How Twitter Has Changed How We Watch TV
Saturday, March 9 | 9:30 – 10:30 a.m.
Austin Convention Center
Room 18ABCD
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s become pretty close to impossible to avoid social media. Whether you just see a hashtag pop up on the screen in the middle of your favorite TV show or whether you’re actively posting your every meal on Instagram, social media has left its mark locally, nationally and globally.
But few integral facets of our day-to-day lives have been impacted as heavily by social media as the television industry. As consumers, we can now talk with childhood friends on Facebook about the latest episode of Breaking Bad, or check-in to watch it with people we’ve never met before using applications like GetGlue. While those social sites have made a splash all their own, no site can come close to the impact of social media heavyweight Twitter.
Jenn Deering Davis, co-founder of Union Metrics, will speak at SXSW Interactive this year about Twitter’s significance as it relates to the television industry. Union Metrics is a company that measures social media metrics and analyzes how those metrics can help marketers and agencies to better use social media tools.
Davis has long had an interest in what she calls “social TV.”
“I’ve actually been speaking about social TV for a few years now, at various conferences and events like Digital Hollywood and SXSW. It’s an area in the center of my Venn diagrams of interests: social media and television,” Davis said. “My company, Union Metrics, works with a lot of television networks, studios and agencies to monitor and analyze social conversations about their programming, so it’s something we have become pretty expert in.”
“We track tweets about TV series, as well as televised events like the Golden Globes and Super Bowl, and help our customers understand what the numbers around those events mean.”
Davis hopes festival goers will have an increased knowledge about social TV after attending her session.
“I hope they come away knowing a little more about the current state of social TV and how they can use this in their own jobs – what works, what’s new, what’s coming up,” Davis said.
Davis has been attending SXSW since 2008. Aside from participating, she looks forward to catching up with old friends, colleagues, and customers of Union Metrics.
“Sitting down with customers face-to-face is one of the best parts of my job, and I can have lots of those meetings in just a few days at SXSW.”
Davis will also be glad to revisit the Live Music Capital of the World.
“We started our company in Austin and I went to UT for my PhD, so I lived there until 2010. I now live in San Francisco, and get back to Austin just a few times a year,” Davis said. “I miss breakfast tacos so much.”