Montreal-based Seevibes launched its new TV Dashboard tool this week to help network and media agencies analyze the social performance of TV shows. The company believes measuring viewer engagement on social networks will help its customers get a better grasp on what the public actually thinks about a show, and will augment traditional ratings like Nielsen. Since launching its measurement platform in 2011, the company has started working with four major television networks and several media agencies in Canada, with plans to expand to the U.S.
The Seevibes TV dashboard came as a result of industry feedback that showed networks and other industry insiders wanted a way to measure social viewers. “The Seevibes TV Dashboard is the result of a long collaboration with the industry to create a product that best suits their needs,” founder and CEO Laurent Maisonnave commented in a interview. “For broadcasters, Seevibes offers exclusive data to demonstrate the added value of the social engagement of viewers around their shows. For media agencies, it’s an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of cross-media marketing strategies, harnessing the power of social media to increase the ROI of media buys and product placements on TV.”
The company believes its social metrics can understand second screen viewers, who are Tweeting, updating Facebook, and interacting on networks like GetGlue while they watch TV. The platform tracks viewer comments about TV shows on Twitter and Facebook using a natural language processing system. Customers can then use the platform to mine the data and access the company’s database of 2000 shows and up-to-date reports. Broadcasters can monitor shows on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, and track data including interactions, frequency, and scope in addition to seeing that data broken down by genre, city, and social network. It also offers what it calls the Seevibes Score, which is composed of six key performance measures that aims to create an indication of the total performance of a show.
The company charges a variable monthly fee, depending on the volume of data a given show generates, to provide customers access to its Seevibes TV Ratings and Seevibes TV Dashboard. Customers can then subscribe to their own shows and competitor shows, or in the case of media agencies shows in which they have bought advertising space.
“The main performance metrics are the volume of interactions, the number of unique participants, impressions and social implications. We also provide data on the gender and geographic location of viewers,” Maisonnave added. “Seevibes has developed a new technology, exclusive to the TV Dashboard, that precisely identifies the geographic location of the social TV audience.”
There has been a lot of activity when it comes to networks and advertisers looking to cash in on viewers’ second screen interactions while viewing TV. Recently BetaKit covered the U.S. Launch of zeebox, lets networks and media agencies deliver exclusive content and promotions to viewers via its iOS, Android, and web-based platform. Other second screen players include Peel, now offering an app to measure the U.S. presidential debates potential voters reactions, as well as GetGlue and Wayin. Since it’s focused on analytics rather than viewer engagement, Seevibes is a way to measure those second screen efforts, rather than promote them. They compete with other social media analytic companies that could also be used to track online chatter about a given show.
The company is currently focused on building its existing product line, and it’s also planning to expand beyond the Canadian market. The service appears to be a definite value-add for broadcasters looking to measure online viewer engagement, and while it likely won’t eliminate the need for traditional ratings systems, it gives broadcasters another lens through which to view their programming.