On Friday, CBS Corp. wholly acquired TV Guide Digital -- including TVGuide.com and its mobile apps -- bumping up its stake to 100% from 50% by buying out Lionsgate. Given that news, we thought it'd be a good time to revisit our Social-TV ecosystem chart -- which we last updated in October.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Yesterday we told you which new dramas were most intriguing users of TVGuide.com's Watchlist, a customizable entertainment guide that lets users make a list of their favorite shows, actors, etc. Today we've got comedies for you.

We're interested in Watchlist because of its predictive powers; the Watchlist community (with more than 1.1 million people signed up, according to TVGuide.com, up from half a million when we first wrote about it) serves as a massive focus group of informed and committed TV viewers. If Watchlisters are excited about a show, that, historically speaking, has typically translated into respectable viewership.

The chart shown here lists the 10 most-added new comedies announced during the upfronts. As TVGuide.com Editor-in-Chief Mickey O'Connor explained yesterday, "Before viewers are able to learn every nuance of every new show, they latch on to the familiar -- whether it be an actor, the source material or even the production company. That's what we're seeing at this stage of the game on the list of new fall shows most added to Watchlists."

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our Twitter Week in Review chart uses data collected and parsed for Ad Age by the What the Trend (WTT) unit of HootSuite, the social-media management dashboard with more than five million global users sending 3 million messages each day. We're back today with Volume 55. Scroll down below the infographic for some context -- and watch for a fresh edition of our Twitter Week in Review each Friday.

It's been a huge week for NBA center Jason Collins, who became the first male athlete in the "big four" American sports to come out as gay. He made the announcement through Sports Illustrated on Monday, followed up on "Good Morning America" on Tuesday and will appear with his twin brother, Jarron, on "Oprah's Next Chapter" Sunday night. It wasn't just Collins' move (and the eloquent first-person piece in Sports Illustrated) that rocketed him to the top of the Twitter conversation, however; it was also the public reactions, both positive and negative, that kept his name trending all week. JetBlue did its part:

Thanks Jason, today we're all on the same team. twitter.com/JetBlue/status JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) April 30, 2013

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our Twitter Week in Review chart uses data collected and parsed for Ad Age by the What the Trend (WTT) unit of HootSuite, the social-media management dashboard with more than five million global users sending 3 million messages each day. (Last week's chart is right over here.) We're back today with Volume 53. Scroll down below the infographic for some context -- and watch for a fresh edition of our Twitter Week in Review each Friday.

The deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday afternoon unsurprisingly topped Twitter's trending chart by a large margin this week, as the city was constantly in the news in the hours and days following the tragedy -- with every turn of events, contested report, photograph and debate seeming to immediately land on Twitter and linger. One of the suspects in the bombing was killed early Friday morning; the search for the other paralyzed Boston into Friday afternoon. But expect to see trends related to the bombings continue to dominate conversation.

Even in a very busy news week, however, pop culture kept much of its grip on Twitter conversation. "Hov" is one of the handful of nicknames attributed to rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z, who was in the news for several reasons this week, starting with continued back-and-forth over his recent trip to Cuba. Time magazine then added to the chatter by naming him one if its most influential people of the year. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who penned a tribute in the magazine, called him "an artist-entrepreneur who stands at the center of culture and commerce in 21st century America."

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our Twitter Week in Review chart uses data collected and parsed for Ad Age by the What the Trend (WTT) unit of HootSuite, the social-media management dashboard with more than five million global users sending 3 million messages each day. (Last week's chart is right over here.) We're back today with Volume 52. Scroll down below the infographic for some context -- and watch for a fresh edition of our Twitter Week in Review each Friday.

The sixth season of AMC's hit '60s drama "Mad Men" premiered Sunday night with a dense two-hour episode, and apparently it wasn't just us at Ad Age who were excited about it; the show clocked in as the third most talked-about topic on Twitter this week in the U.S. The episode drew 3.4 million viewers, down slightly from its fifth season premiere.

Death strikes the top trends chart again this week, with no fewer than three trends referring to celebrities passed (recently and otherwise). Legendary film critic Roger Ebert died Friday, and entertainment outlets all over web posted tributes, while fans on Twitter shared their own favorite snarky reviews the writer had penned over the years. After former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died Monday, Twitter users debated her controversial legacy -- a discussion that evolved into one surrounding the etiquette of criticizing a notable figure who's recently died. Finally, fans of alternative rock icon Kurt Cobain acknowledged the anniversary of his death on April 5, 19 years after he committed suicide.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In February of last year, Mike Proulx and his co-author Stacey Shepatin published the book "Social TV: How Marketers Can Reach and Engage Audiences by Connecting Television to the Web, Social Media, and Mobile." As senior VP and director of digital strategy at Hill Holliday, Mr. Proulx knows what he's talking about -- and, in just a few weeks, he and a few hundred other social-TV obsessives will talk even more about where the industry is headed. The third edition of Hill Holliday's annual TVnext Summit, an event Mr. Proulx created, is coming up on April 29 in Boston. As the event approaches, Ad Age's Media Guy Simon Dumenco spoke with Mr. Proulx as part of the ongoing Dumenco's Media People series of in-depth interviews. What follows is an edited version of a longer conversation.

