Nielsen has launched a social networking site/research thingy (?) called Hey! Nielsen. Think of it as Facebook, plus research, minus friends. Users are encouraged to sign up and rate, blog about their television watching and other stuff. This is one of the most clearly misguided Frankensites programmed into existence. First of all, Nielsen is not in the publishing business and therefore should be working with existing social networking sites instead of trying to create its own. How can this site possibly compete with Facebook or Myspace? Both of them have massive audiences, massive funding and deep data. Not only that, in the case of Facebook, some data is available for free. If you want to know how many people are fans of Battlestar versus Jericho, set up a campaign and use the interface and it will tell you the actual number. That can be broken down by demo, country, city as well with some manual work.
On top of that, they are incenting (tainting the data would be another way of putting it) people to actively blog and rate the shows. It’s really one of those “you can’t be serious” initiatives where a senior executive reads about online and issues the “get me one of those” order.
1 response so far ↓
You're Wrong // December 19, 2007 at 1:51 pm |
I don’t agree with you AT ALL.
“If you want to know how many people are fans of Battlestar versus Jericho, set up a campaign and use the interface and it will tell you the actual number.”
What are you talking about? How would they do that?
And just so you know–both Facebook & Myspace were not in the ‘publishing business’ prior to launching. They were just guys going with their gut instinct and a cool idea. Publishing industry doesn’t even have anything to do with social networks–most of the companies that acquire them (Google, Yahoo, AOL) are INTERNET/ONLINE entities, not publishing entities. Get your facts straight.