Mashable, a large social media blog that you’ll have heard of, invited Craig Engler to their Connect conference to talk about Social TV. Engler is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Syfy Digital.
Expectations got the better of me. Based on the headline “Social TV” I expected Craig to be talking about the likes of GetGlue – where you can “checkin” to shows and share that with friends over Twitter, I rather thought he’d get onto Connected TVs and the convergence of screens, secretly thought he’d talk about Defiance/One Earth the forthcoming Syfy/Trion show/game and would have been impressed if he talked about new opportunities like the Wii U controller.
He doesn’t. This presentation is about how the reach of Twitter impacts the Syfy channel and the people who work for it. Craig begins by saying that they’re not always prepared for people having access to employees involved in the show. The second point is that people now have access to information they never had before and that they don’t always know what to do with it.
A strong takeaway for me was that, to support a show, fans should watch it live. I’m sure that’s due to how ad agencies use the rather dated ratings system to make their media buy choices. Ironically, social TV might represent a cure to some of those challenges as fans could check in to shows (perhaps automatically) that they’ve recorded on Tivo or V+.
I’m also not sure how people like me – who watch SyFy UK – can impact live figures. If five times as many Brits had watched V – would it have been saved?
Now we know why Syfy won’t step in to pick up Wonder Woman. They can’t afford to. It was the end of Battlestar that brough Syfy to Twitter in the first place.
