TV goes social… but does TV get social?

A series of blogs about the broadcast industry, narrated by David Brennan…

When the social media boom first emerged around three years ago, I attended several conferences where the phrase “word of mouth is the new television” was bandied about with hardly a murmur (apart from my good self). It is patently nonsense and completely fails to recognise that, far from being in competition, television plus social media is a match made in heaven.

In fact, television has always been social. We implicitly understood the phrase ‘water-cooler television’ before we even knew what a water cooler actually was.

Television has provided us with conversation and social fuel since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation (Gawd bless ‘er!) sixty years ago. It just took the phenomenon of the social web to force us to recognise how powerful a force our social networks and conversations could be within a media and marketing context.

So, it was no surprise when the broadcasters began to embrace social media; after all, the other ‘disruptive’ forces had been far more benign than any of the experts had predicted and social media could hardly be any less so. TV programmes began to promote their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and audiences liked, followed, commented and shared.

A recent Nielsen study in the USA shows that social media activity is a very good predictor of a programme’s success. Conducted last year among young US adults, the study shows a clear correlation between ‘buzz’ metrics and ratings across 250 shows, with the biggest impact coming at the beginning of the series when initial interest starts to build.

This relationship is particularly effective for reality shows and event television, but can also be applied to drama, current affairs, comedy and documentary programmes, to name but a few.

As a result, most TV broadcasters have social media experts integrated into the programme teams nowadays, rather than being isolated in the ‘digital’ department. That is all for the good. However, there is a real danger that the whole social TV phenomenon could become over-hyped and I think the broadcasters themselves are sometimes guilty of overplaying it for its own sake.

I have also seen similar studies to the Nielsen one that have reported little correlation between social media activity and programme ratings, apart from the very beginning of a series, and viewing soon declines if the show itself doesn’t live up to the hype.

There has been a suggestion that it is the big programmes with the more indifferent audience appeal that have been over-promoted via social media, in much the same way that crap pop records used to be prioritised by music industry ‘pluggers’ to make up for an expected shortfall in their performance. That is a dangerous route to take.

There have been some disturbing signs recently of the social TV trend overwhelming the viewing experience in some TV programmes. For example, some of the presenter announcements in reality shows (especially the spin-offs such as The Xtra Factor) have become almost unwatchable as they refer to the myriad ways in which viewers can like, share or comment on the programme’s content. They often remind me of those financial ads with the twenty second long disclaimers crammed into a thirty second ad. Pointless and irritating.

I really felt this when I was watching Sky One’s Got To Dance semi-finals last weekend with my family. After each act performed, Davina McCall would read out one or two (usually bland and predictable) comments from the viewers via Twitter or Facebook, before going to the judges. Now, I happen to think the judging panel in Got to Dance is one of the most informed, enthusiastic and likeable set of judges on television, so why they have to be prefaced with meaningless comments from average punters is beyond me. It certainly feels like an intrusion into the programme itself. When one particularly meaningless comment came up in support of one of the lesser acts, my 12 year old son piped up with “What would they know? They’re just a bunch of randoms anyway”. I couldn’t help but agree with him.

I think the TV companies are still primarily seeing ‘social TV’ as a broadcast experience; viewers send in their comments and they will curate and broadcast the best of them. Real social TV will be about the viewers participating and sharing in a much more direct and less hierarchical way. App-based products such as Zeebox, enabling social media around TV content rather than within it, is the way forward and early signs are encouraging. But, although TV content is going social, there are few signs – on screen at least – that it is getting social.