience impact. Roy used the Superbowl as a recent example of the question all brands want to know: Did my ad have impact online? While there were more than 13 million tweets about the Superbowl, roughly 1.2 million tweets were about the ads themselves. The ad most commented-on was the David Beckham strutting for clothing retailer H&M with 114,000 comments. The second-most commented-on ad was the Chrysler spot featuring Clint Eastwood with 112,000 comments.
What’s interesting, though, is that Chrysler got more than 100 million potential earned impressions—even more than the H&M ad—since it generated conversations amongst people that have a higher follower count.
Roy also addressed which genres on TV drive the most comments online. The top five, he said, are sports, reality, specials, comedy and drama. (And, in terms of men versus women, men do more talking when it comes to sports and women talk more in all the other genres.)
