Nielsen's New Social Media Measurements

No matter how much influence television continues to lose, it's still the top advertising medium and will be for some time to come. That said, more and more people watch television along with a computer or tablet - the so-called "second screen." Now the powerhouse ratings service Nielsen (who recently bought their long-time competitor Arbitron) has acknowledged the fact by announcing that they'll be instituting a new metric called the "Nielsen Twitter TV ratings" that measures the social media activity of a TV show audience.

A while back Nielsen acquired a company called SocialGuide, and it's their technology that will be used to track the Twitter activity for more than 36,000 programs. The trick is that it's even capable to identify tweets that are associated with a specific show, which seems to be no easy task. The company didn't provide many details on how the service would be implemented, but did say that it would begin for the Fall 2013 season.

The second screen is becoming more and more of an issue for all marketing. Google recently did a study where they found that over 90 percent of people who owned multiple devices tended to use them simultaneously, but it's not necessarily only for social media. Plain old Internet search is also a major second screen activity when watching television.

I have to admit that I won't watch TV without an iPad anymore, but most of the time I use it to search for background information on what I'm watching. Regardless of the reason you use your second screen, advertisers see this as a major marketing opening. The problem is how to do it, which no one has figured out yet. In the meantime, enjoy watching both your screens.

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Audio As A QR Code

One of the more interesting aspects of the Superbowl was the fact that Shazam, the 4rth most popular iOS app of all time, led something of a breakthrough in the world social promotion. The company ingeniously tagged the audio during the superbowl so you could automatically link to sponsors websites if you listened using the Shazam app. For want of a better term, it was an audio QR code.

If you don't know about Shazam, it's a great app that will listen to a song, then tell you its name. That makes adding an audio tag to the music played during the Superbowl so that you can link to a sponsor just an extension of what the app does anyway.

The list of sponsors included Toyota, Best Buy, Cars.com, Pepsi, Teleflora, GE, and movies Act of Valor and John Carter. Plus during halftime, a partnership between Bud Light and Interscope allowed listeners/viewers to unlock exclusive content from Interscope artists.

This venture into audio tagging is a significant development for a number of reasons. First of all, this opens up a host of opportunities for artists in the future. Imagine people automatically directed to your website as they're listening to your song without having to do a Google search first. On the television side, this opened up what's known as the "Second Screen" experience, where what you're accessing on your computer is just an extension of the television show that you're watching.

I always thought that accessing a QR code was anything but a sleek experience, since it always seems to take a number of snapshots from your camera to get one that registers. Audio tagging is so much easier, and let's face it, convenience always wins with the public.

Who would've thought that the biggest sporting event (really one of the biggest events period) could be such a step into the future of promotion?

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.