TweetReach Blog

By now you’ve probably seen one of our posts about this season’s new fall TV shows. For a few weeks, we’ve been using TweetReach to track tweets about all 25 new shows (we’re down to 22 now), and using the tweets to try to predict which ones will be canceled. And we thought it would be fun to bring a guest blogger who knows even more about TV than we do to help make predictions.

So, welcome Adam Rucker to the TweetReach blog! Adam’s been blogging and making videos about TV and pop culture for a long time. He’s even appeared on TV a few times. Here on our blog, Adam will sharing some of his – and Twitter’s – thoughts on new fall shows. And if you like what you see here, you can find Adam on Twitter at @ruckermore, on his YouTube channel, and on his blog. 

This week, Adam takes on FOX’s new show, Terra Nova. Will it be canceled? Let’s see what Adam thinks!

One of the biggest bets of the fall season is the one FOX took on its new sci-fi series Terra Nova. The show, which begins in the year 2149, stars Jason O’Mara as the head of a family that travels 75 million years into the past to live amongst the dinosaurs in “Terra Nova.”

The premise of the show is exciting in nature: super director Steven Spielberg produces the time-traveling mix of Lost, Jurassic Park, and Avatar. It’s also the most expensive new show in production this year with a pilot that cost a rumored $20 million to create and subsequent episodes that cost around $4 million each.

Unlike most shows, FOX ordered 13 episodes of Terra Nova when the original pilot was greenlit, meaning it’s unlikely that FOX will pull the plug on the show before it shows all the episodes it’s already paid for. Still, it is the viewer response to these episodes that will determine if FOX decides to continue pouring money into its investment or fill Terra Nova’s valuable Monday night time slot with another spinoff of Hell’s Kitchen starring Gordon Ramsay.

So what is the Twitter world saying about the big budget drama? In its first week on the air, Terra Nova generated nearly 90,000 tweets from more than 50,000 contributors reaching about 18.2 million people, which is nearly 10 million more than reached the recently cancelled Playboy Club (12K tweets from 9K contributors, with a reach of 8.6 million). Interestingly, the several weeks since the premiere haven’t generated much more attention for the show. In total, 111,000 tweets have reached 20.7 million pairs of eyes. But the attention doesn’t mean anything if it’s bad attention.

A look at the top four highest exposure tweets includes three from Entertainment Weekly linking to articles on the show, but number four is a simple review from English television host, Jonathan Ross:

This tweet was retweeted 111 times, reaching even further beyond @wossy’s own 1.2 million followers.

A tweet by E!’s television critic, Kristin Dos Santos, mocking the show’s inferiority to one of her favorites, Lost, reached her 73,000 followers and was retweeted 28 times.

Personally, I wasn’t a huge fan of the show either. Despite the big bucks spent on production, it came off as cheap and even cheesy in some parts.

This week, NBC announced that it’s canceling both The Playboy Club and Free Agents. So, our question is, did the tweet numbers predict this? The answer is a resounding yes in the case of Free Agents, but in the case of The Playboy Club, the answer is slightly less obvious.

In its first week on the air, The Playboy Club garnered more than 12K tweets from 9K contributors, generating a reach of more than 8.6 million. And during the last three weeks, there have been more than 36K tweets posted about the show. These are not insignificant numbers; The Playboy Club consistently fell in the middle of our rankings based on volume, reach and contributors. But the picture looks less rosy when we dig into some of the tweets about the show and who’s posting them.

@HughHefner and other Playboy-affiliated accounts drove much of the conversation about the show. Hefner tweeted 30 times in three weeks about it, generating 22% of all tweet impressions about The Playboy Club. Other popular tweets called The Playboy Club a poor imitation of Mad Men and made jokes about not watching it. More than 8K tweets were posted the day the show was canceled, making it the highest volume day so far for the show. That’s probably not a good sign – more people talked about the show being canceled than the show’s premiere.

