If you're a viewer, this makes life more interesting. We have become accustomed (addicted?) to interactivity. We like it. It keeps us engaged and it gives us more options. In an ADHD-oriented media blitzed world, we want what we want when we want it. This gets us closer.
If you are a network, a producer or an advertiser, this could be - finally - the secret sauce. Networks are losing viewers to the 'net. Social media is trying to figure out how to more optimally monetize its participant base. Customer connection. Viewer engagement. Hello?
The melding of these two media has been a Holy Grail of sorts. The symmetries (recognizing that that word makes some companies break out in hives)are compelling from an audience and advertiser pleasing standpoint. You get a wider, more involved, viewership. They are already into multi-tasking and, let's face it, everyone is a star and a critic these days so you are enabling their instincts. The numbers have yet to become public but the strategic direction seems too well-targeted to miss. JL
Brian Stelter reports in the New York Times:
Type the term “X Factor” into Twitter’s search engine on a Wednesday or Thursday night and within moments, hundreds of viewer compliments and complaints about the Fox television show of that name will appear.
By the next day, the surly producer Simon Cowell will have read them — the good, the bad and especially his specialty, the ugly. And by the next week, he will have made changes to his show accordingly. “It’s like having millions of producers working with you,” said Mr. Cowell, who once dismissed Twitter as a lightweight list of strangers’ lunch plans but who is now a convert to the social networking Web site.
Next week, for the first time, the user-producers who speak up will have another way to be heard. As an alternative to calling or texting in a vote for a singer on “The X Factor,” Twitter will make it possible to vote with a message to the show’s account.
The voting option is the result of a new technological investment by Twitter and is a reflection of the company’s symbiotic relationship with the television industry. TV producers like Mr. Cowell, who crave the immediate feedback they can get from Twitter, have given the Web site free promotion, helping it to gain more users who will give even more feedback. Over time, the theory goes, having more users will help the five-year-old Twitter turn a steady profit.
“Benefits will accrue to us,” said Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, as a result of the service’s “engaging with these other media platforms and providing benefits to them.”
The company is privately held, and Mr. Costolo has declined to say whether it is profitable. In an interview on Tuesday, he said he did not seek a specific financial return for projects like the one with “The X Factor,” but he expressed confidence that projects like it “are going to result in financial benefits down the road.”
To that end, the proliferation of Twitter logos and language on news and talk shows and now “The X Factor” is not an accident; it is the product of a strategy that started nearly three years ago with the hiring of Chloe Sladden, a former vice president at Current TV, who put Twitter messages on screen during the 2008 presidential election.
“I was brought on board to be the bridge” between Twitter and TV, Ms. Sladden said in an interview this week. Now she oversees a team of seven in Twitter’s content and programming unit. Two started work this week, one to work with music labels and one to work with news organizations. She expects to hire four more in the next three months.
Evangelizing for the Web site, her unit proffers free advice and data to producers, politicians, celebrities, and other people who are effectively content creators for Twitter. “We work with them and think carefully about how to help them create the best possible content,” Ms. Sladden said.
The unit has worked closely with The New York Times, among other media companies; Ms. Sladden spent part of the 2010 midterm election night at a desk in the Times newsroom.
New media partnerships are announced with regularity these days; in August, for instance, Twitter announced a pact with The Weather Channel that adds weather-related tweets to TV segments and to Weather.com.
Twitter executives say they don’t pay for such placement. But for “The X Factor” voting, they spent an undisclosed amount to set up the voting infrastructure. For voting security, only votes that are sent via direct message to the show will be counted; public comments will not be.
Voting will start on “The X Factor” on Nov. 2. Along with votes via Twitter direct messages, the show will count votes via a Verizon mobile phone app.
The option to vote via Twitter, Ms. Sladden said, signifies her unit’s shift “from focusing just on engagement” — getting users to talk about TV —“to getting into the creative fabric of shows and letting the audience help change the outcomes.”
The combination of TV and social media, often labeled social TV, has steadily gained attention as the television industry seeks ways to retain viewers, particularly for live events that people can react to in real time. Facebook, too, is working hard to showcase conversations about TV and media, allowing for viewing of some shows directly from its Web site. For now, it seems, Twitter user names and hashtags are more visible on TV than Facebook names.
Mr. Cowell, formerly of “American Idol,” said he appreciated that social media sites made live TV feel even livelier. That is likely to be an important element for “The X Factor,” which has drawn an average of 12.5 million viewers for its taped audition episodes — higher than Fox’s previous average on Wednesdays and Thursdays but lower than Mr. Cowell’s expectations.
“When we go live,” he said, with performances and votes on Nov. 2, “I do think we’re going to see a real difference.”
Mr. Cowell said he did not post on Twitter — “I am the slowest typer in the world,” he claimed — but would post in the future.
“The only powerful people now on TV,” he declared, “are the people on Twitter and Facebook.”
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