Bluefin Tools Track Social Media Response to TV

In the US, Bluefin Labs has introduced a system of metrics to quantify and contextualise social media response to programs watched on television.

Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 by Deb Roy and Michael Fleischman, as an off-shoot of their research at the MIT Media Lab.

The pair and their team have created a technology platform that analyzes billions of comments posted on publically available social media to measure audience response to mass media content, including TV shows, news, ads and games.

The new Response Level and Response Share metrics enable TV and advertising execs to measure and benchmark how audiences respond to TV through conversations in public social media. These metrics not only measure individual shows, but also provide a basis for benchmarking TV programs across a variety of contexts such as dayparts, genres and networks.

The firm has also launched Bluefin Signals, a web-based tool for accessing, interpreting and analyzing the resulting data. The tool covers social media responses to more than 3,000 TV shows and 105,000 individual airings of those shows. In addition, it can also explore data on 'cross show engagement'.

Roy explains: 'With the introduction of Response Level and Response Share, we can provide new insight into audience engagement in a way that has not been possible before. With these contextualized metrics in hand, media and marketing executives can interpret all responses to any particular show in aggregate.'

Web site: www.bluefinlabs.com .