As for Free Agents, it was one of the three shows we discussed last week as a sure bet for early cancellation. It didn’t receive much attention on Twitter, only generating 8,900 total tweets over three weeks. And the little conversation it did spark was pretty lukewarm – no one seemed to love it and no one seemed to hate it – and even the cast seemed to sense the show would be canceled. Here’s a tweet from the show’s leading actor, @HankAzaria:

So, really, no surprises there. And now we wonder, what show will be canceled next? Will it be FOX’s big and boring Terra Nova? Some of the quieter CBS shows like A Gifted Man or Unforgettable? Or will it be one of CW’s relative duds like H8R or Ringer? We’ll know soon, and we’ll keep you posted.

Today, Apple held a 90-minute event announcing their new iPhone and operating system upgrades. We tracked 319K tweets about the iPhone event, generating a reach of 40.3 million and 522 million impressions, from more than 175K different Twitter accounts.

Here’s a quick graph of tweet traffic during the iPhone event (graph times are in CDT). The first big spike hit 11,200 tweets per minute (tpm) at the announcement of iOS 5 coming to devices on October 12. The second major spike happened when the new iPhone 4S was officially announced, hitting 13,000 tweets per minute. During the 90-minute presentation, tweet volume was sustained well above 4,000 tpm. That’s pretty huge, if you’re wondering.

The most retweeted tweets were typically sarcastic comments about the new phone or detailed updates from the event. Here are the top two tweets in terms of retweets (with 845 and 786 retweets, respectively).

Overall, the accounts that generated the most exposure were news and media accounts live-tweeting the event and sharing updates from the presentation, including @mashable, @TIME, and @nytimes.

Finally, here’s overall tweet activity for the entire day of October 4. 148,205 tweets were posted during the first hour (10:00 a.m. PDT) of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event. 

So far, 20 of this fall’s 25 new network shows have aired. We’ve been tracking tweets about all 25 shows for more than two weeks and today it’s time to check in with our data and see how the shows are doing. I’m going to take my first guesses at which new shows will be cancelled this season, based on a few of our standard quantitative TweetReach metrics. A few caveats before we begin, however…

First, since these shows premiered and air at different times, these initial metrics will be somewhat biased towards the shows that began the earliest in the season. In the next few weeks, this advantage will disappear, but for now, take these numbers with a grain or two of salt. Consider them directional indicators for now. And I’m not including stats for the five shows that haven’t aired at the time of posting. Second, different networks have different audience and revenue expectations from their shows. So just because one show has a smaller reach does not mean it’s less successful than a show with a larger reach on a different network or targeted to a different audience. Finally, this week’s predictions are based on numbers only – we’ll get into the more qualitative and content-based data next week. A terrible show can still generate nearly as much conversation on Twitter as a really good one, and we’ll sort out some of those distinctions in future posts.

So, on to the predictions! I’m going to try a few different models this week to get started. I’ll update these predictions next week when we have more data.

Cancel the lowest performing show on each network, based on reach:

• ABC – Suburgatory* (14.1M)
• CBS – A Gifted Man (3.0M)
• CW – Ringer (6.0M)
• FOX – Terra Nova (16.5M)
• NBC – Free Agents (3.3M)

*ABC still has three shows yet to air, so any of them could take over the lead in this position. Also, Suburgatory premiered just last night, so it could easily catch up to its peers in the next week or two.

Cancel the overall lowest performers, based on tweet volume:

1. CW – H8R (1K tweets)
2. CBS – A Gifted Man (3K tweets)
3 (tie). CW – Ringer, NBC – Free Agents, NBC – Prime Suspect (5K tweets)
4. CBS – Unforgettable (6K tweets)
5. ABC – Suburgatory (8K tweets)

Cancel the shows with the fewest people talking about them, based on unique contributors:

1. CW – H8R (<1K)
2. CBS – A Gifted Man (2K)
3 (tie). CW – Ringer (3K), NBC – Free Agents (3K)
4. NBC – Prime Suspect (4K)
5. ABC – Suburgatory (6K)
6. NBC – Whitney (7K)

Based on these three lists, I’d consider A Gifted Man, Free Agents, and Ringer pretty sure bets for cancellation. They show up in all three categories. (I’m giving Suburgatory one more week before we count it out, since it just started yesterday and the others have had more time to generate conversation.) And it’s not looking good for H8R or Prime Suspect either.

