With every major event we now experience as a country, whether it’s the Super Bowl or the presidential inauguration, it becomes more evident that the conversation on social media is as tied to the event as is the process of physically tuning into the broadcast. There’s nothing new about this — the rise of social media and the second screen has been clear for years — but as soaring numbers for social media sharing are revealed after each event, we shake our heads at just how quickly things have changed.

Even within a year, the connection between television events and their small screen counterparts has grown at a remarkable rate (13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets in 2012 versus 24.1 million last night, and from 100 million active Twitter users in September 2011 to 200 million in December 2012).

That growth is changing how we view and consume media and how advertisers work to reach us. Suddenly, they can fairly reliably cross-promote between television and online, and consumers are increasingly sucked into experiencing both events in real time. And I say events, because watching Twitter during an event like the Super Bowl is an experience in itself.

One predicted trend that hasn’t come into existence yet is the merging of the television and social experiences into one, as Om once predicted and brought to my attention this morning. People are still pretty much watching television on televisions and tweeting from phones or laptops. As we wrote this morning, the majority of Super Bowl viewers did so through traditional broadcast methods, and tweeting from your TV still hasn’t exactly caught on.

But with every event comes the inevitable blog posts from Twitter and Facebook and Instagram about how this was the most-tweeted or the most-photographed or the most-shared event EVER. Frankly, those posts will only be newsworthy if the numbers ever decline, but that seems unlikely at this point. The dual forces of television and social media are dragging us into experiencing live events as they happen, turning on its head the idea that portable computing devices and streaming will let us watch whatever we want whenever we want. And they are setting different standards for how viewer engagement is measured: we all know the Nielsen ratings are a bit of a joke in this day and age. With Twitter’s reported acquisition of social tv analytics company Bluefin Labs, it’s something everyone is interested in figuring out.

My friend’s attempt to watch last week’s heart-wrenching Downton Abbey episode a day later was cheapened when a pivotal plot point was spoiled by a parody account for the Dowager Countess on Twitter (obviously do not click that link if you live under a rock and haven’t watched yet). It was a rough way to find out. And the experience cured my friend of wanting to DVR an episode ever again.

Because if you care about the content and you’re tied to the internet as so many of us are, saving anything for later is a losing battle. And the rapid wit of the Oreo jokes on Twitter during the Super Bowl can’t really be appreciated at a later date. Even as the Dowager Countess parody tweet ruined the episode for my friend, it probably entertained thousands of Downton fans who felt more in the know when they saw it, and felt more connected to the show as a result. There’s nothing like seeing a witty remark from someone you follow about an event you’re also following — suddenly it’s a joke you share with other people. And that experience is extremely hard to replicate after the fact.

Most of us will have to accept the fact that seperating live events from their social media counterparts is a losing battle at this point, but for brands like Oreo, the knowledge that they have a dual-platform audience creates real possibilities. And as they proved last night, can be a delicious combo, both for advertisers and witty twitter users who want in on the joke when it happens.

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The company revealed on its blog Monday that the Super Bowl stream did account for over 3 percent of total network traffic Sunday evening. But that was more than outweighed by people who decided not to tune into Netflix and other forms of online entertainment, and watch the game on their TV instead – for which there was no easy online option, as Sandvine noted:

“At Sandvine’s we’ve long maintained that the biggest screen is always the best screen to consume content, and for the Super Bowl it makes sense that most people would prefer to watch the game on their large HDTV. Since the only option to stream the game was via a web browser, getting the game streaming to their TV would have been a challenge for most people, so unsurprisingly viewers opted to tune in via their cable or satellite provider.”

One should probably add that the Super Bowl was also available via free over-the-air for cord cutters with an antenna. Still, there were some noteworthy blips during the evening when people went online to stream:

Sandvine also noted that the availability of free streams may have an impact on people’s expectations, even if they don’t use them en masse just yet:

“Sandvine’s traffic statistics have shown continued growth in adoption of live streamed sports events, but for the time being it is no threat to replace viewing via traditional broadcast methods. It is clear however that live streaming is only going to get more popular, and if free streaming is being provided for the biggest television event of the year, then users will soon start expecting it to be offered for everything they watch.”

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Check out our ultimate guide to watching Super Bowl XLVII live online and mobile devices below:

• CBS Sports will live stream the Super Bowl XLVII on its website in its entirety starting at 6 p.m. ET (3 p.m. PT). The stream will feature multiple camera angles, DVR functionality, real-time stats and curated tweets. Also notable: This will be the first time ever that a network is going to stream the entire halftime show, including Beyonce’s performance.
• Verizon mobile and FIOS customers can also catch the action on NFL Mobile, which is available on Android and iOS devices. But beware: An NFL Mobile subscription costs $5 a month.
• NFL Gamepass streams the Super Bowl to viewers from outside of the U.S.
• Hulu offers videos of many Super Bowl ads in its Adzone.
• YouTube has teamed up with Adweek for its Ad Blitz, offering Super Bowl ads, an animated GIF generator and more.
• Getty Images is going to publish photos of all the Super Bow action as it happens on its Facebook page.
• Intonow will allow viewers to vote on Super Bowl ads in real time. The Yahoo-owned second screen app, which is available for iOS and Android, also integrates with Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, promising live polls, video extras, exclusive photos, a real-time meme generator, and of course a puppy overload.
• Ustream proves that there is more than one puppy bowl, after all: The site is streaming Rescue Bowl, featuring adorable shelter dogs, starting Sunday at 2p.m. ET..
• ConnecTV will offer live chats during the Super Bowl as well as the half-time show featuring talent from a number of CBS affiliates as well as YouTube darling Michael Buckley. The second-screen app is available for iPhones and iPads as well as Windows and OS X PC.
• GetGlue will offer exclusive stickers for viewers who watch the Super Bowl ads, and it’s partnering with Hulu to bring videos of the ads to its site.

