Grounded In Reality

An interesting new crowd-sourcing site appeared recently, still in Beta, of course, from The Nielsen Company and is (not-so-cleverly) called: Hey! Nielsen.   The site requires that you register to participate and share your opinion, but without registration, you can search through the results of other folks recommendations.  Feels to me like a mix of Digg, IdeaStorm (for Dell, a GCI client), and TV Guide.

There are a couple of things to look at on the site:

• Opinions
  In topics labeled TV, Movies, Music, Personalities, and Internet, members can post opinions about current shows, bands, songs, people, Web sites, etc.  Then the crowd gets to agree or disagree and add additional comments.
• Rankings
  “Each topic (TV show, Movie, etc.) earns a Hey! Nielsen Score, determined by user opinions, comments, and ratings. Calculated daily, the Hey! Nielsen Score also factors in internet buzz via BlogPulse.com.  There is currenlty about a 7-hour avg for updating statistics information.”
• Calendars
  Soon enough this will be the “TV Guide with opinions”…but it will have to launch first.
• Members
  Looking similar to other social networking profiles…and very similar to Digg’s latest ‘profile’ launch, you will be able to click on a member to see which shows, music, etc they like and dont like.  The earlist member date I saw was in May for NatGuy who claims “I’m one of the folks involved in helping to build this site.”  Nielsen lists how many recommendations they have made and lists all their posts.
• Widgets
  What would a site be if you couldnt see if scrolling on your blog? :)  Therefore, they have created a nice scrolling widget for you to keep up with the latest and greatest recommendations on the site.  Hopefully this will become customizable.

Naturally, if you are related to the entertainment industry, this would be an ideal place to gather consumer insights and responses to your content.  However, it would not be an ideal place to promote your entertainment client unless you are extremely open and transparent in your role.

Eventually, Nielsen sees using the information as statistical evidence in each catagory, but personally I think you will need to let the site live for a good amount of time before you can qualify the information collected as valid.  I am also still stuck on the problem of the ‘online demographic’ setting the opinions of a whole set of humans.  I still feel like it is skewed unless mixed with other forms of information collection.

I am interested to see how others respond to the site and the use of the information as statisical analysis.  Would you believe what they say, just because its Nielsen?

The race to provide ‘on-demand’ TV in the UK is really heating up. Out of the major networks (that means no set-top box required), Channel 4’s 4oD was the first to market in December 2006 and has already claimed one million viewers watching a total of 20 million programs since it was launched. Although I understand from the Guardian’s Kate Bevan they still have to smooth out some compatibility issues.

Hot on it’s heels is the BBC iPlayer (sorry Katie Green another non-Apple lower case ‘i’ user to add to the list). The new service is located on the BBC and allows viewers to catch up with programs from the previous seven days and store them on a computer for 30 days.

This is all good for the UK consumer and means that we no longer have to wait or miss out on the programs we want to watch. However, in terms of marketing and general awareness, there’s still a lot to do.

I think the digital area is still riddled with unnecessary jargon and at the moment a lot of the messages are still aimed at ‘early adopters’. For the needle to really move we need to make things a bit more tangible. For example, I’m not a soap fan but most people in the UK probably don’t know that they are only ‘two clicks’ away from watching Coronation Street whenever they like…

If you are trying to get your head around what the UK networks are up to right now it’s worth checking out this well researched and, almost, impartial run down courtesy of the BBC.

For those with a pathological desire to square the circle or just have a serious aversion to ‘hype’ why not try out one of Ofcom’s beautifully crafted documents on digital TV. Sleep well.

I’m a Heroes fan and, in my recent talks with students, have cited NBC’s embrace of digital media as a prime example of traditional media “exposing” itself by providing a 360-experience that taps into the fan network.  What’s neat about Heroes?

• Heroes Rewind: Free, full online videos available five hours after broadcast; entire season is posted online for free (ad free!)
• Commentary: Full-length cast commentary for each episode
• Novels: Online graphic novel (PDF and Flash) that runs concurrent with the broadcast; new characters are introduced and plot lines intertwined and enriched
• Blogs by director Greg Beaman and most the popular character, Hiro (each post gets hundreds of comments, not bad for a fictitious blog)
• Wiki that captures episode guides, mythology, art, trivia, predictions and speculations, etc.
• Theories: User submitted videos about what happens next in the storyline; available as a widget.  (Top Five Theories)
• On the go: Heroes on your mobile device

Kudos to NBC for generating this rich, engaging content.  As it matures, I trust that the layout and navigation will get cleaner and slicker.  I’m eager to see and learn from the upcoming NBC Social Network.

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4/12 UPDATE:

MSNBC pulls the Imus in the Morning show, and it replaces with news. Imus pushes forward with Radioathon; what happens with CBS to be determinedafter his 2-week suspension, which starts next week.

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For those of you who follow the news on a regular basis, the names of Don Imus and Katie Couric need not be explained. They are two of the biggest names in radio and television and this week they are linked together for things gone awry.

Imus got himself in trouble when the now-suspended radio show host called the Rutgers women’s basketball players “nappy-headed hos” on his April 4 show. He’s lost sponsors and has been on every news show from coast-to-coast and on the web. He’s number two (Imus) and number five (Don Imus) on Technorati top searches and there are 20,913 results on blogs with any authority.  April 8-10, his name was getting mentioned in 500+ blogs a day, and as of April 11, he’s over 4,000 mentions. Mind you some folks are mentioning that it’s all getting blown out of proportion, but most are calling for his head.  

While Imus is dealing with his fun, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is putting out her own fire for a producer who plagiarised from a Wall Street Journal column on the fading allure of library books.

 Newsweek has a great piece on the story where they say:

The problems began when an April 4 installment of  “Katie Couric’s Notebook”—a daily essay by the anchor that appears in video and audio form on CBS News’ Web site, among other places—was uncomfortably close to musings by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow on the fading allure of library books.

Newsweek’s story goes on to say that the story came to light “when a Wall Street Journal reader who’d read, heard or saw “Katie Couric’s Notebook” alerted the newspaper, according to an insider at the Wall Street Journal.  Zaslow, the author, said two CBS officials phoned him to express regrets.”

What’s incredible is how the web plays a role in both of these cases.

Imus has been spouting off about all kinds of issues for years. He’s crossed the line many a time, but the world we live in isn’t the same as when I was growing up outside of New York City and he was just on WNBC-AM (you younger folks, you know what AM radio is, right?). 

Couric’s issue is deeper in the sense that plagiarism is deemed “journalistic suicide” and the producer in charge of the ‘Notebook’ has been fired. But once again, it’s an issue that can explode because of the mob on the web. 

 The sad part about Couric’s problems are that, I think, CBS News and Couric have done a wonderful job embracing new media into their broadcast and into their site. If you haven’t checked out their site, I recommend you do at: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/eveningnews/main3420.shtml 

It will be interesting to see when Imus comes back in two weeks if he has any sponsors left and if he will still have a job. The Couric issue will be gone in two weeks. It will be talked about, but they have fired the producer and now onto bigger and better things. The one interesting factor in my mind about CBS News is that they brought in Rick Kaplan to be the Executive Producer.

From Wikipedia entry for Kaplan:

Kaplan was at the helm of ABC’s Prime Time Live in 1991, when they aired an expose against the Food Lion supermarket chain using undercover producers who falsified their resumes and staged events. Food Lion was awarded $5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, they felt that Food Lion was unable to show that they had been directly injured by ABC’s actions.

Just something to keep in your mind as CBS News tries to move out of the number three spot. They wish people were watching their televisions instead of watching the people and things that they do wrong.