That’s an insight that has come after MTV spent the last three years engaging with its audience online through networks like Facebook or Twitter. In an interview, McCormack told us that MTV first built its social group back in 2008 to help understand how its viewers were using social networks and determining how best to interact with them.

“We were struggling with idea of what these new platforms mean,” McCormack said. “The one thing we know is that when we do things we need to make money from them.”

While it’s difficult to pick out what’s causation and what’s correlation, McCormack points out that the most recent MTV Video Music Awards were the most tweeted event of all time. It was also one of the highest-rated shows in MTV history. “Is there a connection? We think so,” he said. “Have we proven all the pieces of the puzzle? No.”

Even so, McCormack believes that potential viewers seeing their Twitter feeds blowing up will lead at least some of them to tune in to see what all the fuss is about.

The art of building buzz

Before you get to that point, however, you need to give social network users something to do to get them engaged with the platform ahead of these big tentpole events. And that’s where MTV’s social content strategy comes in. For MTV, which has a huge millennial audience, the need to be social was extremely important, as it recognized early on that its young viewer base was precisely the group that was engaging with these new platforms.

“Social deserves its own programming,” McCormack said. “This is a new programming platform. It’s not just about ‘Watch Jersey Shore at 10 o’clock.’ It’s about how do we generate content and stories to engage people on these platforms.”

And so MTV has been creating about 200 to 300 pieces of new content a day that lives on various websites and social platforms — on top of the programming that airs on its TV networks. Not only do those pieces of content have to be relevant to its shows and its brand, but they also have to be tailored to the platform that they appear on.

“Every time a new platform evolves, we say, ‘What is the content that’s relevant and endemic to this platform?’” McCormack said. So for instance, short, snappy, headline-driven stories are good for Facebook, while photo essays are good for distribution on Instagram.

Content is still king

All that said, while social can certainly help amplify a message and help to grow a show’s audience. It’s not a cure-all for networks — especially if the content isn’t that good. “Social media doesn’t make bad content good. It makes good better, but if you have a bad television show, prowess at social media isn’t going to help. In fact, it’s probably going to kill you quicker,” McCormack said.

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Conan collected 215,145 tweets for the week, with a peak of 51,843 tweets on Tuesday, Jan. 12 — the same day that he sent out a statement declining NBC’s offer to move The Tonight Show to 12:05 instead of 11:35. Jay Leno was the third most-tweeted about TV topic for the week, with a total of 91,035 posts all week and a peak of 19,336 posts on Thursday, Jan. 14.

Not everyone was talking about the late-night drama going on between Conan and Leno, however. The Gleeks came out in full force when news of a second season of Glee broke early in the week. The show was tweeted about 98,067 times during the week, with a high of 29,715 on Monday. And Jersey Shore also did well, as viewers tweeted 35,007 times on Friday, and 66,254 times during the week.

It was also a big week for football, as the NFL playoffs were in full effect. If tweets translated into points, the Dallas Cowboys might have had a fighting chance against the Minnesota Vikings. Instead, the team’s embarrassing loss led to an outcry on Twitter — with 111,966 tweets on Sunday and a weekly total of 147,718. The Saints were second, with a peak of 57,023 on Saturday — the day of their game — and 120,664 in total. The Vikings were third, with 82,056 posts on Sunday and 100,236 total, and the Chargers came in fourth, with 74,073 posts throughout the week and 55,743 on Sunday. Fifth and sixth were the Colts, with 74,025 during the week and a peak of 47,059 on Sunday, and the Jets, with 72,001 for the week and a peak of 28,355 during their win on Sunday, who will play each other next week in the AFC Championship game.

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Michael Cera with "Snooki" and "Sammi." Photo courtesy of dvDepot.

The upcoming Michael Cera film Youth in Revolt, opening tomorrow in theaters, isn’t your typical teen comedy, at least judging by the trailer. So how do you get teenagers to see it? Hitch the Michael Cera star to one of the biggest teen trends going today — Jersey Shore — for a series of ads that will run tonight between commercial breaks of the much-buzzed-about reality series.

Video from the ads, which were produced by Partizan Entertainment for the Weinstein Company and crewed by dvDepot, has been leaked in advance onto Bing (although, sadly, it’s not embeddable).

The concept is simple — Cera gets a dance lesson from the Jersey Shore cast, gets his hair blown out by Pauly D into the self-professed guido’s signature coif, and then hangs out in a hot tub. It’s a fun spin on Cera’s literally buttoned-up image, but just another day for the Jersey Shore kids, who are now professional partiers — when they’re not soliloquizing Shakespeare-style.

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So how do you compete with the show tune phenomenon? Apparently by kicking or punching people in the face.

That’s exactly what Twilight star Taylor Lautner did on SNL this weekend with a life-sized Kanye West paper doll. His guest appearance, plus a skit about Tiger Woods and other iconic guys behaving badly, helped give the show a nice Twitter spike with 26,940 tweets clocked by Sunday.

Also popular on Twitter this week was MTV’s new reality show Jersey Shore, which included racial slurs and on-camera assault. 28,890 people tweeted about the show this week, which catapulted it into the Top 5 of the most popular TV shows on Twitter, even surpassing the buzz leading up to Sunday’s Dexter season finale.

Meanwhile, 2012 is topping the charts as the most-pirated movie on BitTorrent over at Torrentfreak, with Planet 51 entering the charts in second place and Twilight falling to 10th.

NOTE: TorrentFreak data is based on http downloads of .torrent files from various BitTorrent sites. The data is collected by TorrentFreak and is for informational and educational reference only. Currently, DVDrips, DVD Screeners and R5 rips are counted.

The weekly top five most twittered shows is put together from an analysis of tweets matching the exact names of 63 television programs. Trendrr looks at the source data to check that at least 95 percent of the tweets are related to the show. For more metrics surrounding your favorite show, go to www.trendrr.com and put the name of the show into the search tab.

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