Nielsen and Twitter Establish Social TV Rating

NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, December 17, 2012 – Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, and Twitter today announced an exclusive multi-year agreement to create the “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating” for the US market. Under this agreement, Nielsen and Twitter will deliver a syndicated-standard metric around the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter, slated for commercial availability at the start of the fall 2013 TV season.

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” said Steve Hasker, President, Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

“Our users love the shared experience of watching television while engaging with other viewers and show talent. Twitter has become the world's digital water cooler, where conversations about TV happen in real time. Nielsen is who the networks rely on to give better content to viewers and clearer results to marketers,” said Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s vice president of media. “This effort reflects Nielsen's foresight into the evolving nature of the TV viewing experience, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with Twitter ecosystem partners on this metric to help broadcasters and advertisers create truly social TV experiences.”

TV viewers discuss TV on Twitter, creating a new dynamic between audiences and programming. The service’s more than 140 million active users send one billion Tweets every two and a half days, the vast majority of which is public and conversational, making Twitter data a necessity in producing standardized metrics representing online and mobile conversations about television.

The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings, giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity. These ratings will build on top of NM Incite’s SocialGuide audience engagement analytics platform. NM Incite is a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey & Co., and the hub of Nielsen’s social media analytics efforts.

“The proliferation of smartphones and tablets has generated a substantial ‘connected’ TV audience that is simultaneously watching television and accessing the Internet through these devices. This, in turn, will continue to create the opportunity for content providers like CBS to offer engaging interactive features

for our viewers. As this form of viewer engagement evolves into a mainstream activity, it presents ways for CBS to enhance the viewing experience for our viewers and our advertisers. We are already engaged with Nielsen and Twitter in a program of research and experimentation in this exciting new area,” said David F. Poltrack, Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation. “We are pleased to see Nielsen and Twitter join together to provide a comprehensive measurement system that will allow us to employ these social networking tools to their full advantage."

“Twitter is a powerful messenger and a lot of fun for fans of our shows, providing them with the opportunity to engage, connect and voice their opinions directly to each other and us,” said Peter Rice, Chairman and CEO, Fox Networks Group. "Combining the instant feedback of Twitter with Nielsen ratings will benefit us, program producers, and our advertising partners.”

ABOUT THE NIELSEN TWITTER TV RATING

The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will enhance the social TV analytics and metrics available today from SocialGuide by adding the first-ever measurement of the total audience for social TV activity – both those participating in the conversation and those who were exposed to the activity –providing the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.

SocialGuide, recently acquired by Nielsen and NM Incite, currently captures Twitter TV activity for all U.S. programming across 234 TV channels in English and Spanish, and more than 36,000 programs. Through a sophisticated classification process, SocialGuide matches Tweets to TV programs to offer key social TV metrics including the number of unique Tweets associated with a given program and rankings for the most social TV programs.

ABOUT NIELSEN

Nielsen Holdings N.V. (NYSE: NLSN) is a global information and measurement company with leading market positions in marketing and consumer information, television and other media measurement, online intelligence, mobile measurement, trade shows and related properties. Nielsen has a presence in approximately 100 countries, with headquarters in New York, USA and Diemen, the Netherlands. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com

and follow @nielsenwire.

ABOUT TWITTER

Founded in 2006, Twitter is a real-time information service on which people around the world can post ideas, comments and news, plus photos and videos, in 140 characters or less. The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter.com, text messaging, and desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is available in more than 33 languages. Visit www.twitter.com or follow @twitter for more information.

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Twitter diplomacy: Who Follows Whom Among World Leaders

Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for over 175 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments of the G20 meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12 have an official Twitter account (http://twitter.com/Davos/G20).



Some like @BarackObama have 5.5 million followers, while others such as the French Presidency only have 6,600. All other G20 leaders are somewhere in between and yes, you’ve guessed it, none of them tweet personally.


What’s interesting though is not who has the most followers, but rather who follows who.

Grand master in the art of political tweets @BarackObama ranks fifth in the world and mutually follows his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev @KremlinRussia_E who sent his first tweet in late June. The Russian president is very active, especially Twitpicing, and now has over 160,000 followers on his English and Russian accounts combined.