Finally, since I’d hate to end this post without saying something about the shows that are doing well on Twitter, here’s a few stats about some of the top performing shows.

The top five shows that seem safe, based on highest reach: 

1. X Factor (37.3M)
2. New Girl (21.5M)
3. Charlie’s Angels (19.6M)
4. Revenge (17.3M)
5. Terra Nova (16.5)**

**While Terra Nova is FOX’s lowest performing show so far (it’s competing against the X Factor and New Girl), it still has a higher reach than most of the other shows.

The top five shows that seem safe, based on unique contributors: 

1. FOX – X Factor (73K)
2. FOX – New Girl (40K)
3. FOX – Terra Nova (37K)
4. ABC – Revenge (26K)
5. ABC – Pan Am (25K)

We just learned that FOX’s New Girl was picked up for a full season. Based on the tweets, that seems like a good choice. It’s also looking pretty good for NBC’s Up All Night, CW’s The Secret Circle and Hart of Dixie, and CBS’ 2 Broke Girls, but I wouldn’t count my predictive chickens before they hatch. We’ll see what the tweets can tell us after another week of these shows.

So, what do you think? Have you seen any of these shows? Do these lists ring true with your experience? Tell us which shows you think will be cancelled (or picked up) in the comments.

Until next week, happy watching!

Recently, TweetReach customer Exposed PR, along with C&I Studios, ran a very creative promotion with their client IKEA. We love to highlight interesting – and successful – PR campaigns, so read on for more about this cool promotion.

In July, Exposed PR and C&I Studios teamed up with IKEA to organize an in-store scavenger hunt with an online twist. Called Capture the Catalog, this promotion pitted 11 teams against each other in a scavenger hunt at the IKEA store in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Teams competed to complete a set of tasks in the store, and tweeted about their achievements as they went, trying to get as many retweets as possible. The teams were competing to see who could generate the most impressions on Twitter in 90 minutes. Exposed PR used TweetReach to track these tweets and measure each team’s impressions. They generated more than 8 million impressions in just an hour and half, reaching more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts!

We talked to Sara Shake of Exposed PR, one of the creators of this promotion, to understand more about where this clever idea came from and how everything went.

First, tell us a little about the IKEA Capture the Catalog Tournament. What was the goal of this promotion?

The goal of the Ikea promotion was to launch their 2012 Catalog. As a company, Ikea has a few different times throughout the year that are extremely important, and their catalog launch is the biggest. We wanted a creative way to get the word out that didn’t include the typical Media Day festivities that they had done in the past.

How did you come up with the idea for this promotion?

I share my office with a company called C&I Studios. It’s not unusual for us at the end of the day to start speaking in terms of “What If.” Once we’ve completed all the work for the day, we always try to spend sometime just brainstorming without the limitations of the clients that we currently service. We don’t think about location or budget, we just bounce ideas until something sticks. We call these ideas our 5 O’Clock Miracles.

This idea came largely from my frequent frustration with traditional media… We (Joshua Miller from C&I Studios and I) thought there has to be a better way to get the word out, without the help of traditional media. Then we thought about how competition drives people. The original concept was Capture the Flag (which is where Capture the Catalog came from), but it evolved into a scavenger hunt. We knew we needed a forward-thinking brand to latch onto the idea…and this was just about the time that you started hearing about Ikea letting the cats loose in Sweden. We said “We need a brand like Ikea!” We were lucky enough to have one in the neighborhood, so we just called.

How did you decide who won?

The first-place winner was the team with the highest number of impressions of their unique hash tag during the 90-minute scavenger hunt.

What role did TweetReach play in this promotion?

TweetReach was instrumental in the Capture the Catalog tournament. We were able to set up a Tracker to live-track every team’s (there were 11) hashtag throughout the tournament. This way we were able to make announcements like, “So and so is in the lead with 350,000 impressions.” We also announced every time that we reached another million impressions of the combined hashtags. We took snapshot reports for each hashtag at the end of the tournament and that’s how we determined the winner.

