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...
Note: Post was updated on 2/12 with ratings info.
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This post may contain “spoilers” to the January 30th broadcast of Let’s Make A Deal.
CBS continues to experiment with innovative uses of social TV’s Twitter “backchannel.” This time, engaging its more than 67,000 @LetsMakeDealCBS Twitter followers, yesterday, while the show’s latest episode was being taped for its January 30th broadcast.
Over the course of about two hours there were about 7 times where folks following the @LetsMakeDealCBS Twitter handle could Tweet answers that would affect the course of the show.
Some of the engagement was through multiple choice hashtags:
While others were more open ended questions:
CBS also used Tout to give the Twitter audience short behind the scenes video clips of the game show’s talent.
How many
participated?
Using Radian6, I extracted all of the mentions of 10
different hashtags used over the course of yesterday (click chart to enlarge).
The multiple choice hashtag that was Tweeted the most garnered 65 mentions. That's less than one hundred (in case you thought that was a typo ;-). The more generic #DecideTheDeal hashtag was Tweeted 172 times yesterday. That’s about .25% (note the “.”) of Let’s Make A Deal’s followers on Twitter.
BUT…
Before any of us think these seem like low participation
numbers, let’s keep in mind what CBS’s goal is: Ratings. They’re using this as a
stunt to generate buzz that will drive people to tune in on Wednesday, January 30th
when the actual episode airs.
That’s when we’ll see whether or not this (again innovative) experiment worked for them.
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UPDATED 2/12 - The ratings are in and it seems as though this stunt did what it was intended to do as this episode garnered the highest ratings so far this season amoung adults 18-49 (47% higher than the average) and is tied as the top rated Let's Make A Deal eipsode in 2 years.
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A final thought:
I’ve now looked a results for stunts like these for The Voice, Hawaii Five-0, and now Let’s
Make A Deal with the latter two having relatively low volumes of people who
Tweet about the show when compared to shows like ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars or AMC’s The Walking Dead or VH1’s Love & Hip Hop– and especially live
events (sports or awards shows).
If television networks want to drive the volume of participating in interactive “social TV” stunts like these, producers may want to consider the most social shows on their respective networks. Yet at the same time, NBC’s The Voice does indeed have a very active real-time audience on Twitter yet still only got about 15,000 Tweets when they tried a real-time vote.
In the end, this is just the beginning of the potential for audiences (who want to) to be able to interact with and affect their favorite shows. I hope the experimentation from TV networks continues…
As a follow-up to my January 6th post, tonight was Hawaii Five-0’s much hyped “who dunnit?” episode wherein the viewing audience crowdsourced, in real-time, the show’s murder mystery ending by Tweeting one of three possible hashtags representing one of three possible killers and/or voting directly on CBS.com.
Did people
participate?
Using Radian6, I pulled all of the mentions of the 3
hashtags, exported the results to Excel and isolated those Tweets during the East
Coast and West Coast episode airings' voting period as mentioned by the @HawaiiFive0CBS Twitter account during the broadcast.
Note: These counts represent only votes via Twitter mentions and not any votes on CBS.com.
EAST COAST AIRING
There were a total of about 7,200 Twitter votes during the 40-ish minute East Coast voting period. The vote on Twitter matched which ending aired ("The Boss").
WEST COAST AIRING
There were just over 1,000 votes via Twitter for the West Coast airing. The vote on Twitter did NOT match the ending that aired. "The Student" was the West Coast ending (and received the lowest votes on Twitter) which must mean that it had a substantial number of votes on CBS.com over the others to make up for the disparity.
Did people tune-in?
Of course, CBS did this (very creative) stunt to drive
ratings. Did it work? UPATED 1/15: About 9.4 million viewers tuned in to watch Hawaii Five-0 last night. Looking at Nielsen historical data, this is slightly below average ratings for the 2011/2012 season which saw on average 10.7 million viewers on new episodes. But it's higher than the average viewership of the Fall 2012 season so far of 8.9 million viewers.
Not the most Tweeted H50 episode (by far)(but close).
Pulling historical data of Hawaii Five-0 from Bluefin Labs (click image to enlarge), even with all of the hype, press, and publicity, the amount of 24 hour social activity for this episode was average and less than half of the September 24, 2012 broadcast.
Update 1/15 - 9pm: When looking at the social activity (via Bluefin Labs) limited to just the airtime of each episode, the data shows that the amount was very close to that of the 9/24 season premiere (click image to enlarge.)
So in the end, the episode garnered average-ish Nielsen ratings and above average Social TV ratings. Now the unanswered question becomes to what degree did this stunt maintain ratings? Would they have been materially lower had it not been for the buzz leading up to (and during) this episode?
A few other things…
I was expecting to see lower thirds during the broadcast encouraging
viewers to vote. There were none other than the standard #H50 hashtag at the
very beginning of the episode. However, at the :30 minute commercial break,
there was a TV promo spot telling people to vote and showing the different
hashtags they could use. This appeared at both the beginning and ending of the commercial pod.
At the end of the episode, there was a quick bumper that mentioned the other endings were now available to watch on CBS.com.
It's debateable if the overall vote count is good or bad -- it's very similar in volume to the numbers I pulled when NBC's The Voice did something kind of similar. But in the end, those who participated seemed to really enjoy it.
