• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 1, 2005

A new word-of-mouth monitoring tool incubated by a major media agency to measure the buzz surrounding TV programs has been spun out into a syndicated research service for the TV industry. The service, dubbed TV*BuzzMetrics, was developed by online buzz monitoring firm BuzzMetrics as part of a proprietary tool created by Initiative Media, which has signed on as one of the charter subscribers of the new syndicated version.

The system--which monitors online discussions, blogs, and other consumer-generated media emanating from TV enthusiasts--was a core element of Initiative's so-called PropheSEE system, which the agency uses to help predict the success or failure of new shows it buys on behalf of its clients.

Over the past six months, BuzzMetrics has monitored and analyzed more than 23 million TV-related discussions involving about 100,000 individuals to determine how their negative or positive views toward TV programs could influence the success of a show.

The system is one of a host of new metrics being developed by Madison Avenue and a variety of research suppliers in an attempt to measure consumer engagement with media and advertising content.

The approach isn't new. A variety of agencies conduct primary consumer research to understand consumer attitudes toward media, especially TV programming. Carat, for example, pioneered the field in the U.K. and the U.S. with its so-called ForeTel system. But the burgeoning online consumer-generated media community has created a new, fertile area to mine for real-time buzz surrounding marketing-related issues--in this case, television programming.

To date, seven networks, including two of the major broadcast networks, have signed on to use the system as a means of augmenting their own research, programming, and scheduling decisions. CBS is among them.

Whether other agencies will want to buy into a system developed by Initiative isn't clear, but most of the major media shops put a premium on proprietary--or at the very least, customized--approaches to syndicated consumer research. Most--if not all--of the major shops, however, are known to be engaged in some form of word-of-mouth tracking. The big question is how representative such metrics are of the consumer population at large.

For example, research conducted by Universal McCann indicates that bloggers represent only about 2 percent of the U.S. population. But their discussions are nonetheless seen as a rich resource of found data for marketers, fueling the growth of companies such as BuzzMetrics, a unit of VNU--as well as Intelliseek, Technorati, and Cymfony.

"Is it representative of the U.S. population? No," concedes Max Kalehoff, vice president-marketing at BuzzMetrics, adding: "and that's precisely the reason that it's so valuable." By looking at discrete subsets of consumers--in the case of TV*BuzzMetrics, TV enthusiasts--Kalehoff says marketers, agencies, or media companies can gauge people who are "so engaged, so passionate, and care so much about the product" that they're actually discussing it online with others.