Social Media is The New Watercooler

Watercooler shows are the shows people talk about in a social situation. The emergence of social media has taken the phenomenon of watercooler shows to a whole new level. Social media provides people a platform to talk about the shows. Every day millions of viewers are joining the conversation on social networks and they are using Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and other platforms to share opinions and convert a normal show into a watercooler show.

What is essential for a show to become a watercooler show on social media? Apart from great show creating a captive audience, it needs a few key influencers to stir the pot on social media, to talk about the show, love it when something great happens, hate it when the things are not as they would like it to be, but irrespective of anything happening just keep participating in conversations about it.

Millions of people spending hours online on social networks and talking about these shows also leads to an interesting side effect. It creates a rich source of data to find insights about these shows. By intelligent mining and analysis of these conversations, marketers can find what key themes and characters are sticking with the audience to develop promos and advertisements for the shows, advertisers can find what demographic and psychographic segments are associating themselves with the shows to better target their products, and producers can get a sense of what is working and what is not working in their shows. Social media sets new standards for audience analysis and measurement for the shows which are much more realistic and practical as compared to traditional methods of measurement.

The evolution of social media has impacted a lot of industries. The In-home entertainment industry is one of them. Every television channel wants its show to be the watercooler show with captive customers and eager advertisers. In today’s connected world, that “watercooler” is replaced by something that is much bigger, scalable and measurable. Social media is the new watercooler!