The News. We are excited to announce the launch of SocialGuide Intelligence. SocialGuide Intelligence (SGI) is the first – and only – social TV analytics and audience engagement platform in the marketplace. An enterprise level, web-based data solution, SGI allows networks, agencies and brands to harness the power of social TV.
SGI’s charter client is A&E Networks who will utilize the service on behalf of its A&E, History, Lifetime, Biography and its other properties.
SGI delivers daily, weekly, and monthly social TV reports for every program aired across 215 of the most popular US broadcast and cable television channels. We also provide the most comprehensive social TV ratings across these 215 channels, measuring the social activity for every program type and every program air. Also, SGI is the only social TV analytics product in the marketplace that can be used to identify and engage with key comments and the social influencers of every network and program.
Why SGI? SocialGuide’s DNA, and approach to social TV, is unique. Our background is both in technology and TV. We recognize that the value of social TV information does not lie in ratings and graphs alone. Social is an audience. The need to understand and activate that audience is important to many groups across an organization. SGI was built to be used not only in research, but also in social, digital, marketing, sales, research and production departments.
SGI gives visibility to the social audience – and their social conversations – and allows that information to be actionable.
Coming Up. We have many product features on our SGI roadmap and look forward to sharing more details closer to their launch. In the mean time, if you’d like to learn more about SGI and get a demo of the product, please email us at sgi@socialguide.com or explore SGI.
As 2011 comes to a close, we thought we’d share our year-end look at SocialGuide’s Most Social TV & Movies. Using our Intelligent Social Recognition System that captures the real-time conversations around air-time we bring you the top 5 most buzzed about networks, series, specials, sports events, and movies (box office) of 2011 (May-Dec).
At SocialGuide, 2011 was the year of methodology & capture. Our methodology includes dynamic technology, smart editorial, and structured accounting of social activity for every program category (new, repeat) and every program type. This year alone we have captured more than 225M Social TV Comments from 17M Uniques and have matched these comments to more than 37K TV Programs – making SocialGuide the most comprehensive social TV capture service in the marketplace. To see the full archive of our public reporting, since May, please visit Social 100.
In 2012 we’re entering the next phase of our measurement business: insights and analytics. We’ll be helping networks, brands, and agencies understand the social impact of linear TV and provide them with a platform to identify and interact with their social influencers. We look forward to sharing more news about this in the next few weeks.
SocialGuide CEO and Founder Sean Casey presented, along with a great lineup of companies and speakers, at today’s sold out Social TV Summit. The Summit focused on emerging trends and approaches to the social TV space.
Sean spoke on the Social TV Research panel where he shared SocialGuide’s approach and view of social TV data capture and analytics. Below are the slides he presented. If you’d like a copy of the presentation email us at info@socialguide.com. Or if you’d like to watch his opening remarks, head to Snappy TV for the clip.
Deloitte predicts there will be a billion tweets about TV in 2011. We’re excited to be a part of the social TV conversation and look forward to bringing our social TV solutions to the marketplace. More on those soon!
Facebook just announced some sweeping changes, among them “frictionless” sharing for viewers of Hulu and Netflix. Once you install these apps on your Facebook page, anything you watch on those services is automatically shared on your real-time ticker, e.g. “Sean is watching 30 Rock on Hulu.” Friends can click through to watch the same episode with you, and chat live on Facebook while you watch. This is a massive leap forward in the concept of “social TV” — or is it? It depends on your definition of “social TV.”
From a “social as sharing” standpoint this will certainly be huge. But will this affect consumers’ linear TV consumption and will these sharing features lead to a rise in non-linear co-viewing? Both are unclear.
Here’s our view – if serendipity strikes, a friend out of however-many-you-have on Facebook may choose to watch and chat about that same episode of “30 Rock” on Hulu with you at that very moment. What are the odds? At best, this is a “micro-social” TV experience. The big, proven potential of social TV still lies with linear TV, where there is an opportunity to create social television experiences among large groups of people.
Linear TV still dominates viewing consumption. Nielsen says the average American consumes 35+ hours of linear TV per week compared to 2 hours 25 minutes of time-shifted TV and 33 minutes of video on the web. Every marketer will agree that linear TV is unique in its ability to attract large and sustained audiences.
And with social media, linear TV has gotten even more engaging. Today more than two-thirds of viewers are on a “second screen” while watching TV. Over the last several years, social media has created a new shared viewing experience, cultivating passionate audiences for shows like Glee and True Blood and driving viewership for events like the MTV Video Music Awards and The Oscars. Deloitte predicts that more than 1 billion TV-related tweets will be sent in 2011 – you’re missing half the fun if you’re not engaging on two screens.
