Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers

Are you seeing more QR codes on your TV screen and wondering who scans a code while watching TV? It could be up to 80% of the mobile Internet users who responded to a recent study by Razorfish!

Multitasking is hardly a new phenomenon, but laptops, smart phones and tablets have taken the activity to a whole new level. An earlier study by Yahoo!, which interviewed over 8 thousand Internet users and over 5 thousand mobile users, found a whopping 86% of mobile users (92% of mobile users aged 13-24) viewing mobile content related to the TV program they were watching. That is too many multitaskers to be ignored!
According to the ReadWriteWeb graphic, a fair amount of the multitasking activity is communication, specifically social networking or texting (about brands or TV programs, I wonder?). 70 percent is use of apps, many if not most of which connect to the web, and 37% is plain old web surfing. That’s a lot of people conducting a lot of potentially brand-related activity! Neither study breaks out search as a separate activity, but given the explosive growth of mobile search, I have to believe that there’s a lot of searching buried in the surfing data.

Specific types of content are also more likely to stimulate sharing. This graphic from the new Razorfish report shows what they are. I see a strong reflection of target audiences, many of them young. My hypothesis would be that young men are heavy sharers of sports news; moms are heavy sharers of food content. What about reality? Everyone, or is that sharing somewhat female also? These are questions the marketer needs to pursue for her own brand.

Marketers can direct the activity and conversation by creative promotions and learn from their results. For example:
• Pepsi gave a free bottle of Pepsi Max who shared an ad with their friends using a Yahoo! social tool called IntoNow.
• The “Old Navy Records” campaign offers incentives including free music to people who tag ads with Shazam.
• A Heinken app allows users to play along with soccer games, trying to predict who will score in the next 30 seconds.
Read more here. And while you do, notice that these campaigns use special tools/applications to create just the right context for social sharing.

There are two important take-aways:
• It’s more than just not ignoring mobile; it’s also creating content that can move seamlessly from one channel to the other, as the Timberline scan tag and mobile site I described in my previous post.
• Then it’s devising ways in which to get people to interact with programming content or with advertising.

Marketers need to follow the lead of their customers. They are sharing web content. How does the marketer make content worth sharing and participate in the brand-related conversations?

Article first published as Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers on Technorati.

Old Spice Guy Is Back--Quietly

I just linked my post-Super Bowl post to a detailed report on the effectiveness of the ads themselves and their impact on social media by agency ymarketing. The social media aspect wasn't particularly clear during the game, but it appears to have been considerable. I'd encourage you to read the report for yourself.

Likewise, the return of the Old Spice Guy on the day after the Super Bowl did not generate the buzz of the first outing last summer. Still, Ad Age reports a huge number of video views. That makes sense for at least 2 reasons. First,Isaiah Mustafa is just as hunky as ever--see the most recent ad below entitled Scent Vacation. Second, the campaign has a huge following. The ad below has gotten almost 2.5 million views. If you watch it you'll also get access to the I'm Back and Phone Call videos that were part of the effort to develop Super Bowl buzz. That part seemed to have gotten lost in the Super Bowl hoo-haa, but the campaign itself seems to be flourishing.



What does all this show? The report says that ad tie ins with social media do bring visitors. Old Spice seems to say that if you have a campaign that's working with the target market, stick with it!

Engaging With Customers

So far we’ve talked about how to listen to our customers and how (and whether) to respond. The next step I suggested in an abbreviated strategy development process is to engage. This is hardly a new subject; I found some good case examples not long ago.

Since I believe it’s important to have a common understanding of what we’re talking about, I searched “definition of customer engagement.” I got 150,000 hits, pretty much what I was expecting. The Advertising Research Foundation’s 2006 definition is widely accepted; here is a good article with an elaboration of the definition. The common thread in the subset of the 150,000 definitions I read is that we want to encourage interaction with our customers—real give and take that adds value to the customer’s brand-related experience.

