Are you ready for Social Media Convergence?

Ready or not, it’s already here!

About a year and a half ago in the Atos Scientific Community we started focusing on the importance that social media would have on other traditional forms of media, especially broadcasting. One of the main outcomes of this was our “Social Second Screen” where we analysed (and prepared an end user app) the relationship and, in real time, between Twitter activity and live broadcast events (and the possibilities this gives for personalization and interactivity). See my previous blog post: Instant Zeitgeist – Social Second Screen

It seems every week there is a new piece of news that reinforces this idea. Perhaps the biggest news of the year so far in the broadcast industry might turn out to be the acquisition of Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics firm, by social media giant Twitter for a reported $100M (http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-bluefin-labs-2013-2). The definitive push for the second screen? The end of the reign of Neilsen (the TV rating agency)? Twitter may be the new kid in town in theTV space, but they have already stated that their business model will be the second screen (http://gigaom.com/2012/10/12/dick-costolo-says-being-the-second-screen-is-the-future-of-twitter/). And while Facebook so far has been less active in this, we shouldn’t forget about their alliances with Spotify or Netflix. SN + traditional media is not new to them even though so far it has been relatively superficial.

And this week it was announced that the NY Times is using Twitter trending topics to place (and presumably price) ads in their online edition. (http://paidcontent.org/2013/02/19/the-nyt-is-doing-something-smart-by-using-twitter-trends-to-target-ads/. What’s interesting here isn’t the technical side (fairly trivial) but the monetization side. Whenever we talk about social TV somebody is bound to ask “What about monetization?” and sometimes the answer isn’t entirely clear. In this case, it is glaringly obvious.

Social TV, big data, personalization and targeting, the convergence of social and traditional media, second screen, connected TV, …

We’ve been saying all this for some time. But are you ready for it?