What would you change for next time?

We would just find a way to make it bigger and better.

What went well? Was there anything you were particularly proud of?

We were really proud of the teams; they went all out. It was also an amazing experience to work with Ikea as a brand. They believed and bought into the vision, and took it to an entirely different level. From the graphics and signage they produced, to the staff that manned each clue, to the prize that they provided to our winners, it was totally refreshing to work with a brand that didn’t cut a single corner. They were exceptionally thoughtful down to the last detail.

What did IKEA think?

They loved it! In a Miami Herald article about the event, Chantal Nichtawitz, marking manager at Ikea Sunrise, said, “We were certain that the event drove traffic to the store. That Saturday we had one of the biggest Saturdays we’ve seen in over a calendar year.”

Do you have any recommendations or tips for someone running their own promotion or contest on Twitter?

The key is finding the right brand and participants.

You can follow Exposed PR, C&I Studios, and the IKEA Sunrise store on Twitter.

At TweetReach, we’ve tracked a lot of tweets about television, from special events like the Oscars, the Golden Globes and the Super Bowl, to regular weekly episodes of many of your favorite shows. That’s because we (and our customers) know that Twitter can tell us a lot about what an audience thinks about a show, from how much viewers tweet about a show, to when they tweet about it, to what they actually tweet about. There’s a lot we can learn about a TV program’s success just by analyzing the tweets about it.

So we thought it would be fun to track this fall’s 25 new shows on the five big broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC) to see what Twitter thinks about them. But we’re not content to just rank Twitter’s favorite shows. Oh no. Inspired by the New York Times’ Fall TV Season Ratings Pool and based on Twitter chatter, we’re going to predict what new fall shows will be canceled.

Want to play along? Leave your predictions in the comments. Which new shows do you think will be canceled? Or, even better, which new shows do you wish they’d cancel?

We’ll be posting throughout the fall with our updates, predictions and conclusions (and maybe we’ll even feature some special guests along the way!). For reference, here’s a list of the new fall shows, ordered by network.

ABC

• Charlie’s Angels
• Last Man Standing
• Man Up
• Once Upon a Time
• Pan Am
• Revenge
• Suburgatory

CBS

• 2 Broke Girls
• A Gifted Man
• How to Be a Gentleman
• Person of Internet
• Unforgettable

CW

• H8R
• Hart of Dixie
• Ringer
• The Secret Circle

FOX

• New Girl
• Terra Nova
• X Factor

NBC

• Free Agents
• Grimm
• Prime Suspect
• The Playboy Club
• Up All Night
• Whitney

We worked with ESPN to measure Twitter’s reaction to this year’s X Games 17, held in Los Angeles, California from July 28-31, 2011. Hundreds of athletes from 17 countries competed in sports like skateboarding, motocross, BMX and rally car racing. And over the four days of the X Games, 97,200 people tweeted 188,813 times, generating an impressive reach of 37.7 million*.

How’d they do it?

“Our goal going in was to make the event as social as possible,” says Mick Kelleher, Associate Manager of Multimedia Content Strategy for the X Games. This was a big, integrated effort combining all the ESPN teams responsible for producing the X Games. The TV production team showed the #xgames hashtag frequently during the telecast, included athlete Twitter accounts in on-screen bios as well as showing athlete tweets on air. The social team used the @XGames Twitter account to keep their followers on Twitter up to date on all the events. The social integration even went all the way to the event site, where they encouraged fans attending the Games to tweet.

The results

ESPN used TweetReach Pro Trackers to comprehensively track and analyze all mentions of the X Games on Twitter for the week leading up to the event and during the event itself. As you can see below, the strong results of their social strategy speak for themselves.

The most retweeted tweet about the games was from @LilTunechi, which received 905 retweets and generated more than 3 million impressions.

One of the biggest stories to come out of this year’s X Games concerned Travis Pastrana, who broke his ankle and leg in the Moto X Best Trick competition on Thursday, but later competed – and placed fourth – in the RallyCross final on Sunday.