A recent publication from Alterian quotes some statistics. Note particularly the second one. Customer service experts have long known that resolving a problem for a customer can make that person more loyal than the person who has never experienced a problem. It also supports my hypothesis that the customer experience concept--if it did not grow out of what we know about customer service management--is at least a first cousin. Contemplate the steps recommended by the Opinion Research Corporation. They say the goal is a differentiated customer experience. The strategic questions are:

1. How well do our employees deliver on our brand promise?
2. What are our customer’s expectations of experiences with our organization?
3. What is the gap between our brand promise and the customer experience/customer expectations?
4. How consistent is the delivery of our brand promise across all channels of customer interaction?
5. What are we doing to deliver a differentiated experience from that of our competition, and/or in comparison to other non-competitive organizations?
6. How is all of this information utilized by our organization to close the gap between the promise and the experience to ultimately enhance the overall customer experience?

The focus on brand promise is the unifying theme—the one marketers want to embed in all communications channels, at all customer touchpoints. While this makes sense to me, it’s more operations focused than interaction focused. Getting customers to interact with us seems to be the goal; it’s not enough that they just go away satisfied.

Let me give you two quick examples. I went shopping over the weekend. I had a few staples to pick up at Macy’s; of course that led to browsing other departments and, of course, that led to buying some stuff that I only needed marginally, if at all. But I was having fun. Sales associates were being nice to me; two of them stretched the definition of “red” to give me the discount for the “Go Red” AHA promotion (note more cause-related marketing here). One associate wrote her name on the register receipt and encouraged me to evaluate my experience. I got good service everywhere I went, so I did write a review when I got home. I thought that would be the end of it, but a couple of days later I got a thank-you email from Macy’s. It’s nice to be thanked and I was interested to see my review was being forwarded to the local store. Too bad they had to spoil it with a lame subject line! But overall good try.
The second is what’s becoming the ubiquitous video contest. This one does seem to tie in well with the brand promise. You probably know Flo, the terminally perky sales rep who sells insurance “packages” for Progressive on TV. Now, apparently, Flo needs help! You can send in a video in a contest for a live tryout, presumably for a lucrative ad contract. You can watch the “tryouts” but I don’t see that viewers get a vote. They certainly are encouraged to “share.” Progressive is clearly serious about it; there have been two days of tryouts in New York already and they are taking the road show to Miami next week. The program, of course, has a Facebook page and is being promoted by Tweets from the Progressive account. As I said, these contests are becoming ubiquitous, but when the campaign needs refreshing can you think of anything better???

Macy’s tried, and I did appreciate being thanked. However, there was no real encouragement to try to get me to interact further. I do expect to get more emails though! Progressive will probably come up with another cute spokesperson—is “young” part of the strategy, I wonder? And what will they do to ensure that all the contestants go away happy, if not richer? And will they use the entries to build any kind of relationship? Keep an eye out.

And if you ever believed in “build it and they will come” forget that now. It all takes persistent effort. That’s what builds a social media strategy!

My Last Take on Super Bowl XLIV

You’ll see a lot of analysis of what took place on the Internet before, during and after the game. Watch for things like maps of the Twitter traffic, perhaps some Facebook traffic stats, and perhaps some on social network activity.

I watched on TV so I could concentrate on the ads, which I always enjoy. Maybe I missed a lot of what was going on, but I didn’t see much in the advertising that was directly related to websites and social media. Yes, they had their website and Facebook URLs, but that was about it. Maybe what I should have done is watch on the Internet; there were apparently several sites streaming it live. I like this one; it not only accessed the Super Bowl, it accessed the Puppy Bowl. Something for everyone, as I said last week! Thinking back to watching the Inauguration online, I saw a lot of things going on, but I was watching that on my Facebook page. The channel you use may have a lot to do with what you see, which I think is the essence of targeting.

If you want to review ads or vote for your favorites, there are many places to do that. As part of good coverage by Ad Age, Bob Garfield opines that most marketers should have stayed home. His ad-by-ad commentary is always thought-provoking, whether you agree or not. I like Garfield because he’s a curmudgeon, but even more because he focuses on whether customer benefits or key selling propositions are communicated. He’s right that advertising basics tend to get lost in the hoo-ha surrounding the Super Bowl.

I thought the actual chicken ad (Denny’s) was cute. What’s more important is that they are getting lots of mileage beyond the ad with the contest. They are also able to paint themselves as community-friendly in a time that’s economically difficult for many people. Or you can buy a chicken t-shirt What’s not working there?

