Social media isn't killing anything, least of all TV.

In fact, after years of declines in live tune-in, Twitter, Facebook and some mobile startups appear to be luring audiences back to appointment TV.  While DVRs unglued us from TV schedules, the desire to tap into the tweets, posts and check-ins in real time may just bring us back.

"If you look at the tweets about a TV show, a huge proportion come from when the show is airing live, not an hour later," said Robin Sloan, who works with Twitter's media-partnership team.  During awards shows such as the Oscars and Grammy's Twitter has seen viewers complain that those events aren't aired live on both coasts.  To appease U.S. fans forced to swear off the internet for a month to save from British tweeters' "Doctor Who" spoilers, the BBC decided to air the show on both continents on the same day.

The most viewed TV event in history, this year's Super Bowl XLV, also broke a record on Twitter, too.  At more than 4,000 tweets per second during the final moments of the game, it had the highest volume of tweets for any sports event.

What's the allure exactly?  The peanut gallery.  When "Seinfeld" was the show du jour, we'd snicker in the office the next day about puffy shirts or Bubble Boy.  Now, with phones and laptops snuggled up next to our viewers on the couch, chatter about "American Idol" and Rachel Berry doesn't have to wait until the morning.

A whopping 86% of U.S. mobile internet users watch TV with their mobile devices, according to a Nielsen and Yahoo study published in January.  Of that set, 40% say they are using the devices for social networking, 33% are using apps and more than half are texting family and friends.  On the wired web with PCs and laptops, 60% of Nielsen panelists reported they simultaneously watched TV and surfed the internet at least once in March.

But chatter doesn't always translate to ratings.  Digital agency Wiredset recently launched social-media tracker Trendrr.TV to rank TV shows based on full-week volume of tweets, Facebook posts and check-ins for GetGlue and Miso, two mobile startups that aim to corral TV chatter.  On that chart, for the same week, "Idol" and "Dancing With The Stars" are top-three social-media shows; they also top Nielsen's list for most viewers.  However, "Glee," while No. 2 on Trendrr.TV, was No. 77 on Nielsen's top-watched broadcast prime-time list for the same week.

While the need to tweet may boost appeal for live programming, is it stealing eyes from commercials as folks tweet during spots?  Not if those advertisers pull in Twitter, too.  During its Super Bowl spot, Audi used the hashtag #ProgressIs and, at air time, mentions spiked to levels comparable when Audi paid to promote the hashtag on Twitter itself.

Other marketers are partnering with networks to be on other screens when viewers' eyes stray from the TV.  "We're observing and planning for consumers engaging with multiple screens concurrently so when they watch our content on TV, they are simultaneously going to our website and engaging on other devices," said Scott Kelly, head of digital marketing at Ford.  To bring more viewers to those ads, networks are also turning to Twitter and its cohorts to boost viewership.  In early April, for example, CBS launched TweetWeek, a week of TV stars from shows such as "Survivor" and "NCIS" tweeting during the live broadcasts of their shows and answering viewer questions.

"It's the difference between 43 minutes of exposure vs 24/7 exposure," said Jesse Redniss, VP-digital at USA Networks, which has a Chatter page for shows such as "Psych" and "Burn Notice" to collect web comments and tweets form stars and fans.  When Comedy central aired its roast of Donald Trump with the hashtage #TrumpRoast, the cable network saw its highest-rated Tuesday night ever.

Source: Advertising Age Online

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This was the week that the media decided that Twitter warrants a bit of well-placed skepticism, instead of just valuation pumping, delivering some tough analysis of the company's recent stumbles and a trip into darker side of its history. Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson knocked it out of the park with an investigation of Twitter's early days focused on the squeezing out of one of the co-founders -- the guy who seems to have come up with the name -- and on early investors who co-founder Ev Williams bought out of Odeo, the rather aimless-sounding podcasting company Twitter eventually emerged from. (Suckas!) Mr. Carlson, who back in the day did some exemplary work on Facebook's litigious infancy, conducted a long interview with Noah Glass. Mr. Glass comes off as a little sad but also rather calm and thoughtful despite the fame and fortune he's missed out on:

"I'm sure you get this impression from the story and I've never really said this before - I did feel betrayed. I felt betrayed by my friends, by my company, by these people around me I trusted and that I had worked hard to create something with.

