LiveHive Leverages its tvClickr Social TV App to Measure "Social Engagement" with TV Shows

LiveHive Systems, a Waterloo, Canada-based provider of interactive and social TV solutions last week launched its "Social Engagement Index," which it says is designed to measure how viewers are "socially engaging with TV while they watch." The company--which claims to have provided social TV content to over a million viewers through partnerships with networks and through its tvClickr social TV Facebook application (allows viewers to chat with their online social network of friends while watching a TV show, and to play along with a show by making predictions, answering trivia questions, and taking part in polls; viewers receive points for answering the application's questions correctly, and are rewarded by moving to what LiveHive describes as "different levels of achievement")--says that its new Social Engagement Index summarizes the interactive behavior of those viewers, in order to determine in real time how effectively a show is socially engaging its viewers. "The Social TV movement is forcing media companies to rethink how content is produced, distributed, and consumed," LiveHive president, Dave Bullock, said in a prepared statement. "However, the tools to understand how viewers are engaging with a show have failed to keep pace. Nielsen ratings make a rough estimate of how many viewers are watching a show, but Nielsen is not able to measure how engaged these viewers are, or how they are promoting the show on the social Web. These are critical metrics that determine a show's value and its impact for both producers and advertisers."

The top-performing shows from the past TV season, according to LiveHive's Social Engagement Index, included shows that did not do especially well in traditional ratings charts. The top-five shows, the company says, were: "One Tree Hill" (SEI rating: 24.3), "90210" (SEI rating: 14.1), "Jon and Kate Plus 8" (SEI rating: 8.2), "Desperate Housewives" (SEI rating: 7.0) and "So You Think You Can Dance" (SEI rating: 6.0). According to LiveHive, the rankings were determined via a proprietary formula which accounts for in-show social activity online, and is normalized against the total viewing audience. "While a top ranking in the Social Engagement Index does not mean a program is generating the most online social engagement, it does mean it is generating vastly more social engagement than other shows with similar audience sizes," the company explains. It says that "One Tree Hill's" number-one ranking is "the combination of a story format that is well suited to active social discussion and interactivity, and a demographic that gravitates to multiplatform media."

Prior to the Social Engagement Index, LiveHive says, media companies were limited to analyzing post-broadcast social behavior such as blogging, video sharing and fan rankings of episodes. "While valuable," the company says, "these are metrics of the 'Engagement of Referral' and typically measure activity the day after a broadcast airs, while the Social Engagement Index measures the 'Engagement of Participation.'" The company says that its technology "typically produces audience engagement patterns where each viewer provides a measurable online social interaction every 90 seconds that is tied to an on-air activity. This two-way channel to the viewer," the company continues, "provides networks with the ability to better retain viewers, measure sentiment, and calculate the impact of on-air advertising."

LiveHive says that, next month, it will release demographic details from the Social Engagement Index, including demographic category rankings of which audience groups are the most socially engaged while watching TV. More information on the Index and its methodology is available at http://www.livehivesystems.com/2009/08/sei.