• by Gabe Samuels , May 18, 2012

In what might be described as media’s long-tail wagging its biggest dog, researchers are tapping social media to help television programmers better understand viewer reaction to and experience with TV content.

Using what some people over 40 might call "content analysis," Crimson Hexagon demonstrated its ForFlightTM Platform during an ARF Thought Leader Forum in New York this week, which mines extensive social media databases – well over 100 billion posts, comments, tweets etc. via Facebook, Twitter and the like – to provide detailed and often surprising insights into the television audiences experience.

As much a boon as the new platform might be for programmers, it also has the potential to shed new light for brand marketers, including how consumers feel about a particular brand and its competition, and even otherwise unspoken complaints people have about their brands and products. The list goes on, and the potential for drilling deeper into initial findings is tantalizing.

During the presentation at the ARF forum on Tuesday, Eleanor Cleverly, assistant director of not-for-profit Harmony Institute, detailed findings provided by Crimson Hexagon about a specific television program, AMC’s “The Walking Dead.”

The data, which was derived from a combination of neuroscience technology (EEG) and analysis of Twitter feeds, provided some eye-opening visualizations of the data regarding viewer’s reactions in second-by-second increments.