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Study Shows Correlation Between Social Buzz and TV Ratings


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A major undercurrent of the 2011 Fall TV season is the increasing role that social and digital media have on how consumers consume, discover and discuss TV shows. A longstanding question in the social TV space, however, is what impact social media buzz has on traditional television ratings.

NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey Company, worked with Nielsen to try to better answer that question. In the study, NM Incite and Nielsen were able to find a statistically significant relationship that shows a correlation between online buzz and TV ratings. This correlation takes place throughout the TV show season, though the impact online buzz can have on ratings can vary based on a season’s timeline.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest correlation takes place with younger demographics, viewers ages 12-17 and 18-34. Nielsen and NM Incite also found a slightly stronger correlation for women over men.

In the 18-34 demographic, Nielsen found that social media buzz most closely aligned with TV ratings around the time that a show premieres. In other words, the social discussion was most likely to affect or correlate with ratings in the lead-up to a show’s launch or its first few episodes. In this scenario, a 9% increase in buzz volume correlates to a 1% increase in ratings.

This relationship weakens as the show’s season wears on. At the mid-season mark, a 14% buzz increase correlates with a 1% increase in ratings. Likewise, a 14% increase in buzz corresponds to a 1% increase in ratings in the weeks leading up to a show’s finale.

It’s important to note, however, that with older viewers, social buzz has a greater impact on ratings toward the end of the season than at the beginning or middle.

Reality shows (competition and non-competition), dramas and comedies were programs that saw the biggest social-to-ratings impact with women 18-34. Men 18-34 showed the strongest correlations with competition reality programs and dramas.

Anecdotally, this matches up with some of the other social TV stats that have shown that programs such as Basketball Wives and The Voice are big social TV hits.

While the data Nielsen and NM Incite presents is interesting, it’s shallow. We would like to see specific gains for specific shows — or specific losses. Moving into the 2011 season, we would also like to see which shows are benefiting most from social buzz and which are cancelled despite strong social media behavior.

More About: Nielsen, nm incite, reports, social tv

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LinkedIn Lets Companies Post Status Updates [VIDEO]


LinkedIn has long let users follow companies, but Thursday the professional networking service is finally allowing the more than two million businesses with company pages to post status updates to their followers.

Company Status Updates will enable assigned administrators of company pages to post updates, up to 500 characters in length, to the “Overview” tab of their pages.

“This is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike,” says Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn. “Nearly half of our members follow over 2 million Company Pages on LinkedIn.”

Company status updates will also appear in a page follower’s LinkedIn homepage news feed. And any LinkedIn member can see, like and comment on status updates, or share an update with friends, from the company page.

The new addition makes company profiles more similar to Facebook Pages, and should transform the once-static pages into dynamic entities.

Companies interested in the new feature can turn it on here.

More About: linkedin, status updates

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Feature: Can't stop the tweet: the peril—and promise—of social networking for IT


In 2009, over 300 sensitive company documents, including financial projections and office security codes, were stolen from a Twitter employee's Google Docs account. An individual named "Hacker Croll," claiming responsibility, shared the documents with TechCrunch, which published a portion of the trove online.

More recently, there was the case of Scott McClellan, HP’s chief technologist and interim vice president of engineering and cloud services. In a May update to his publicly accessible LinkedIn profile, McClellan revealed HP's planned foray into cloud computing software and solutions—well in advance of the company's official news release.

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Researchers create stealth virtual machine that can run alongside insecure VMs


A team of researchers have devised a way to create an isolated and trusted environment on virtualized servers. Called the "Strongly Isolated Computing Environment" (SICE), the approach makes it possible to run sensitive computing processes alongside less secure workloads on the same physical hardware.

SICE, developed by Ahmed M. Azab and Peng Ning of North Carolina State University and  Xiaolan Zhang of  IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, is currently a research prototype. Peng and his fellow researchers will present a paper on SICE at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago on October 19. But if further developed, it potentially addresses one of the major security concerns with using virtualized environments: that attackers could take advantage of exploits in a hypervisor environment to access the memory and storage of the virtual machines running within it.

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Social TV: How Content Producers Can Engage Their Audiences in New Ways


Rick Liebling is director of digital strategy at Coyne PR where he helps clients utilize social media channels to engage relevant audiences. You can follow him on Twitter @Rick_Now and read his blog at here.


As social media matures, new opportunities are arising for content producers. Social TV, for instance, has exploded in 2011. While terms like “cross-media” and “transmedia” have only started to become part of the media lexicon, technology advances are creating new opportunities for content creators and audiences to engage with one another – an experience I call “intermedia.”