I also checked out Intel, another of my long-time favorite advertisers. They’ve been at it for a long time and they know how to do TV, whether you liked Jeffry the Robot last night or not. There’s not much for them to say on their website except “watch it again,” which is exactly what they are doing. Their Facebook page is lively and had Super Bowl related posts yesterday, but they’re pretty much on to other issues today; the page is pretty busy this morning. Their Twitter page was lively yesterday with posts to point their followers to “geek humor” sorts of issues related to their ads. It’s pretty quiet this morning, which may suggest something about the way they use the two channels.

Let me close with two related issues. First, Pepsi again. The Ad Age coverage has an article about the Pepsi Refresh program, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. They quote Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi as saying Pepsi has shifted almost one-third of its budget to interactive and social media. That’s as big news as their skipping the Super Bowl in the first place.

Second, comScore recently reported that nearly 178 million US Internet users viewed over 33 billion videos were viewed in December. So don’t roll your eyes because Intel posted its ad on its website; people watch those, they watch on Facebook, and, of course, they watch on Facebook. So, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t entirely visible to the TV game viewer, savvy advertisers distribute their content widely. From what I saw on Facebook, I’ll bet Intel with be giving out little Jeffry the Robots at the next big IT conference! The work continues to be “integration” whether you’re talking about the rarified atmosphere of the Super Bowl or everyday communications.

And congratulations to the Saints—and to the wonderful city of New Orleans, which deserves all the good vibes it can get!

Marketers Prep for Super Bowl XLIV

The Friday before THE BIG GAME always brings bloggers out in force. Just as in the game itself, there are two opposing forces. One is the group who care about the football game; the other is the group who care about the ads. I count myself a member of the latter!

So here’s an update to what I wrote earlier about Super Bowl ads and Pepsi substituting a social media program. Coke has 3 ads; I thought one of them was going to be pushing their Expedition 206 program. Apparently not; it appears they are trying to get more fans on their Facebook page—as if they need them. There is apparently going to be a Living Positively theme to the ads and the charitable tie-in. Read about Coke's social media program (including the video about how Coke’s top-ranking page came about) on another recent post.

Animals seem to be big again this year. What’s even more interesting is the number of teaser ads that have been released (see some of them here)—that’s part of the traditional practice of building buzz before the game itself. Ads themselves will certainly be posted on YouTube and other sites during and after the game.

Read all about it in Ad Age’s special section. The one that interested me most was the article about marketers moving to ‘platforms’ and Garrick Schmitt describes some interesting ones. I prefer the explanation that Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive gave in my class last night. It’s all the channels marketers are using to reach out to audiences—and more. Your blog has to integrate with your Facebook which has to interact with your Twitter—and on and on. These interconnected channels are the ways marketers “broadcast” these days; they are just on the web, not on the tube. Except maybe on Super Bowl day!

Not a football fan? I’m sure you’ll find counter programming. Ad Age had an article about the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. I checked some of the other usual suspects and didn’t find anything interesting—perhaps they don’t have a schedule that’s as easily searchable as Animal Planet’s! Note that the Subaru ad for the Puppy Bowl also has a charitable tie in. That’s social media in action also!

In other words, it’s a BIG DAY—for football, and also for social media. Enjoy!

Does Search or Social Media Have More Impact?

Of course there’s a secondary question—impact on what? For several days I’ve been thinking about two specific questions:

1. Does search marketing or social media drive more traffic to websites? I’m going to limit it to PPC and not include SE0.
2. Does PPC or social media have more impact on sales?

Both sound pretty simple and straightforward, right? If we believe that, we’ve forgotten all we know about the interconnectedness of media. Nevertheless, starting out with two specific questions led me to some interesting data.

Going backwards, we also know that question two is not as simple as phrased; there is immediate impact on sales and delayed impact. From early studies we know that web exposure, which was mostly display advertising at that time, had some immediate conversion impact but also had longer-term impact. In other words, it often took more than one visit for a consumer to decide to make a purchase. Think about your own behavior—does that make sense? We also learned that conversions occurred offline in retail stores after consumers had visited websites. That was a pretty common phenomenon in the early days, “research on line buy offline.” Again, we’ve all probably done that. Are we more likely to just go ahead and buy online today; probably depends on a number of things.

The same is true of the online vs. offline conversion issue. These 2005 data seem pretty straightforward. More people convert offline. comScore went on to say that they “analyzed the time lag between consumers’ initial searches and subsequent purchases made in the same categories during November and December of 2005. . .more than half (56%) of consumers’ online holiday buying actually happened in subsequent internet sessions, clearly demonstrating the strong latent impact of search.”

