TV, Big Data and Twitter Social Media Startup, Trendrr

Social media seems to be generating new superstar companies at the speed of light. One of the latest to garner attention is a real-time analytics “big data” company called Trendrr. Trendrr sifts social data on Twitter, Facebook and Viggle to help TV companies rate shows and work out just where advertisers should spend their money.
Using both quantitative and qualitative data, it’s apparently the only service that tracks television engagement across multiple data courses. We would call this “diversity in numbers” while other precursor companies before it may have used the term “safety in numbers.”
The data collected by Trendrr is allowing it to rank today’s social TV top five on cable and broadcast television.
According to Wired, Trendrr uses proprietary queries to gather information on gender, location and mobile devices. Like its competitor, Bluefin Labs, it then matches messages to a show’s plotlines and characters using natural language processing and air times.

Trendrr follows at least 120 TV networks and processes at least 30 million activities per day. It also offers real-time analysis during live events. These services appear to be catching up (if not surpassing) more traditional, powerful entities such as Nielson, which is now embracing and pushing out a slew of its own cutting-edge analytics platforms.
Here’s a sample of some recent stats coming out Trendrr:

1. The 2013 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament generated 23.6M 2nd screen interactions from the First Four through the Championship game – an increase of 131% from 2012.
2. Increases in these middle rounds (2-3) can also be attributed to the emergence of a compelling Cinderella storyline – a storyline that the 2012 tournament lacked.
3. On Sunday March 31, season 3 of The Walking Dead came to a dramatic close. The finale inspired more than 1.3 million 2nd screen interactions from a highly engaged audience.

Part of the big data revolution asks the question, “Can numbers actually speak for themselves?” A recent Forbes article included an interesting opinion.
“Sadly, they can’t. Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and the how not just the ‘how many.’”
But for the time being there is massive convergence of multiple IT trends including social media, big data and cloud computing. Trendrr looks set to capitalize on all three waves over the next couple of years!
Do you think TV will ever become truly social?