Charting the Chatter

I talk back to my TV. Not often, but sometimes I’m just compelled to react out loud to a display of inane conduct or wonky thinking. US elections are warming up, so it’s not going to get better any time soon.

I take some heart in the knowledge that I’m not alone in this. And we’ve all heard (and nod in tacit approval upon hearing) the occasional report of a television set falling victim to someone with a handgun within easy reach.

Today, more and more people are reacting to what they see on television in a much more meaningful way; in a manner that may actually be making a difference. The masses are talking back through social media.

Throughout the world, 300 million public comments are made online every day, two-thirds via Twitter. On average, some 10 million are related to television. Social media makes it possible for viewers to express their dissatisfaction or approval early and often. And the networks are listening.

Though difficult to capture and even more difficult to make sense of, these expressions represent data. Television networks now employ senior research people to turn these millions of spontaneous, irreverent, often profane remarks into useable information.

There are a few sentiment-analytics firms that have developed some extraordinary technology to parse social media commentary, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Bluefin Labs, founded by Winnipegger and University of Waterloo grad, Deb Roy, for example. Bluefin is focused on television, for the time being. The next frontier for Roy and his co-founder and his one-time PhD student, Michael Fleischman, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, politics.

Roy and Fleischman are confident that social media analytics will soon be applicable to all manner of marketing initiative. “If you are looking for a set of people with a particular interest, we can tell you how this relates to another set of interests,” says Fleischman.

Setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account, using social media and online channels to help drive your marketing agenda is now part of the brief. Everyone is doing it, or should be. But part two is on the doorstep: using bona fide analysis of public sentiment to modify messages, products, services and service behaviour.