The Growth of Social TV and the Dawn of Intermedia


Increasingly, social TV has viewers using platforms like Twitter to comment on and discuss their favorite shows. HBO’s True Blood, Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club and Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants, or landmark events such as presidential debates generate thousands of comments, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands. As social TV gains momentum, savvy networks like Bravo, MTV and The CW are poised to take advantage by engaging their audiences in new and compelling ways.

Then intermedia was born, the offspring of social TV and transmedia. Social TV provides a space for audience members to discuss a show, while transmedia encourages content producers to create stories that move across platforms. Therefore, intermedia means that audience members and content producers engage each other between media channels, often with content from one platform affecting content from the other.


Why You Need an Intermedia Strategy


While content producers are currently leading the way, brands will surely follow along the intermedia path, hungry for new, relevant ways to reach consumers. In the months to come, companies and their agencies will be looking to build intermedia strategies.

Overall, intermedia leverages several trends:

  • Viewers are looking for more meaningful interaction with the shows they watch.
  • Stars/celebrities are taking an active role in social media.
  • Content producers are trying to engage viewers in new ways.
  • A burgeoning group of social platforms are catering to various entertainment interests.

Read on to discover the components of an intermedia strategy plan.


1. What Does Success Look Like?


Before you embark, have a measurement of success for your program. Think about how you’ll measure the growth of the online community as well as show viewership. Look at quantitative metrics such as followers or retweets, but also observe more qualitative engagement like conversation sentiment. You may also be looking at other factors such as an increase in traffic to online or offline retail outlets for ancillary products such as merchandise or DVDs. Use intermedia as a tool to see what elements of a program are resonating most with the audience.


2. What Are Your Assets?


Do you have access to talent? Will that talent engage viewers as themselves or as their characters? What online owned media channels can you leverage? Does the show already have a Twitter account? Finally, archival footage, brand partners and physical venues can also become weapons in your intermedia arsenal.


3. What Sort of Intermedia Content Will You Develop?


While certain properties have an existing base of passionate fans (think Mad Men), new shows (like 2 Broke Girls) attempt to establish a strong initial relationship with their audiences. Understanding your audience will help determine the type of content you can create, whether by providing character back story or offering exclusive access to table readings from the actors. Ultimately you’ll be asking yourself: Am I trying to build deeper ties with those who already know my content, or am I trying to introduce myself to new, potential fans?


4. What Platforms Should You Use?


While Twitter is the obvious choice for intermedia engagement, it’s certainly not the only one. Sarah Hill, interactive anchor/reporter for KOMU-TV in Missouri uses live Google+ Hangouts during her broadcast. Turntable.fm, Skype and YouTube can all be leveraged similarly.


5. When Will This Happen?


Intermedia can be planned for a variety of experiences and settings, including music venues, sports stadiums and fashion shows. Producers can also use intermedia to reinvigorate classic programming; for instance, G4 aired Star Trek 2.0 in 2006.


Recent Examples


Companies like Social Guide and TV Dinner are making social TV engagement easier by developing mobile apps and engagement platforms respectively. Others such as Bluefin Labs show the value of social TV interaction through rigorous measurement.

For their season finale, Spike TV’s Deadliest Warrior integrated live segments of the show’s hosts, who answered tweeted questions and commented on real-time poll results taken from the show’s website. This dynamic approach helped land the show a Top 10 “Social TV” spot on SocialGuide.com for the night, edging out CBS social TV juggernaut Survivor.

ESPN is taking a more ambitious intermedia strategy with its NFL32 programming. The show airs Monday through Friday at 6 p.m. ET on ESPN2, during which ESPN football analysts and insiders take questions from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. An #NFL32 hashtag keeps the conversation flowing alongside the @NFL32 account.

As you can see, creating an intermedia program requires more aggressive tactics than a simple hashtag or a few Facebook video posts. Planning and maximizing assets using an intermedia strategy can drive real results.

Images courtesy of Flickr, wajakemek | rashdanothman, xJasonRogersx


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Twitter Opens New York Office on Madison Avenue



New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey Thursday morning to announce the opening of the company’s first official New York office.

Although New York is likely, as a statement from the city reminds us, “the largest developer population outside of California in the nation,” we have a feeling it’s not engineers Twitter most hopes to reach out to from its new East Coast headquarters.

The company’s new headquarters are located at 340 Madison Avenue (the former address of Facebook’s NYC office space), in close proximity to potential advertising clients.