I’ve been looking for a replication of this study ever since. I’ve never found one. Does that mean that the latent impact of search has become part of Internet marketing conventional wisdom and no one sees the need? I did find a marketer’s analysis of a single campaign in 2009. He found that initial Google results were faster to come in than Yahoo’s, but that 31% of all results came in after his (approximately 1 month) campaign was over. I’ll take that as confirmation until someone shows me otherwise.

Ok, so here’s what I found in terms of traffic. The answer to question 1 looks pretty simple, right? Search is the winner by a huge margin. But look at what else eMarketer said (newsletter, October 22, 2009):

According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing. More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.

It doesn’t say that the loyal users were more likely to buy, but would you agree that the likelihood of a purchase goes up with repeat visits? It does seem likely; how much is unanswered, at least in any recent research I could find.
The most interesting data I found is this 2007 study of the influence of newspaper advertising on web traffic. 44% of people who saw an ad did additional research; 67% of them did their research online; and 31% went to a search engine first.

But strong brands matter; in 2009 Nielsen found that 61% of the holiday traffic of retail web sites came from direct visits, not search. A Nielsen spokesman said:

the fact that such a high percentage of people go directly to retail sites and even those that search generally have a pretty clear intent as to which website they'd like to go to -- it makes a compelling argument that brand and past experiences [with a marketer] matter an awful lot and will be far more significant determinants of success than any customer acquisition strategy that they're going to engage in."

That’s really interesting. Two things strike me. First, that’s holiday shopping data for retailers and it may be different for purchases during the rest of the year. Second, all marketers have to do customer acquisition, so the question as to whether social media or search is best for acquisition still matters. Each and every marketer has to answer that by looking at quality vs. quality of initial referrals and the persistence of customers who were acquired in various channels—in other words by Customer Lifetime Value. At the same time, it’s unlikely that one acquisition channel will ever be enough; the question is allocation of resources.

Question 2 one more time--does search or social media have more impact on sales? Here’s data from the current Razorfish Fluent Report. Offline friends are most trusted when making a purchase—WOM again and always. TV was also trusted by these respondents, then “online” activities of several types appear. Search is down at the bottom as far as trust when making a purchase is concerned.

The issue is not straightforward in the sense that either search or social media is “best.” However, there seems to be a pretty clear picture in these data. Search brings more people to your site; social media gives them more trusted information on which to base their purchases. It’s not either/or.

Several times while I was looking for data I came across a good piece of advice. Marketers must measure the impact of various media at each stage in the conversion funnel. It changes from “just looking for information” to “deciding to buy something” and in between. That’s the real message; marketers must use all the tools in their arsenal—wisely!

Customer Experience Counts in All Channels

Forrester recently completed its 2010 customer experience ranking. Data was collected from 4,653 US consumers in November 2009. The full report is available only to Forrester clients, but Bruce Tempkin released key summary statistics yesterday.
His summary of the findings, much of which is displayed in this chart, is interesting:

• Retailers take 12 out of the top 20 spots. I’m happy for them, but I also wonder why retailers appear to think that customer experience is more important than do other types of businesses that sell things—B2B or B2C, products or services?
• Healthcare, Internet and TV services dominate the bottom. Quelle surprise! We all have our stories. My most recent one is yesterday. I called a physician’s office for an appointment instead of her competitor whose office’s customer service was dissed on local ratings services. So far, so good—the appointments secretary was nice to me on the phone!
• There was very little excellence. Again, not news to most of us. Excellent customer service, and it’s outcome, excellent customer experience, is a sustainable competitive advantage. Why? Because it’s hard and it requires upfront investment.
• Liberty Mutual improved the most. Interesting. I’ve actually paid attention to their “responsibility matters” TV advertising. I wondered how that fit into their ability to improve customer experience, so I decided to look around.

What I expected to find was some trade buzz that Liberty Mutual had really been working on its customer service. Maybe they have, but that’s not what I found. I found The Responsibility Project. Business Week had an article and video interview with Stephen Sullivan, senior vice-president, communications services at Liberty Mutual. Sullivan talks about the challenges the firm faced in 2008 as it tried to expand market share in the face of competitors who could outspend and customers who didn’t trust. He says:

"It's a wonderful thing to say that we do the right thing, but it's also a more difficult message to get across to consumers because so many people want to say that," says Sullivan. "What we wanted to say is 'We recognize that personal responsibility is one of your core values and if this is true, then you will like doing business with a company like us because we share that value; in fact, we celebrate it on your part.'"

