How Mapping Social-Media Chatter to TV Commercials Yields Insights

Bluefin Labs is exploring the relationships between listener and speaker, orator and audience, marketer and audience, and mass media and audience by looking at about 3 billion social-media comments a month and, from that , filtering and mapping about 13.7 million comments that pertained to TV and/or commercials. That mapping of social-media conversations to TV shows and commercials is called the TV genome; Bluefin was founded at MIT as a result of language-acquisition research MIT Researcher Deb Roy did on how his child had learned to talk. "Mass media has a tremendous benefit in that it reaches many people at the same time, but one of the drawbacks is the feedback loop from audience back to speaker and communicator is essentially broken, or at least you lose much of it," said Tom Thai, VP-marketing and business development at Bluefin. The idea behind Bluefin is to offer a deeper look at the audience feedback, beyond numbers of viewers and demography. Put simply: It is focused on taking the conversations and chatter that happen in social media and tying them back to the stimulus that caused that conversation on TV -- either shows or ads. The challenge in all of this: help machines understand the semantic layer, or the what the conversation is about. As he describes it, the first input is TV, the second input is social media. The space in the middle is the semantic barrier: Based on the data, Mr. Thai had a few interesting tidbits to share about particular shows: "Beyond the top events and shows -- basically for every given show that happens on TV -- when you have access to this type of data you'll be able to find surprising and insightful things on the data," said Mr. Thai.

How Mapping Social-Media Chatter to TV Commercials Yields Insights

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