Social Media As Business Accelerator, Social Media Analytics As Enabler But Business Culture Has To Change

When we relate this to the TV industry, it alligns to this article, where we analyzed Social TV's potential in adding insights for companies. Companies like Bluefin Labs are increasing the insights by the correlation between the shows and ads audiences are watching on TV and what those audiences are saying about that content via social media streams. As reported in that article, this technology is a type of ultimate focus group, continuously extracting information in a P2P environment where "honest" interaction can be monitored, without worrying about socially-favorable answers and diverts.

On a strategic level it alligns with Gartner's Strategic Technology Areas for 2011:

The TV industry has potentially one of the biggest focus groups, in terms of interaction about TV, "TV shows will be the most common conversation topic around the world and the subject of more than a billion tweets,"according to Deloitte. Think not only of this area of communication, but also on business issues as Customer Service and new product identification which can be extracted from the crowd. 

A step further would be involving customers and giving them a sense of ownership of the brand. Once the consumer owns the brand, they already bought the product. Co-creation processes brings the best of both worlds, at the one hand, customers influence internal processes, involving them means a better adapted proposition to the needs of the audience. On the other hand, the business part, co-creation brings cost-savings. "Businesses can use information available from social networks to solve the broadest problems in a cost-effective manner", McAfee said.