We analyzed tweets about several events in detail, including Moto X Best Trick, Skateboarding Big Air, BMX Park Freestyle, Rally Car Racing, Skateboard Street, and RallyCross. At one point during the RallyCross final, viewers noticed something strange; 200 people tweeted that they spotted The Stig from Top Gear walk behind Brian Deegan during an interview. Here are the big moments from one our favorite X Games 17 days. Click the image for the full size version.

Congrats to all the athletes who competed this year! Thank you for an exciting and action-packed four days at X Games 17.

*Read this for more on how we calculate reach and other metrics. And, are you interested in this kind of analysis for your media event? Let’s talk.

President Obama held his first-ever Twitter Townhall today. For several days, White House staffers have been collecting questions from the public on Twitter. Anyone could contribute a question for the President by just adding the #AskObama hashtag to a tweet.

We followed all the #AskObama tweets during today’s Q&A session. During the hour-long event, we tracked 64,789 tweets from 29,772 contributors with a reach of 35 million. There were more than 161K total tweets posted yesterday with a daily overall reach of 49.5 million. Here’s a word cloud of those tweets (thanks, Wordle!).

We wanted to understand just how many tweets were posted about some of those topics. Nearly a quarter of all questions were related to jobs and unemployment, about 18% related to the economy, 10% about taxes, and 5% about education. Of course, not all questions were about serious topics like jobs and the economy. More than 100 people asked if the president prefers boxers or briefs, and 200 asked the president to bring back Arrested Development (or to hurry the movie along). And there were more than 1,000 retweets of the Nyan Cat.

Finally, here are a few of our favorite less-than-serious questions. We’re still wondering about the answer to the third question ourselves. And of course we all know the answer to that last one.

Here at TweetReach, we’re big fans of the Games of Thrones franchise – the books and the HBO television show. So thought it would be fun to take a look at tweets about last night’s season finale. Here’s a word cloud made from tweets about the show, courtesy of Wordle (click on the picture for full size).

Yesterday, we tracked 253,321 tweets from 160,458 Twitterers about Oprah Winfrey’s final episode of The Oprah Show. The tweets have been pouring in all week. We, along with Resource Interactive, have monitored more than 600,000 tweets about Oprah and her show this week alone. Dozens of celebrities tweeted their congratulations and opinions on Oprah’s last show, including @TheEllenShow, @ricky_martin, @MariahCarey, @RevRunWisdom, @aplusk, @DENISE_RICHARDS, @Alyssa_Milano, @michaelianblack, @kevin_nealon, @kathygriffin, and @AnnCurry.

The Oprah Show aired for most markets at 4:00 p.m. local time. During the 4:00 p.m. hour in EDT, tweets spiked up to 2,500 tweets per minute during the final moments of the show. That’s a sizable spike, but compared to the 2011 Academy Awards (11,780 tpm) or even the Chrysler ‘Imported From Detroit’ Super Bowl commercial (2,816 tpm), it’s not even close to the highest spike we’ve seen for a television event (of course The Oprah Show wasn’t aired live in all markets at the same time, so these aren’t completely equal comparisons).

A few more tidbits from the data:

• 4,511 tweets including references to tears
• 8,001 tweets mentioned crying
• 5,183 tweets referred to feeling sad
• 12 tweets used the phrase “my life is over”

But not everyone was unhappy to see the show end. Many of the most-retweeted tweets were sarcastic remarks or jokes about The Oprah Show. For example, these tweets from @funnyordie (via @robhuebel) and @DamonLindelof received 1,068 and 677 retweets, respectively.

Oprah’s main demographic is women over 35, which isn’t really Twitter’s main demographic. So some of the most popular tweets about Oprah yesterday, like the two above, had nothing to do with the content of the show. But other popular tweets were quotes from the show itself, like these:

Oprah gave out her personal email address – oprah@oprah.com – on air and 1,179 people tweeted about it. She’s probably going to get a lot of emails. Good thing she has the time to read all those now. Just don’t accidentally email Opera.