That view is the core of The Responsibility Project. TV is the responsibility of Hill, Holiday. PR comes from Ketchum, which describes the project as follows:

The Responsibility Project, created by Liberty Mutual, uses entertainment content to create a forum for people to discuss personal acts of responsibility. Through short films, online content and television programming, The Responsibility Project is a catalyst for examining the decisions that confront people trying to “do the right thing.”

Take a look at the project website. The entertainment content is obvious with short films from Liberty Mutual and “responsibility partners” including NBC, Slate and BeliefNet. I was interested in the box that describes their outreach to bloggers at the summer BlogHer conference. The site is reasonably interactive with a blog and an opportunity to post stories, vote on issues and make comments.

Individually, the pieces are impressive. More impressive is the degree to which Liberty Mutual integrates the “doing the right thing” into all its messaging—from the blogger outreach this summer to the career pages on its website. In the Business Week interview Sullivan made the point that employees had to believe in the message in order to be able to deliver on the promise. That starts with hiring the right people, as they are obviously trying to do. One assumes that management at Liberty Mutual is behind the program in both word and deed. Otherwise, the results wouldn’t be showing up in customer experience rankings.

Where did this all start? Liberty Mutual, of the 133 organizations in 14 industries that Forrester surveyed, improved its customer experience rankings the most. That means it supported its words with actions in a most impressive way--another best practices example.

Social media is nice. However, marketers have to use all their channels and use them in an integrated way. If the message doesn’t resonate and the experience is not satisfactory, all social media can do is to reflect customer discontent. If social media is to reflect a strong and trusted brand, business actions are going to establish the foundation. Getting the message out is important, but the actions of employees and the everyday experiences of customers are the ultimate test of strategy.

The New CNN - Marriage of Site and Social?

Very early this morning I heard John Roberts and Kiran Chetry introducing the new CNN website on American Morning. Even at the early hour it sounded interesting, so I checked it out.

CNN's web designers seem to have brought as many different types of content to the home page as possible. It has latest news and features -- both headlines and videos, most popular (newspulse), a whole banner of editor’s picks videos in a banner across the middle of the page and topic boxes with links to stories. I think that sounds confusing, but it’s well organized and easy to follow. Take a look for yourself.


It was the personalization and social features that I was most interested in, though. There are more, but here are two that I investigated. I set up a profile, personalized my weather for Boston (easy), tried to upload a picture (didn’t work), and followed some topics, which John and Kiran said was easy. I didn’t find it so, at least initially, but as you can see, I did make it work. I wanted to follow Tech and thought I’d get latest headlines. All the RSS feeds to that macro level of topics are still there, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. What I found was that I had to read an article; at the end there was a Follow This Topic button. Hitting that button usually gave me several keyword-type choices which then showed up on my profile page. The topics are rather micro for my taste, but it will be interesting to follow them for awhile and see what shows up. You can follow up to 12 topics, which on the one hand is enough to keep up with, but on the other hand may not give the reader much of a perspective, given the small scope of most of the topics.

I’m not an iReporter, but I was interested in what’s happening on the citizen journalism front. What was new to me was the concept of “vetted” iReports. These reports have been checked (for correctness, acceptability, they don’t say exactly what) by CNN editors. One assumes that’s an attempt to give credibility to citizen journalism. On the iReport main page they have an Assignment Desk where readers can get story ideas while in search of their 15 minutes of fame. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s the real purpose, for CNN or for local news sites. News happens and often reporters aren’t on the scene, but people with their phone cameras are. With that in mind, CNN just launched an iPhone app so people can upload iReports directly from 3GS iPhones. Events and breaking news seem to be the whole point!

As I looked as this I was reminded of a section of last year’s Razorfish FEED report (now hard to find but is on SlideShare). The chapter on usability/Dr. Nielsen is what I was recalling and here is the provocative quote:

The New Building Blocks

Jakob says:
People don’t read your websites; use a different editorial style and make your pages “scannable.”

We say:
Throw away your concept of primarily designing “pages” as building blocks and start designing experiences. (slide 20)

I think that’s what CNN is trying to do. Call it engagement, call it offering experiences, it may be a guidepost on the road to the future of the web. It’s an experiment worth following.