The @KremlinRussia_E and the @WhiteHouse both follow UK Prime Minister David Cameron @Number10gov. These three could actually conduct a direct and secret Twitter diplomacy in 140 characters literally spelling ‘the end of those red phones that have been sitting around for so long’ as Barack Obama recently joked.

However, only London and Moscow follow Canada’s @PMHarper who @BarackObama and the @WhiteHouse seem to ignore. But it gets worse! None of the big four follow the other G20 members on Twitter. Neither is following @DilmaBR, the new president of Brazil, nor @JuliaGillard, the Prime Minister of Australia or the presidents of Korea @BluehouseKorea, France @Elysée, Mexico @FelipeCalderon, South Africa @PresidencyZA or Turkey @cbAbdullahGul.


At the Franco-British summit last Tuesday @Number10gov started to follow the @Elysée Palace which had not immediately reciprocated. In fact the French Presidency is following no one and therefore Nicolas Sarkozy cannot have a private conversation with his peers on Twitter.


And finally, for the record: while the Russian and Mexican presidents tweeted public congratulations to the new Brazilian president on her recent election win, neither had the foresight to actually follow her. Only exception: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez @ChavezCandanga who talked to Dilma Rousseff on the phone and immediately started following her.


During the G20 summit in Seoul follow the official Twitter channel http://twitter.com/g20seoulsummit or read the 140 character diplomacy on the World Economic Forum’s G20 Twitter list: http://twitter.com/Davos/G20.


Matthias Lüfkens (@Luefkens) is Head of Social Networks at the World Economic Forum, He is an occasional contributor to the Swiss-French magazine Bilan (www.bilan.ch) and blogs in French at http://lufkens.wordpress.com/.

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Twitter Promotes Promoted Trends To The Top Of Trends

Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com. Previously, these were at the bottom of the area, buried under the inevitable topics about Justin Bieber.

Obviously, anything at the top of a list is going to be more visible than something at the bottom of the list — and Twitter appears to be testing out what that will mean for click-through rates of these Promoted Trends. When you click on one, it still takes you to search results for the term with a Promoted Tweet paid for by the advertising company at the top of the feed. Promoted Trends still have the highly visible “Promoted” logo as well.



“We’ve always said that we would experiment with all elements of our Promoted Products suite. Moving the Promoted Trend to the top spot is one example of this experimentation, and you can expect to see more changes in this space,” a Twitter representative tells us.

On old Twitter, this may move the Promoted Trend above the fold for many users. But with New Twitter, Trends have been moved higher — which will make this top Promoted Trend even more visible and clickable. What that will mean in terms of revenue flowing in, only Twitter knows.

Now that their @earlybird monetization experiment is over, Twitter has said it will focus more on its Promoted suite of products. That includes Trends, Tweets, and soon, Promoted Accounts as well.

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The AP Is Using Twitter To Send People To Facebook. Wait. What?

Oh the Associated Press, our most favorite banned new source. It seems almost monthly they do something that defies logic and/or looks to be a suicidal act. And today brings another oddity.



The AP is using their Twitter feed to tweet out their stories — nothing new there, obviously — but every single one of them links to the story on their Facebook Notes page. It’s not clear how long they’ve been doing this, but Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan noted the oddness of this, and how annoying it is, tonight. The AP obviously has a ton of media partners, and they could easily link to any of those, or even the story hosted on their own site. But no, instead they’re copying all these stories to their Facebook page and linking there for no apparent reason.


As Sullivan notes in a follow-up tweet, “i really miss when people had web sites they owned and pointed at. why lease your soul to facebook. or buzz. or whatever. master your domain.”

What’s really odd about this is the AP’s recent scuffle with Google over the hosting of AP content. The two sides appeared to reach some sort of deal earlier this month (after months of threats and actual pulled content), but now the AP is just hosting all this content on Facebook for the hell of it?

Sure, maybe they think that by hosting the content on Facebook, they’re being impartial with the tweets. But again, why not just use their own site?


When I asked Sullivan to elaborate on this issue, he made a good point, “funny, they seem to get social (twitter & facebook) more than basic SEO (the core of their issues with Google).” Oh the AP; the amusement never ends.

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