Archive for the ‘tv’ tag
This Week in Social Analytics #43
It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for This Week in Social Analytics and our favorite posts of the past week in the world of measurement, analytics, and social media. See a great piece we missed? Link to it in the comments!
4-in-5 Americans multitask while watching TV [from Marketing Charts]
“Significant numbers of consumers around the world are indeed using their mobile devices to discuss TV programs on social networks as they watch them, even if Americans appear to be behind the curve in that regard.”
Why data without a soul is meaningless [from GigaOM; written by Om Malik]
“What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”
5 Digital Marketing Insights from a New Gartner Study [from Social Media Today; written by Chris Horton]
“When asked which three digital marketing activities are most important to their success, the marketers surveyed listed a corporate website, digital advertising, and a presence on social media.”
Link to Gartner study here.
Global media consumption: the digital reality [from The Global Web Index]
“GLOBAL TIME SPENT: Digital is 57% of daily media time. Social 48% of online.”
People Try to Put us D-down, Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Reputation – Part 2: Understanding and Acting on What You’ve Discovered [from Social Media Explorer; written by Jim Berkowitz]
Understand and act on what you’ve discovered from listening, as discussed in Part 1 on this topic.
The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management [from the KISSMetrics blog; written by Daniele Virgillito]
An outline of the concepts and steps involved in monitoring your reputation online.
ABC’s Once Upon a Time premieres to big ratings on TV and on Twitter
Up next in our series of posts about what Twitter can tell us about new fall TV is an analysis of the most recent show to premiere, ABC’s Once Upon a Time. What did Twitter think of ABC’s new fairy tale drama? Let’s find out!
One of the last shows to premiere this fall season, Once Upon a Time aired for the first time on Sunday. Its premiere episode got really great ratings, garnering 12.8 million viewers and scoring a 3.9 rating in the desired 18-49 demo. To put that in context, TV|Line writes:
Once‘s tallies represent almost double what Extreme Makeover: Home Edition last did in the Sundays-at-8 slot. In fact, it’s ABC’s biggest audience in the time period with regular programming since March 2008 and its best 18-49 performance there in three years.
So, according to traditional TV audience ratings, the premiere of Once Upon a Time was a huge success for ABC. But what did the Twitterverse think? Were the Twitter ratings as high as the Nielsen ratings?
On Sunday, October 23, 2011 (the day of the first episode’s premier), 14,353 tweets about the show from 12,033 different people generated a reach of 6.55 million. Those are terrific numbers, with lots and lots of unique contributors, a healthy tweet volume, and an impressive reach. For comparison, here are the numbers for the premieres of two similar ABC shows (all three are hour-long dramas).
While Pan Am generated nearly twice as many tweets as Once Upon a Time on its first day, those tweets were posted by a smaller group of people and generated a much smaller reach. Revenge, which has already been picked up for a full season on ABC, generated fewer tweets, but had a very large reach. The size of both the contributor pool and the audience for those contributors’ tweets (as measured by reach) can tell us a great deal about a show’s popularity, particularly if we watch how these metrics trend over time. Take these graphs for recent tweets about ABC’s Pan Am and Revenge, showing tweets from 9/14 through 10/22, encompassing the first five episodes of both shows. 
The spiky green graph represents tweet volume by day for each show, with large spikes on the day the show airs on television. The blue area represents weekly reach for each show. While the scales for the two shows differ, you can see a steady and alarming decline in both reach and tweet volume for Pan Am, after some initial interest during the first two shows. In contrast, Revenge seems to be picking up steam recently and is settling in to a solid pattern. (Note that reach plummets for both graphs on the right because the current week has just started, so weekly reach data is incomplete.)
But back to Once Upon a Time. Sure, the metrics for its first show look good, but what do the tweets about it actually say? Here are a few of the most-retweeted tweets.
Generally, most tweets with any opinion included a similar positive sentiment. It’s still very, very early – the show only premiered yesterday – but these tweets are definitely a good start. And of course, not everyone loved the show. Below are a few examples of less-than-glowing reviews. But even most of the popular negative sentiment tweets weren’t really all that negative, which is certainly a good sign (compare that to tweets about the now-canceled Playboy Club, which saw lots of highly negative tweets).
So, we’ll keep an eye on this show as it finds its footing in ABC’s Sunday night lineup. It’s still way too early to decide if this show will eventually get the axe or not, but based on early reactions, I predict that ABC will keep it around, at least for now (and based on that graph above, it’s probably safe to bet that Pan Am will be canceled soon). We’ll see how both shows do over the next few weeks.
Did you watch Once Upon a Time? What did you think?
Will FOX cancel Terra Nova?
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.
But to be fair, not all of the Twitterverse had bad things to say about the show. Drew Carey’s positive review went out to his 627,000 followers and gained a spot as one of the highest exposure tweets about the show.
Jared English, founder of the incredibly popular celebrity gossip blog, JustJared.com, also had far-reaching kind words for the dino-thriller.
But what does it all mean anyway? For an expensive show like Terra Nova, my guess is a lot. A thumbs up or thumbs down from any one of these influential tweeters could very easily result in the loss or gain of hundreds of thousands (or in some cases, millions) of viewers. While various reports show that Terra Nova’s ratings have been “respectable,” there’s no getting around the fact that it is up against some stiff competition, including ABC’s ratings behemoth, Dancing with the Stars.
It just depends on what FOX executives are looking for. The network recently picked up its new comedy series, New Girl starring Zooey Deschanel, for a full season. While the budget of this good-natured, apartment-based comedy is probably a tenth of Terra Nova’s (and also generated far fewer tweets and tweeters), New Girl has reached nearly two million more Twitter users during its time on the air.
There’s still time for Terra Nova (at least 10 more episodes), but my guess is that, unless it gains a devoted following (quickly), FOX is going to stop paying the bills and its 13th episode will probably be its last.
Do you think Terra Nova is headed for extinction? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
First fall TV show cancellations – The Playboy Club and Free Agents
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.