Bluefin Labs mapped social chatter about Mountain Dew to TV that Dew fans also buzzed about. Click here for details.
Before moving on you are probably wondering what is 'Social Television' or 'Social TV'. Here's the simple definition of Social TV:
Social Television is a general term for technology that supports communication and social interaction in either the context of watching television, or related to TV content. It also includes the study of television-related social behavior, devices and networks. Social TV is the modern term that replaces 'Interactive Television'.
or even simpler put...
Social Television is the state of the art -- and science -- of monitoring social-media chatter about television.
The concept of socializing around TV content is not new. But Social TV is creating the cyber-living-room and cyber-bar to enable increased interactivity around shared programming both live and time-shifted. In an attempt to recapture the social aspects of television or the sociological influences television has had on society since its inception, lost since the advent of multiple-screen households, which discourage gatherings to watch television together, social television aims to connect viewers with their friends and families even when they are not watching the same screen. As a concept, social television is not linked to a specific architecture such as cable TV, IPTV, peer-to-peer delivery, or internet television (over the top or OTT). Nor is it necessarily limited to a traditional television screen, but could also be presented on a computer or handheld device such as a smartphone, tablet or netbook.
Social TV started in the early 2000s with limited success as the creation of the shared connections was cumbersome with a remote control and the User Interface (UI) design made the interaction disruptive to the TV experience. But social networking has made Social TV suddenly feasible, since it already encourages constant connection between members of the network and the creation of likely minded groups. The shared content and activities often relate to TV content. At the same time, the smartphone market has been growing quickly. 86% of Americans already use their phones while watching TV. A recent AC Nielsen survey also revealed that 33% of consumers regularly use mobile apps while watching TV.
The key thing to remember is that Social TV is not specific solely to your home television set, but incorporates any device that delivers television programming, films or online video content to the consumer.
In the following video, Lorie H. Schwartz, Chief Technology Catalyst, North America, McCan Worldgroup explains how Social TV is growing and exploding on multiple platforms:
In the following video, interactive television experts gathered at SXSWi held at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas on March 12, 2011, to discuss the future of social TV.
Just how big is the market for Social TV? What is it? How is it being used? Watch this video of Mark Ghuneim, CEO, Trendrr (this dude speaks from the side of his mouth) at the NBC Universal Social TV Symposium held in New York on September 14, 2011:
Having given you the various definitions of Social TV and a brief history, here are 7 things you need to know about Social TV right now:
1. TV owns and is driving social
For more than two years now, AdAge.com has had an editorial partnership with Trendrr, the social-media-monitoring company. Trendrr, which was born in 2006 as Infofilter, grew out of Wiredset, a Manhattan digital-marketing agency founded by Mark Ghuneim and Tom Donohue in 2004 (the same year Mark Zuckerberg was launching what was then TheFacebook.com out of his Harvard dorm room, and two years before Twitter fluttered to life). Ad Age partnered with Trendrr to create weekly online EKG charts of rising and falling tweet volume surrounding memes that were dominating Twitter conversations. Back in the summer of 2009, we tracked everything from Sonia Sotomayor (then a nominee for the Supreme Court) to "Glee" to Major League Baseball to "True Blood."
Over time, it dawned on us that more than anything else, TV was driving social. Sotomayor would trend on Twitter only when her confirmation hearings were being televised; a specific team would trend because it was doing great (or sucking) in the game being broadcast at that very moment on ESPN; during prime-time hours in the U.S. and the U.K., Twitter's trending topics list would be all but taken over by TV-related chatter. You could get a real-time take on "Glee" viewers' level of delight over the most deliciously nasty things uttered by Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester character because fans would dutifully thumb-type their favorite bits of dialogue right into their Twitter streams. (In fact, it started to seem like "Glee" writers were writing as much for Twitter as for TV.)
Over the past couple of years, Trendrr has tightened its focus on TV -- even launching Trendrr.tv specifically to serve the TV industry. Today, 14 of the top 25 TV networks are Trendrr.tv data customers, and as the social-TV business has exploded, Ad Age has also started editorial partnerships (to generate charticles for AdAge.com) with other emerging players in the space, including Bluefin Labs a Cambridge, Mass.-based outgrowth of the MIT Media Lab that is building a broadcast-meets-social database it calls the TV Genome project, and Manhattan-based entertainment check-in service GetGlue.
Mr. Ghuneim said,
"Social TV could not be heating up more, because engagement is really starting to map to currency."
He added.
"The networks that 'get it', are using the social graph to measure the effectiveness of their marketing spend, for real-time audience research to understand the demographics of their viewers, to be smarter about how production dollars are spent and what content will resonate. And especially to demonstrate to advertisers the value of the network off the network."
2. Social TV is, at its core, incredibly old-fashioned
Social TV is about watching TV with other people -- think of "50s-era family and friends gathered around an old Magnavox console to catch "I Love Lucy." Only now the living room has gone national. (Get your feet off the coffee table, Texas!)
3. Twitter is definitely not the only game in town when it comes to social TV
Consider GetGlue, which launched in June of last year. This past August, it hit a high of 11.5 million check-ins, driven by partnerships with big broadcast and cable networks from ABC and Fox to Showtime and HBO. (The summer's most popular show on GetGlue was "True Blood" with 490,787 total check-ins.)
TVGuide.com, which built its own site-specific check-in service and launched it last October, recently surpassed 4 million check-ins and is averaging 20,000 per day just from its user base. General Manager Christy Tanner says that to date TVGuide.com has sold 45 sponsorships to both network and non-network advertisers -- from ABC to Starbucks -- eager to engage with a deeply engaged audience.
