What Twitter's acquisition of Bluefin Labs might mean for brands.

It's finally official after a day of reports. Social TV analytics company, Bluefin Labs has been aquired by Twitter just 3 months after Nielsen aquired (Bluefin competitor) SocialGuide.

After reading Twitter's announcement, I started to visualize in my head their description of the current ecosystem they've created around the much buzzed about (and forthcoming) Twitter TV rating. Here's my attempt at diagraming it:

But I doubt this acquisition is just about "social TV" and the Twitter TV rating. Brands continue to ask the tough questions about how social media is helping to drive their respective businesses. Data must be both the start and end points in answering this. And what Bluefin Labs has done with social analytics (by taking a "big data" approach) is innovative in helping to surface actionable insights.

Over half of Sunday's Super Bowl TV spots incorporated a Twitter hashtag. And many of those brands additionally purchased promoted Tweets from Twitter. I'm sure Twitter wants (and needs) to continue to prove its value as a place for brands and media companies to invest marketing budget dollars. Bolstering the company's arsenal of measurement and analytics capabilities is one way of doing just that at scale.

But there's even more beyond the realm of measurement. Let's not forget Bluefin's keen ability to map affinity relationships between lifestyle attributes and brands (and TV shows). It would seem that this kind of algorithm and intelligence could be used as a powerful (advertising?) targeting engine. And that may just have more imporant implications for brands.

Let's see what happens...

Comments

[Paul_mcgrath]

It seems to me that the BlueFin's brand affinity relationships, especially if they can correlate them back to the entire TV audience is the big attraction for Twitter here. Given the size of the TV ad industry, even a small increase in the efficiency of ad targeting would move tons of money around.

The Social TV Ratings stuff is interesting, but it's not that hard to do (and SocialGuide is already ready to do it).

[Amir Zonozi]

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