Afterwards, I was a little shellshocked. I was like, 'Wait ... what's the value in building these relationships if this is the result?'

So I spent a lot of time by myself. And working on things alone.

I worked on a game for a while. It didn't really come out the way I wanted it to.

I moved to Los Angeles to work on something totally different. It was an alternative energy system that I had in mind. I built a prototype for that. It just didn't function the way I thought it was going to function.

I've been working on projects that could be something big if they get fleshed out.

Moving back to San Francisco is sort of a step in being involved in collaboration again. It's something I didn't necessarily want to do because of what had transpired. Because of the story you're writing. Collaboration on something where everyone else gets all the credit and all the glory and fame is frustrating. It can be a frustrating experience."

An article from Fortune's Jessi Hempel was more focused on the present, triggered by co-founder Jack Dorsey's return to take over product development. To some, that's problematic because Mr. Dorsey already has what one imagines is a rather time-consuming day job -- he's CEO of the startup Square -- and because the move is the latest in a series of management change-outs, suggesting that the task of figuring out what to do with the maturing microblogging network is a bit of a hot potato.

Anyone with a sizable Twitter following and a reasonable grasp on reality knows that many of their followers are actually bots, snippets of code masquerading as living, breathing, tweeting Twitterers. It turns out that some researchers from New Zealand ran an experiment in which they tried to get a few bots to fool cat lovers on Twitter...and it worked!

Newsweek buyer and audio-equipment magnate Sidney Harman wasn't the only media owner to pass this week. The late Tiger Beat founder, Charles Laufer, was, in the middle part of the 20th century, a high-school teacher who wanted to give children something to read. Instead, he gave them Tiger Beat, which covered celebrity culture in the days before paparazzi and snark ruled, and before teenyboppers could occupy their time by dropping thousands of their parents' dollars on the creation of an awful music video that would then get millions upon millions of views. Back in Laufer's day, all they had was enthusiastic punctuation. 

Speaking of businessmen, Donald Trump recently showed off his literary chops in a letter to The New York Times that criticized an op-ed column that criticized Mr. Trump's "birther" strategy. Vanity Fair marked the occasion by showing off its own experience with The Donald's media criticism, which took the form of a print-out from the Vanity Fair website marked up by the potential presidential candidate. 

Times Ten Creative Marketing Solutions specializes in social networking and generating original written content for a variety of blogs.

Source: www.adage.com 

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Hasn't social-media-audience targeting gotten better than that? How helpful are social relationships when it comes to targeting? Will ads be the answer for Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other social networks, or will broader forms of marketing, e-commerce or virtual currency ultimately be the model? The answers: yes, somewhat and likely.

If these questions sound familiar, they should. Ten years ago, we were asking the same questions about the relatively non-participatory Web 1.0.

Many social-network-targeting methods are deceptively simple -- and simplistic. Is there a point in targeting all the friends of someone who "likes" a brand on Facebook, particularly if that person has thousands of friends in nonintersecting circles (family, colleagues, personal friends, the kids' piano teacher)? Not likely. No wonder a rumor surfaced at SXSW that soon to bow was Google Circles, a social network that shares content with those contacts who actually matter, not with everyone in the proverbial phone book.

We may see it yet.

Meanwhile, Facebook is the ground zero of social-network targeting. With more than 600 million users, it's not hard to understand why. Blinq Media is one of the dominant players in targeting Facebook audiences on Facebook, in no small part because the platform is integrated with Facebook's own API. Companies such as Turner and agency clients including Group M, Omnicom, OMD and Havas use the platform for what CEO Dave Williams calls socially endorsed ads. In other words, you can see which of your friends likes a specific brand or product. Blinq also can run campaigns to build fans, RSVPs or install applications.

Williams, who earlier founded 360i and SearchIgnite, calls social-audience targeting "a branding opportunity we hadn't seen before in digital advertising or in search." He cites a Nielsen study indicating performance and brand impact compound when 'likes' are streamed into news feeds, and an increased ability to see which demographics are most responsive to specific brands and campaigns. "It's the difference between targeting fish floating by vs. fish in a pond," he claims.

Motivity Marketing CEO Kevin Ryan sounds a note of caution, however. He sees advertisers, "Dialing up the targeting with a gazillion different options: audience, attitudinal, behavioral -- but they use same creative because all that targeting increases their cost. It's a young platform without a lot of stability. It's really hard to invest heavily in it because it's in a constant state of change."