This is significant for networks and marketers because people watching linear TV and using social media are highly engaged viewers. The more they share via social networks, the more they influence their social graph, potentially driving tune-in and ratings. Socially engaged viewers are powerful influencers. We believe that fostering social experiences around linear TV provides the greatest benefits to the television audience, networks and marketers.
Originally published in MediaPost on Thursday October 20th. Click here to view the article.
Here at SocialGuide, we believe in looking at social comments happening around TV shows as they are airing. Why? Because this is where real social TV is occurring. And Twitter agrees: “a good percentage of the 90 million tweets per day are television related with Twitter peak times happening during real-time broadcast TV prime time.”
Since January 1st, 2011 we’ve monitored and stored 90 million comments from 9 million unique people for 18,000 unique television shows.
So what do we consider to be a social TV comment? Well there are the “check-in” services where people can check into shows whether or not that program is airing. This only represents about 1% of social TV comments that are shared. The next largest group is what we consider to be “Twitter check-ins,” which is when people use explicit words or abbreviations around the shows they are viewing (e.g. “I’m Watching Glee” and “#NW American Idol.”) But, far and away, the largest pool (89%) of comments about TV are what we call “implicit” comments. This is where we come in.
SocialGuide has created an Intelligent Social Television Recognition System that dynamically recognizes all the ways people are being social around a TV show. This includes program names, a program’s social abbreviation(s), and other common natural language that is used to describe a TV show. We’ve also inputted thousands of cast members and athletes’ Twitter accounts so that @replies directed to these stars are included in this data as well. For example, if someone at replys @KimKardashian while “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is on air, we consider this to be a social TV comment.
We are committed to capturing comments around air-time and we will continue to evolve our system so that we can bring forth the most relevant social TV content and data.
If you have questions about our methodology, we’d love to hear from you.
We’ve actually been live with our beta since March, but because we’ve been hustling to get our products rolled out, we’re only now ready to get our blog on. Better late than never, right? Thanks for your patience.
At SocialGuide, we’ve had the pleasure of immersing ourselves in the social conversations that people are having about TV. And there are a lot of them. This year we’ve seen over 85 million comments by nearly 9 million unique people. And this behavior is likely to increase. Studies show that of the 300 million Americans who watch TV, 60.4% of them are on a mobile device while they watch.
So a lot of people are being social, but as a TV fan, how do you make sense of all of this activity? That’s where SocialGuide comes in.
SocialGuide is a social TV platform. We know the shows that are airing across the country, on every cable and satellite system. We then identify, capture and filter the millions of comments that people make about TV shows – as these shows air. From this activity we do a few things:
• We’ve created the first real-time, “Social Programming Guide” or SocialGuide, which ranks shows on your TV system in order of their social popularity. Think of it as a crowd sourced TV listings guide. You no longer have to go to your cable guide and scroll endlessly though the channel listings trying to find something to watch. SocialGuide will tell you what shows, along with their channel numbers, are trending right now.
• We’ve created the ultimate social show companion to use while you watch your favorite shows or sporting events. From the SocialGuide, click on any trending show to see the real-time social activity around that episode or live event. As a default, you can see what “Everyone” is saying about this program – see funny comments or find new people to follow. Or if you’d prefer, view the “Friends” stream so you can see what your friends are watching and talking about. We’ve also added thousands of Twitter accounts into our Cast & Team stream – so you can follow what the stars and athletes are tweeting as the event happens. It’s easy to tell people what you are watching and easily join in the conversation.
• For those with an iPhone or Android device, we’ve released our SocialGuide App. Now you can get SocialGuide and the all filtered social streams – on your mobile device. You can read more about our app features and download it here.
• Finally, we’ve launched the Social 100. This is our social ratings product, and the first public ranking of the 100 Most Social Programs, Episodes, Primetime, Sports Events and Networks. This gives TV fans, and the television and media industry, a new standard for monitoring the social activity around Television. We’ll be following up with more info on the Social 100 so stay tuned.
We’re just getting started but we think we’re really on to something. Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that we’re alone in our positive thinking. We’ve been thrilled by coverage about SocialGuide in TechCrunch, Lost Remote, MultiChannel News, SocialTimes, GigaOM, All things Digital, and The Los Angeles Times. Here’s more of our recent press. Equally exciting, we were named on of one of the “10 NYC Start Ups to Watch” by the editors of Time Inc.
Our imaginations have been captivated by the witty, funny, thoughtful and sometimes bizarre and even outrageous comments that millions of people have shared about their favorite TV shows. We’re seeing more and more of this activity – and are just getting started in creating great products around it.
Thanks for reading and we hope you continue to track our progress. We love feedback. Use our Feedback link (on any page) or comment below.
Team SocialGuide
@Social_Guide
