December 3, 2009 Jill

Are TV and social media like Twitter about to merge?  Writing in Forbes, Steve Rubel is SVP, director of insights for Edelman Digital, predicts the coming together of TV and social networking experiences in 2010.  According to Rubel, visits to media portals and sites have been dropping for more than a year, yet people are spending more and more time online.  What are they doing?  You know.  Hanging on Facebook and Twitter.

To date, however, social networking has largely remained a two-foot experience. We engage using our PCs or, increasingly, via mobile devices. This, as a result, means that social networking has largely siphoned time and attention away from other online media, while leaving TV relatively unscathed. That’s all about to change.

Rubel believes web-ready HDTVs will have a major impact on television.  New(ish) technology will let viewers interact not only with the shows, but each other.

Television inherently has been a social experience for decades, dominating water cooler conversations worldwide. But as social networking enters the living room via embedded Twitter and Facebook streams and more, some observers see it changing the live experience, which has largely remained passive. This potentially could shake up the millions of dollars spent on TV advertising, while ushering in new ways to reach both women and men.

He sees the Oprah Winfrey Network taking a significant lead in all of this.

OWN is betting that the hundreds of thousands of viewers that have participated in Oprah’s Webcasts will partake in other social experiences. And that social TV, more so than the Web, “could provide the right vehicle for advertisers who want to combine the reach and audio-visual power of television with the engagement and two-way dialogue offered by social media,” said Tercek. “Conversations around quality content will be more likely to conform to the expectations of brand advertisers.”

Rubel’s vision of the coming year?

“The lines between television, video and gaming are beginning to blur,” wrote Kroese on Microsoft’s blog. “When the entertainment history books are written, and the long, inexorable decline of The Big Four (networks) is a well-documented Harvard Business School case, I think we’re going to look at the creation of OWN as the tipping point. And I predict 2010 will be the year that most major brand advertisers shift substantial portions of their budgets toward more targeted, measurable, engaging and accountable mediums.”

Must of what he’s saying here makes sense to me.  I can’t forget how badly the Twitter stream working on Glee, but at the same time, I do think there will be more creative ways to integrate social media and interactivity in the television experiences.  And I do love the phrase “targeted, mesaurable, engaging and accountable mediums”!

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