And that's just one of many similar Tweets praising CBS for its innovation and willingness to experiment. I'd have to agree ;-)
NBC’s weeklong primetime run of Howie Mandel-hosted game show Take It All reveals what the next iteration of game shows might look like in the social TV era of television.
While second screen companion apps have yet to find scale/mass appeal with television viewing audiences, the game show genre might actually be its sweet spot. Since game shows have been on the air, people have always mentally played along at home. The second screen (in the form of our tablets, smartphones, and laptops) actually let us do that – and with each other. In addition, the demographic that plays social games is also similar to the demographic that watches game shows.
Playing around with NBC's Take It All app last night, I was struck by a few things:
- NBC did a nice job using their investment in Zeebox to integrate the Take It All App as a layer that sits on top of it (versus something separate).
- Similarly, everything from logging in to playing along was in the vein of “lightweight interactions” – the whole experience was seamless and simple.
- The strategy behind the app is smart. The game can only be played while watching the show live (hence an incentive along with the lure of winning $10,000 that could drive ratings).
- It was great to see on-air/in-broadcast promos for the game/Zeebox leveraging Howie Mandel at the end of a commercial break further connecting the dots and emphasizing Take It All as a cross-channel experience.
As for where this could lead? There is a huge opportunity when the show goes to commercial break for the app to be doing something (other than just showing a countdown timer) such as ads that sync to the broadcast commercials helping to reinforce an advertiser's message (and provide lean-forward interaction with the TV spot).
And the holy grail? The biggest opportunity would be to leverage the app/second screen for live game shows (unfortunately this game show is pre-recorded) wherein the viewing audience can actually affect and/or be integrated into the broadcast itself.
Now that would be social TV at its finest.
On my last post, I illustrated how TV networks are displaying show-level hashtags on-air. But another trend is emerging that harnesses the instant feedback loop of the social TV era of television thanks in large part to Twitter: Social TV Polling – Done in a way that affects the programming of live shows in real-time.
A couple of months ago Big Brother polled its viewing audience using the hashtags #BBpunish and #BBreward asking viewers whether or not the voted off contestant should be punished or rewarded at the end of the show.
And eight minutes into last night’s The Voice live results show, a branded integration from Starbucks, had host Carson Daly asking viewers to choose which treams/song would be performed at the end of the show.
Viewers who Tweeted using #VoiceBestShot were voting for the remaining contestants of Team Christina + Team Blake to perform Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot.
Viewers who Tweeted using #VoiceWantMe were voting for the remaining contestants of Team Adam + Team Celo to perform Cheap Trick’s I Want You To Want Me.
Voting lasted only 15 minutes until the hashtags were counted.
The Results?
I was curious to see just how
many people actually participated. Using Radian6, I pulled the following
volumes of each showing a total of 15,203 Tweet votes generated.
And indeed, towards the end of
the show last night, Hit Me With Your
Best Shot was performed by Team Christina + Team Blake.
So What’s in it for TV networks?
It was a very strategic and
planned move, by doing this early into the show. NBC was trying to spark
trending topics on Twitter in order to drive tune-in which is a correlation
that research firms are trying to prove.
Expect to see lots more of this happening as Twitter + TV integrations evolve from a single passive hashtag to a strategy that leverages TV viewers feedback in real-time to affect on-air programming.
Twitter hashtags have been popping up in the lower thirds of TV shows’ on-air broadcasts now for about two years. But this Fall season, they’ve become a standard include in television networks on-air graphics packages and have gained even more prominence on-screen.
Here’s a look at the latest usage of hashtags across a few networks and shows.
The Persistent Standalone
ABC is sporting some pretty bold/translucent hastags in the lower left of the screen that persistent fairly strongly through the duration of the given show's episode. The hashtag inlcudes the network name (ABC), as part of it and is designed in a simlar graphical style as the ABC network bug which appears on the opposite side of the screen. The hashtag is written out in title case.
The Logo Lockup
FOX's The Xfactor maintains a persistent hashtag but is displayed as a network logo lock up bug (and in all lowercase).
The Conversational
Glee has been incorporating hashtags for a while and a few months ago I blogged about their use of multiple hashtags that appeared during buzzworthy moments of the show. The standard #Glee hashtag usually appears above the network bug but lately it's been a bit more conversational based on when the show returns from hiatus or a new season as in the example above #gleeisback - all lowercase.
The Animated
CNN heavily promotes the hashtags of many of its shows and in this example it appears with motion/animation but also as a persistent hashtag below the animation and promoted dynamically throughout the show in the main lower-third area. It appears both as title case and all upper case.
The Climactic
Show's like PBS's Nova and NBC's The Voice display show hashtags at "crescendo" moments during on-air broadcasts where there's a high propensity for Twitter backchannel discussion. #novascinow is in all lowercase and #TheVoice is in title case.
There's no 1 right way to do it.
In the end, Networks and shows continue to experiment with the best way to spark conversation about thier shows using Twitter hashtags. The goal, of course, is to hopefully trend on Twitter to drive greater tune-in. And while there isn't consistency in display usage across television networks, you can bet we'll continue to see even more hashtags appear in programming.