New York is the city with the most Twitter users in the world, Dorsey says.

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Why We Need More Failed Startups in Boston


I can’t remember the last post mortem or “dead pool” article that I have read about a Boston startup. And yet, I know they are out there. But why is it that as a community we do not talk about or even celebrate our failures?

Startups have a 90% failure rate. Chance are you are going to fail and it’s going to suck at first. But imagine all of the knowledge that you have obtained since taking that initial leap off the proverbial cliff. Information that no money can buy, or college or large company can teach you. I am talking about first-hand, living-in-the-trenches knowledge. From your first failed focus group to your last failed investor pitch and every no in between. From the sleepless nights with your founding team where you try to solve problems that at often times seem unsolvable. And maybe they are unsolvable, but there is only one way to find out. Try. Jump off that cliff and learn to fly on the way down.

I am extremely lucky that my job is to learn from all of you. I hear the constant trials and tribulations; what worked, what didn’t, what was messed up, what should have been done and so on. And yet, I feel as if that information is private. I am only told these things “off the record” because founders in this city are afraid to talk about their failures. And I cannot understand why. You should be more afraid that you are failing your colleagues because you may just hold the key to the problem they are experiencing.

As a city, we only choose to talk about the successes, we very rarely embrace the failures. And yet these failures are likely 9 times more important than any startup success story. For example, instead of offering advice on how to raise money, tell the rejection stories. Share with other entrepreneurs all the no’s, where you dive bombed and what really didn’t work. These tidbits of information are more helpful than any “how I grew a successful company” story.

In being fair, I will offer insights on our first project here at Streetwise Media, Pinyadda. We had some great success stories at first – winning a Demo God award and getting the first couple thousand users. But like most consumer facing sites we fought a constant uphill user acquisition battle. And one example of a big failure was our initial on boarding process. Upon signing up for the site it was too confusing to get up and going. We failed at walking our users through the product, so eventually new sign-ups dwindled and we brought the site back into a closed beta and now use it as an internal lede generation and collaboration tool.

Now, every time I talk to an entrepreneur building a consumer site, my first piece of advice is to make sure their sign up process is simple, efficient and clear. Offering them advice on how we obtained users or how we won over the Demo crowd is trivial, the real information is in our user acquisition failures.

I know there are thousands of entrepreneurs out there with gory failures. Failures that if brought into the open would help strengthen this community. So why not share these and help out our trench fighting colleagues? Talk about your risks and fears in public. We can only grow so big if we are always riding high on our successes, we need some Belichick humble pie every once in a while.

If you are brave enough to publicly disclose some of these stories, please let us know in the comments or submit a guest post. Your hardships and experiences need to be out in the open.

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YouTube Goes Political with New Channel


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Just in time for the the 2012 Presidential election race, YouTube has just launched a channel dedicated to all things U.S. politics. The channel will feature political campaign ads, parodies, speeches and a variety of relevant clips.

The channel will also serve as a full-function social video tracker for the 2012 election. Scrolling down the page will reveal graphs and charts comparing each major candidate’s YouTube individual views or subscribers as well as brief profiles condensing their core YouTube stats such as views, video shares and even the amount of times they were searched.

YouTube has been steadily increasing its coverage of American politics including a YouTube town hall with President Obama, a virtual town hall where the public can vote on major issues and co-hosting a GOP Presidential Debate (via Google).

The new channel looks like another step in the right direction for YouTube. The analytics give the channel a sense of purpose and a reason for politics junkies to return to the hub.

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More About: Political, Social Media, Video, YouTube


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Rdio launches free, non-ad-supported streaming for US users, meter to keep you in check


Ad-free, on-demand streaming is coming your way, folks -- and it won't cost you a dime. Rdio has announced the launch of its free service that will give you access to a library of over 12 million songs without being interrupted by pesky Spotify-esque advertisements. The no cost subscription won't require you to give up your credit card info either, but, you will get a "customized meter" that will let you know how much music you can access monthly. No word yet on how much time you'll have, but any amount of time with the Radiohead discography is sure to be of use. You'll be able to listen via the web or desktop app without grabbing a paid membership, but if you want Rdio's tunes on your phone, it'll cost you $9.99 per month. Also, from what we've heard, this is only available in the US -- for now. If you're looking for the full rundown then hit the PR below for all the details.

Continue reading Rdio launches free, non-ad-supported streaming for US users, meter to keep you in check

Rdio launches free, non-ad-supported streaming for US users, meter to keep you in check originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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