Bluefin Labs has introduced a new system of metrics for quantifying and contextualizing social media response and conversations around television content.
Bluefin Labs was started as a spin-off of the MIT Media Lab and founded in 2008 with the goal of applying machine learning and cognitive science to the broader goal of understanding how audiences respond to TV shows and ads.
The data and pattern correlation Bluefin uses for its analysis was born out of work done by the company’s CEO Deb Roy, who captured more than three years of his family’s home life in 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio.
A New Kind of Viewer Metric
Bluefin isn’t trying to redefine how TV viewership size and viewership share are calculated (at least, not yet). Instead it has created a new set of metrics to complement those established conventions, which are:
Response Level — The number of comments for any given episode of a TV show, using a 10-point exponential scale.
Response Share — A percentage of a program’s share of social response within a specific time of day.This is significant because while existing metrics can gauge how many users are watching a TV show and when, the audience response to those programs has remained in a black box.
To make sense of the new response metrics, Bluefin has launched its first product, Bluefin Signals.
A Web-Based Social TV Dashboard
Bluefin Signals is a web-based analytics dashboard that analyzes the social media response to more than 3,000 TV shows and 105,000 individual airings of those shows. Right now, Bluefin’s technology analyzes 3 billion public-facing social media comments per month. It then pairs those comments with more than 2 million minutes of linear TV time.
Bluefin analyzes 47 different U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks. That’s impressive, to be sure, but it doesn’t cover the entire U.S. TV market. Bluefin says it plans to have full coverage of the national U.S. TV market for shows and commercials by early 2012.
In addition to showing the Response Level and Response Share for each program, Bluefin Signals can also find overlapping data across audiences, using Audience Connections. It’s designed as a way to visualize TV shows that share similar audiences and engagement points. That can be ideal for marketers or programmers who are looking for insight on what to target or how to better serve an audience.
Understanding the Way Users Engage
Having audience response and social response data in correlation with when programs air, or about certain episodes of content is certainly fascinating — in fact, we’d agree with Bluefin Labs that the ability to aggregate this type of information is something that the industry has needed for quite some time.
Still, response monitoring is only part of the equation. Tools like Bluefin Signals and other analytics measures also need to take into account how users engage with social TV.
Content producers and networks are scrambling to make viewing experiences more social. We’ve seen this with the wave of second-screen experience apps for devices like the iPad and with socially infused conversation points in web services like HBO Connect and Hulu’s new Facebook commenting tool.
At Mashable Connect, Christy Tanner, general manager and executive vice president of TV Guide Digital, talked about the most social shows on TV and how viewers engage with them.
As Tanner pointed out, viewers comment on programs in real time more frequently using Twitter than Facebook. That isn’t to say that users don’t socially engage with programming after it airs or that that engagement is any less valuable.
Separating the real-time interactions from the post-airing interactions will be an important nuance for marketers and programmers to understand.
What really excites us about the Bluefin technology is how it will work with the next generation of social programming. Already we’re seeing producers take more risks and invest more in social, making it an integral component to a show rather than just a bolted-on addition. Social response metrics are the perfect — and essential — complements for innately social programming like NBC’s The Voice.
With any luck, Bluefin’s technology will help pave the way for the next generation of ratings.
More About: analytics, Bluefin Labs, real-time clickstream tracking, social tv, social tv analytics, television
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