And more and more networks are building their own social destinations. At USA Network, says VP-Digital Jesse Redniss, more than 300,000 unique visitors came to its Character Chatter platform -- at characterchatter.usanetwork.com -- this summer to discuss USA shows including "Burn Notice" and "Psych." When USA broadcast a "Burn Notice" marathon and ran Character Chatter posts on an on-screen crawl, "That was a big "a-ha' moment for us because we saw 35,000 concurrent users logging onto the system. It was really cool to watch."
4. Social TV is a form of self-expression -- and a form of peer-to-peer peer-pressure marketing
Get Glue CEO Alex Iskold says,
"What we've learned since launching GetGlue, is that entertainment is an incredibly emotional experience for people and the reason that people love checking in is because it's a gesture of self expression. It's people saying, 'I'm a diehard "True Blood" fan, and that's a really important thing to me, it really matters to me, and that show gets into my head and gets into my soul.'"
A network can drown you in endless promos for a new show it wants you to watch; maybe you'll succumb, maybe you won't. But the influence of social-media messaging about that show from a friend whose taste you trust can't be underestimated. An enthusiastic tweet about "Ringer" is not only an endorsement of the show but an implicit call to action; it says,
"This is what you're missing out on."
5. Social TV has slowed down time-shifting for some of TV's biggest shows
TVGuide.com's Tanner said.
"We did a survey of our 10,000-person TV-fan panel last year, and what we found is that 20% of them said they are watching more live TV specifically to avoid "social spoilers.'"
6. Social TV is not primarily about predicting hits
Some of the big shows premiering this fall already have great social buzz; ABC's "Once Upon a Time," which won't even air its first episode until October, already has more than 100,000 likes on Facebook. What does that tell us? That ABC is doing a good job promoting it and that the fantasy-drama theme conveyed in the promos is resonating with potential viewers. And that's it.
Bluefin Labs VP-Marketing and Business Development Tom Thai said.
"Merely tracking the volume of buzz without a deeper analysis of other factors, is very rudimentary. What matters is context; once a show gets traction, what else can the viewers who are chattering about it tell us about their other preferences as consumers? If you're a CMO for an automaker vs. wireless carrier vs. laundry detergent, your audiences and needs will be different. The key next step is marrying social-TV data about the shows with data about specific brands."
7. The Couch Potato is a dying breed
Remember when TV viewers were seen as passive consumers? The minimal effort required to operate a remote control (and open a beer and a bag of Cheetos) meant that sitting on the couch and taking in a few of your favorite shows made you a "couch potato." Funny how the addition of just another small device -- the smartphone -- to the mix has transformed the couch potato into a superfan/social-marketer/programmer with the power to transform TV.
COMMENTARY: Social TV was named one of the 10 most important emerging technologies by the MIT Technology Review on Social TV in 2010. And in 2011, David Rowan, the Editor of Wired magazine named Social TV at number three of six in his peek into 2011 and what tech trends to expect to get traction. Ynon Kreiz, CEO of the Endemol Group told a packed crowd at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in January 2011:
"Everyone says that social television will be big. I think it’s not going to be big — it’s going to be huge".
According to Gartner Research's Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies for 2011 (see below), Social TV is very much an emerging technology, at the bottom of the "technology trigger" slope of the hype cycle curve. Gartner believes it will become mainstream in 5 to 10 years, but I tend to agree with Mark Ghuneim, CEO, Trendrr, that Social TV will attain mainstream adoption much quicker than this. The proliferation of mobile devices, cloud computing and apps has made access to TV and digital content available anywhere on a 24/7, 365 day basis. The developers of these technologies know what you click and how long you are watching something, and what you are saying about that content on your social network stream.
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To give you some idea just how rapidly some emerging technologies can become mainstream, compare the Gartner Research's Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies for 2005 (see below) with the Gartner Research's Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies for 2011.
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You will notice that the word "social" does not even appear on the Hype Cycle curve. At the end of 2005, Facebook had only 5.5 million users and was being hosted out of Mark Zuckerberg's house in Palo Alto, California. Fast forward to July 2011, Facebook claims it now has 800 million users.
Social TV technology can integrate voice communication, text chat, presence and context awareness, TV recommendations, ratings, or video-conferencing with the TV content either directly on the screen or by using ancillary devices.
Social TV is very active area of research and development that is also generating new services as TV operators and content producers are looking for new sources of revenue. While a number of existing social television systems are still at a conceptual stage, or exist as lab prototypes, beta or pilot versions are available commercially.
White-labeled social TV platforms have also emerged (such as Visiware's PlayAlong, LiveHive Systems and Ex Machina's PlayToTV) which allow TV networks and operators to offer branded social TV applications.
On the ratings front, companies such as Networked Insights and TrendrrTV have emerged to measure the social media activities tied to specific TV telecasts. In essence, these new companies seek to serve as the Nielsen Ratings of the social televisions space.
If you want to know more about Social TV, you might want to tune into or attend The TV of Tomorrow ( TVOT) 2011 to be held in New York City on December 5, 2011.
Courtesy of an article dated September 19, 2011 appearing in Advertising Age Mediaworks and Wikipedia
Richard, thank you for your feedback and nice compliment. Hope you become a regular fan. I cover just about every aspect of social media that you can imagine, even the emerging social, like Pinterest, SCVNGR, Groupon, Desk.com, AirBnb, social snoopers, social intelligence corp, to name a few
Posted by: Tommy | 02/03/2012 at 09:09 AM
Wow…I am bowled by your level of knowledge. I am so impressed. I think you have got a deep insight into this topic. Could not think on those lines ever…
Posted by: Richard F. Sands | 02/02/2012 at 11:09 PM