Datran Media Senior VP Chris Gaebler cites other limitations of Facebook's platform, such as the inability to apply cookies to identify specific users or groups. "We've made many campaigns better over time by using smarter targeting. But you have to drive them off of Facebook to apply cookies."

TARGETING SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

Companies such as 33Across, Media6Degrees and RadiumOne target ads based on social interactions. Anonymous sharing of content, posting to a blog, emailing from a publisher site or commenting are some of the interactions that make the platforms assume people are connected, if not socially than at least in terms of affinities or interests. RadiumOne offers consumers the ability to "like" or "share" its ads with friends.

The new social data is fertile ground sourced outside the trough of generally available behavioral data that all networks, exchanges, agencies and DSPs have access to.

"Behavioral data has become commoditized, hence the rise of DSPs," RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal said. "Everyone has access to the same data. Our model looks at everything that happens outside of Facebook that allows you to have that social experience. When you share I don't know what kind of connection you have, but I do know there's an influencer and someone being influenced."

But here's something to consider: Just because consumers are talking about a brand, or sharing stuff or even "liking" it, it's not necessarily an indicator of positive sentiment. Put more bluntly: They might be hating on you.

"Working with networked targeted audiences requires one, possibly two extra steps," said Pauline Ores, who until recently headed social-engagement strategy at IBM. The first determines that a discussion is taking place. The second should determine if customers "are actively disparaging an aspect of your offering or service."

THE SOCIAL-ANALYTICS BUBBLE

But how easy is it really to monitor and analyze social conversations? Social-listening-software solutions are proliferating. Radian6, SocialCast, Lithium Social Media Monitoring, Sysomos, Meltwater Buzz, Jive, Attensity, Brandtology, Omniture and Visible Technologies account for just part of an increasingly crowded landscape.

There's no doubt monitoring social conversations can help enormously when it comes to targeting audiences. San Francisco digital shop Questus was able to identify an untapped market of urban Latino and African Americans who liked to customize sport bikes, which led to Suzuki's Busa Beats campaign.

Yet its clear these are early days; having test-driven some of these solutions, it's obvious plenty of kinks are still to be ironed out. One product I played with differentiated between "editorial" and "blog" product discussions. But where do you draw that line? I mean, if your brand is mentioned in a CNN article that happens to be posted on the network's blog platform, there's a difference, right? Yet this solution lumped those mentions into the "blog" category. I've also seen social-link reports that are unable to screen out glaringly obvious (as in based in Cambodia) linkfarms.

Even when such kinks are ironed out, there are tougher nuts to crack when it comes to listening.

"Precise? No. Useful? Yes. It's really complex stuff. They're functionally valid for business today, but they're not going to get exact," said web-metrics guru Jim Sterne. "Sentiment analysis is a nut we've been trying to crack from the beginning of computing. On the whole, sentiment polarity is deemed good, bad, or neutral with just enough accuracy to be useful. 'I hate AT&T!' is pretty clear, and can be monitored and trended over time to determine if the T-Mobile acquisition is really for the better or not."

DON'T TARGET ME, BRO

Social-media-audience targeting is clearly here to stay, and methods will only become more sophisticated with time. In the current climate of privacy protection and do-not-track, there will be continued pressure from advertisers, agencies and vendors for more access to data and more-granular forms of targeting.

Forgetting for a moment about whether these indeed violate user privacy, paramount is that users don't perceive that their privacy is being invaded, or that advertisers have cross-hairs squarely on their social-media profiles.

Source: www.adage.com 

While I was scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook, I noticed that a few of my friends had updated that they were using an application for the iPhone called, Stroodle.  Of course, as with anything pertaining to the iPhone, I researched it and found that Stroodle might just be the next big thing.

Stroodle allows your Facebook stream, your Twitter feed and your LinkedIn Network to all be accessible through one application.  Every update filters right to this application and directly to your iPhone, and the app is designed for 24/7 usage.

It is also built for quick setup.  Stroodle is up and running in a guaranteed less than 45 seconds from the time that you download the free app.  

Stroodle was designed to make our busy, social lives easier.

Times Ten Creative Marketing Solutions specializes in social networking and is well versed in social networking applications.