Video - The Beat Goes On!

Every time I ask a group who has recently watched television programming on the web, I get a substantial show of hands. A lot of them are thirty-somethings, so I don’t find it too surprising. I was, however, a bit surprised when I saw the headline in the WSJ Online recently saying that older viewers were being attracted to Hulu—long form video, especially entertainment programming. It turns out that “older” is 25-44 instead of the more traditional 18-24 video demographic, but it does point to a slightly different audience for time shifting by watching television programming on the Internet. Here’s a glimpse of today’s most popular on Hulu; it’s an interesting mix of program episodes and SNL snippets.
The growing power of online video is highlighted in ComScore’s December 2008 video report as published by Internet Retailer:

• 78.5% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

The networks post their own videos and Marketing Charts recently reported the online stats for top programs. Almost 1.5 million unique viewers for Lost—amazing!


I’m still chewing on the “older” part of the WSJ headline, so I looked at Quantcast. The demos for Hulu are fascinating. The 50+ boomer group is represented, but the 12-17 virtually not at all. Jeremiah Owyang, who tracks the social media activity of the boomers, has often repeated that while they do consume social media content, most do not create it. That makes it easy for social media marketers to miss the activities of boomers on their platforms, so care should be taken.

Back to long-form video sites; who can you reach? Profitable, “older” demographics seems to be the answer.

The even more provocative question is the one asked in the WSJ article. Does this represent the real convergence of the television and Internet channels? If so, what are the implications? More “made for the Internet” programming, perhaps with emphasis on audiences that are slightly older than the general “YouTuber?” A long, slow downhill slide for television, as it continues to lose desirable eyeballs to the Internet?
Or have we not seen the full implications yet? Stay tuned to your favorite Internet video channel to find out!

Viewing Socially

I’ve noticed announcements of CBS’s social viewing rooms for some of its most popular series. I’m not much for watching entertainment videos on the web. However, I have been known to watch a show or sporting event from the comfort of my sofa while talking on the phone to a friend who’s also watching it—I guess that’s the non-social-media version of the same thing.

Anyway I decided to check out the social viewing rooms. I had the direct link, so I looked at the roughly 30 that are available (includes Survivor and The Young and the Restless and lots of sitcoms, which probably indicates a young target audience—surprise, surprise!). However, they have the original Perry Mason series also, so they must have hopes for older viewers.

I clicked on NCIS. That took me to a login page where I could actually register and sign in or just use a temporary name if you want to remain anonymous. I signed in using a ficticious id and was taken to the room for the episode I had chosen. I was the fifth person in the room; 3 of us anonymous, 1 that looks like an avatar, and a kitty with a green hat. I really need a cute identity for these things. . .

In any event, when you sign into one of the rooms you join a program in progress--after viewing an ad, of course. There were two rooms open for this particular episode; Room 2 appeared to hold three of the same people. Were they looking for an earlier entry point? I have no idea. There were occasional quizes about some of the esoterica of the show itself. A comment box was available, but I didn’t say anything.

I thought that in order to watch from the beginning, you have to “View by myself.” That is true, but along the way I got lost. I could get back to the NCIS home page, but I couldn’t get out of it and get back to the page that lists all the series. I eventually had to go to the CBS home page and intuit that the Watch & Chat link would take me to the social viewing rooms. It did, and that might work better for the average user than the “social viewing rooms” link I was looking for.

Some of the comments on the NCIS page are pretty funny. I especially liked the young woman who had to wait until she got home to watch because they’ve taken off her video at work. Wonder why?

But issues of work vs. entertainment aside, it’s an interesting experiment. As is often the case with social media, it looks to me as if it’s going to attract primarily the young, which is fine. I can’t get to the advertiser metrics, of course, but based on my short experience, I’d be careful. I’m pretty sure there were only 5 unduplicated viewers at this particular moment even though the 2 rooms held 8 viewers. I suspect there are engagement metrics—viewed completely, took quizes, commented. Those would be the most interesting, but not terribly relevant unless there’s more advertising at the end. I didn’t stay for the entire episode.

I wonder what other applications might exist for this type of platform. I don’t see anything terribly obvious, but the social media space is evolving in interesting ways. This is a Beta worth watching.