SocialGuide Launches Daily Ranking of Most Social TV Fare

Also offers monthly and week rankings of networks, programs and sporting events that get the most activity on social networks during airtime

George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/11/2011 12:53:52 PM

SocialGuide has launched a daily raking of the top programs, networks and sporting events based on the social media activity that takes places while the show is airing.

The Brooklyn, N.Y. based tech start-up had been quietly offering monthly and weekly rankings of the top shows and networks for May and June and the launch of daily rankings is part of an ongoing effort to expand their coverage of the social activity around TV shows. The rankings are available at www.socialguide.com/social100.

The rankings are built on what founder and CEO Sean Casey calls an "intelligent social TV recognition system that takes U.S. TV listing data from Tribune Media Services" and tracks the Twitter activity with every show that airs on around 160 of the most popular broadcast and cable networks.

"Since January we have collected about 90 million social TV comments from about 9 million unique users," Casey explained in an interview.

For consumers, the company has a web site (www.socialguide.com) as well as mobile apps for iPhones and Android phones that were launched in late June.

The consumer apps allow users to log in and see a list of the currently airing top ranked shows in terms of social media activity. The app also shows where the shows are airing on in their multichannel provider's programming line-up.

In addition, SocialGuide's Social Programing Guide allows users to follow three different feeds: a feed with all the tweets during the show; a feed of tweets just from their friends; and a third feed of tweets from cast and team members of the programs and sporting events being tracked.

"It is a very unique way to find and discover programming," Casey notes.

Looking forward the company is hoping to build on its Social Programming Guide and the rankings of social media usage it currently provided to consumers, with a B-to-B data product targeted to networks and advertisers that will be launched this fall.

"The Social 100 data is consumer facing but we will be launching a data product with a full dashboard for networks and advertisers that will allow them to get deep into the data we are collecting around these shows," Casey notes. "This will provide them with a very interesting metric that will provide them with a measurement of what level of social engagement is going on around their TV shows. It offers a cross-section of the activity around the Twitter user base and shows what younger people who are into social media are watching and talking about. We think that is a very interesting demographic that is highly sought after by advertisers and networks."

SocialGuide tracks Twitter feeds one hour before and two hours after the program airs but the rankings are based only on the activity that is going on during the show because that period is the most important for networks and sponsors in terms of advertising revenue.

"The live viewer is what is driving the ratings and the advertising and that is how the networks are making money," Casey notes.

At the moment, most shows haven't developed strategies for expanding social media usage or better tracking the social media data that might help them better promote their content. But Casey says that shows like The Voice, which has a well-developed social media strategy, have seen a payoff in both social media interaction and ratings.

"I think we will see a big push in the fall," he adds. "This is going to be the biggest fall season yet for social media and I think over the next 12 months the networks are really going to embrace it and find ways to more effectively use it to drive behavior."