Harmonic Aftershock

Did the Emmys Twitter stunt drive tune-in?

We all know by now that the “Tracy Morgan passed out…” stunt at last Sunday’s Emmy Awards drove the highest spike in public social media mentions during the show and spawned a worldwide trending topic on Twitter.

While the consumer side of me personally despised the greasy “bait & switch” of the whole thing, the researcher in me immediately wanted to know: Will this actually drive tune-in? Especially since this is a heavily debated topic which has been recently been resurrected.

Using Bluefin Labs own “social mentions” chart as a base, Hill Holliday’s Network Buying team (thanks to Erica Sperry) overlaid Nielsen minute-by-minute ratings (above in RED) to see if there’s any apparent correlation to when social activity spiked versus actual Emmys tune-in on ABC.

While there is a ratings peak at the time of the stunt, it's very similar to the other peaks throughout the Emmys airing.  So then we looked at the ratings within various demographic slices and the only demo that showed a notable spike in ratings around the time of the Tracy Morgan stunt were men 12-24 years old (chart below).

So in the end, can we say there was a direct and evident correlation between the Twitter stunt to get people to tune in to the Emmys on ABC? Not really. Could it have accounted for some lift in viewership as it trended on Twitter? Possibly.

Let the ratings debate continue... ;-)

I originally posted this on Hill Holliday's blog.

A ratings tale of two singing competition premieres.

The competition is on between NBC’s The Voice and FOX’s The Xfactor. With these two (very similar) TV shows premiering during the same week, I couldn’t wait to compare both their Nielsen TV ratings as well as their social TV ratings (Bluefin Labs).

There’s a lot of talk as to whether or not the social media backchannel drives tune-in. And while there is increasing evidence that there’s some kind of correlation, it’s not (at least in this case) directly proportional to audience size.

On Wednesday, September 12^th (shaded in gray on the above chart), the two shows aired at the same time. Pulling data from Bluefin Labs’ “Signals” shows that The Voice generated 80,000 social media mentions during its 1-hour broadcast and The Xfactor had 1.4 million (which, by the way broke the record for the #1 most social season premiere all-time previously held by Pretty Little Liars) over the course of its 2 hour premiere. Yet, using Nielsen data, The Voice had about 2 million more viewers tune in than The Xfactor.

Both shows heavily promote (and integrate) Twitter into their on-air programming. So the big question is why would one show (with less viewers) generate materially that much more comments on the backchannel.

And if you want more of a direct comparison, the two hour season premiere of The Voice on Monday, September 10^th generated 202,000 social media mentions with 12.2 million viewers. That’s just under 4 million more viewers than The Xfactor season premiere (on Wednesday) and over 1 million less social media comments.

Diving deeper into Bluefin Labs’ data for both shows:

vs.

Each show follows a similar pattern of peaks and valleys but The Xfactor simply has more intensity of public social media comments throughout its broadcast.  One thought? The two new judges on The Xfactor. Looking at the most popular terms it seems that Demi Lovato drove a lot of conversation. And of course there was Britney Spears. But what drove the biggest spike? Seeing Simon Cowell nearly cry for the first time.

This was originally posted on Hill Holliday's blog.

The power of the backchannel.

With hashtags seemingly everywhere these days, it begs the question when it comes to television shows what value they’re adding? There’s, of course, the insights that can surface by mining the volume of Tweets generated – but Tweets are content too and the “backchannel” of television can absolutely compliment what’s on air.  

And that’s exactly what’s covered in the latest episode of The Pulse on Lost Remote – enjoy!

A very social wedding.

For whatever reason, I was thinking the other day how it could be cool for weddings to have a Twitter “backchannel” in place of the disposable camera trend that was once big.

Apparently this was so not an original idea as the wedding I attended last Saturday did just that...promoting it with a sign in the lobby of the reception hall.

While there wasn’t a huge amount of posts using the hashtag (it wasn’t exactly the Tweeting kind of crowd), I loved seeing the use of social media at what is inherently a very social event.

Next up? Twitter wedding vows – In Turkey, it really happened.