Simon Dumenco: Talk to me about what's changed in the social-TV space since the publication of your book -- other than everything.

Mike Proulx: The biggest change we predicted was that consolidation was going to be the theme for 2013, and that certainly has come true. In Chapter 5 in the book, we talked a lot about the social-TV analytic space, and since the release of the book Nielsen bought SocialGuide, and Twitter bought Bluefin Labs, so that leaves an interesting landscape where you have Trendrr as really the only independent social-TV analytics company now.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Since movie critic Roger Ebert died last Thursday, tributes and remembrances have been flooding the internet. (See, for instance, my colleague Nat Ives' video round-up of some classic Ebert outtakes, review and slams.)

Here's one you may have missed: a clip of Ebert and his old "At the Movies" co-host Gene Siskel on the Sept. 5, 1982 episode of "Saturday Night Live," doing, as Siskel put it, "history's first live review of a television show still in progress." (I first spotted this clip on the offical "SNL" Tumblr.) Yep, nearly a quarter century before Twitter launched (in 2006), Siskel & Ebert were doing what millions of people would ultimately become obsessed with doing: commenting about TV in (near) real-time.

In this brief clip, you can see the hallmarks of modern-day Social TV: snark, drive-by opinions, a certain meta sensibility...

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our Twitter Week in Review chart uses data collected and parsed for Ad Age by the What the Trend (WTT) unit of HootSuite, the social-media management dashboard with more than five million global users sending 3 million messages each day. (Last week's chart is right over here.) We're back today with Volume 51. Scroll down below the infographic for some context -- and watch for a fresh edition of our Twitter Week in Review each Friday.

April Fool's Day is always an unpredictable day on social media, as brands and media entities try to generate their share of buzz by duping gullible followers with fake announcements or products. Google played a handful of pranks, as did other tech companies, and even P&G managed to pull the wool over a few eyes with Scope's "Bacon Flavored Mouthwash." Twitter users discussed the notorious holiday in general terms, as it applied to them personally, and the pranks they either perpetrated or fell victim to.

Unsurprisingly, 20-year-old college basketball player Kevin Ware trended high this week after sustaining a gruesome compound fracture to his right leg during a live televised game against Duke Sunday night. Players and spectators on both teams appeared visibly disturbed by the sight of his injury, which required emergency surgery to mend. Its impact on Twitter was immediate, with hashtags like "#PrayForWare" soon trending widely. Ware is expected to rejoin his teammates on the bench during Louisville's NCAA national semifinal game against Wichita State tomorrow in Atlanta. ("March Madness" was also a top trend, and the Miami Heat managed to grab the no. 10 trend of the week after a war of words between its general manager, Pat Riley, and the Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge.)

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Our Twitter Week in Review chart uses data collected and parsed for Ad Age by the What the Trend (WTT) unit of HootSuite, the social-media management dashboard with more than five million global users sending 3 million messages each day. (Last week's chart is right over here.) We're back today with Volume 50. Scroll down below the infographic for some context -- and watch for a fresh edition of our Twitter Week in Review each Friday.

March Madness hit the Twitter chart with a vengeance this week, indicating it's not just basketball fans getting in on the conversation. Largely this is thanks to the Cinderella story care of the No. 15 seed Florida Gulf Coast, which knocked out favorite 2-seed Georgetown in the first round, an unprecedented win for a team ranked near the bottom of its division. After defeating 7-seed San Diego State, the school will take on 3-seed Florida on Friday night for its first chance at the Elite 8. More brackets were shattered on Thursday night when 4-seed Syracuse secured their Elite-8 spot again top-seed Indiana in a crushing 61-50 win. It's par for the course when the top seeds make it to the finals, but the underdog stories are what have been driving the conversation this season.

That was good news, not incidentally, for brands such as AT&T that associated themselves closely with the tournament. AT&T paid for ads in tweets like this from @MarchMadness:

Continue reading at AdAge.com

As we've pointed out before, social media and made-up, nerdy holidays were practically created for each other. "National Pi Day" rolls around every March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant equal to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. As we have seen with "National Margarita Day" and "National Donut Day," these days are basically excuses to drink/eat/earn nerd cred -- apparently much-appreciated by Twitter users.

The death of Google Reader was much bemoaned on Twitter after Google said it will end its support for the 8-year-old RSS tool in July. In its spring cleaning announcement last week, the company cited a loyal following but declining usage over the years. Although Google didn't mention it, maybe people now follow the news via Twitter.

The History Channel's ambitious and controversial miniseries "The Bible" certainly drummed up plenty of buzz and ratings for the network since it premiered March 3, but it was the show's depiction of Satan that drew the most ire on Twitter. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck was among the first on Twitter to point out that Mehdi Ouzaani, the Moroccan actor portraying Satan in the series, bears a striking resemblance to Barack Obama -- or at least an older and more sinster version of him.

Continue reading at AdAge.com