We will add links to additional apps and sites to this list in the coming days.

For more on how to watch sports and other TV programming without paying for cable, check out my ebook Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable.

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The round was led by local VC Hyde Park Venture Partners with participation from Hyde Park Angels, Amicus Capital, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Gerry Tan of Y Combinator, former Navteq CTO Amreesh Modi, and Henry Feinberg, a former partner at Technology Crossover Ventures.

While SpotHero is just getting started, offering its online parking spot brokering services only in Chicago and Milwaukee, ParkWhiz has been around the block. Though it’s just now raising a Series A round, ParkWhiz launched in 2006 focusing on special event parking. It has since expanded into day-to-day spot reservations and now has an inventory of 3 million parking spaces and relationships with 2000 parking lots nationwide. ParkWhiz says it has generated $10 million in revenues for lot owners in the last six years.

The company has struck deals with StubHub, TicketsNow, professional and collegiate sports teams, and big sports and entertainment venues to handle online parking reservations for their predictable crowded events. In 2011, it parked 15 percent of the 2011 Super Bowl XLV in Dallas, and it doubled that number in 2012 for the Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis.

And what about this year? ParkWhiz is hoping to break its Super Bowl record in New Orleans this coming February. In case you’re wondering, ParkWhiz is charging between $200 to $325 parking in a lot right next to the Superdome.

Parking lot image courtesy of Alex 92287.

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According to a Pew Research study released Monday, nearly 8 out of 10 Americans say they’re following the London Olympics on either traditional television or via the internet.

As a media event, that makes the Summer Olympics bigger than the Super Bowl, which draw attention from about 7 out of 10 Americans. (The latter data came from a Harris Poll conducted last year.)

Not surprisingly, traditional television is the dominant consumption platform for the London Games, with 73 percent of the 1,005 individuals surveyed by Pew saying they watch events on the tube (see chart).

Also read: BBC’s super-served Olympics shows how narrowcast can go wide

However, among younger demographics, usage of internet platforms to follow the Olympics is significant.

For example, among groups aged 18-29 and 30-49, 22 percent are tracking the Games online. And 31 percent of 18-29-year-olds are using social media to get their Olympics fix, far away the most social-media use of any demo surveyed.

Also notable: The level of Olympics consumption rises along with wealth and education.

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Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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It’s new Senti-meter, which appears as part of the Los Angeles Times‘ interactive and ongoing awards section called “The Envelope,” ranks movies, actors and actresses based on the number of tweets about them and the sentiment contained in those tweets. For example, as of its last update on Jan. 28, the Senti-meter showed Hugo dominating in number of tweets, but Midnight in Paris generating the most-positive reaction. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, however, appears to have the best balance between number of tweets and positive tweets.

It’s easy to take fan sentiment with a grain of salt if you’re a movie critic, but if you’re a studio, being able to quantify the types of movies and stars fans prefer could mean big bucks. When I spoke with IBM SVP of IBM’s Software and Systems Steve Mills in October, he told me IBM expects to do $16 billion in analytics revenue by 2015, and he expects social-media analysis to be a big driver of that growth.

Anyone into betting on the various awards shows might find this particular project useful, too. It’s hardly predictive analytics, but the masses might know something: although the New England Patriots were favored in last week’s Super Bowl, sentiment swayed in the last few days to New York Giants quarterback — and eventual winner — Eli Manning from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

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AT&T had quite the Super Bowl. At the game AT&T’s networks carried 215 GB of traffic, placed 74,204 phone calls and transmitted 722,296 SMS messages, according to its public policy blog. AT&T reported no problems in handling the traffic and had, in fact, been prepping for game day by adding permanent and temporary capacity. But in what is now becoming a common refrain, AT&T used the event to lobby regulators for more spectrum.

Here’s an excerpt from the post, written by AT&T VP Joan Marsh:

As the mobile broadband data revolution continues, the urgency for new spectrum allocations continues to grow.  Despite the National Broadband Plan’s laudable spectrum goals, we have not had a major spectrum auction since 2008 (the 700 MHz auction) and no major auctions are currently scheduled.  The spectrum legislation currently being considered by Congress has never been more essential.  And as we have argued elsewhere in our blogs, any new spectrum allocations should be assigned via auction without unnecessary encumbrances or limits that hinder any individual carrier’s ability to fully and fairly participate.

… We’ll continue to invest in and enhance our wireless networks, but more spectrum is the only long-term solution to the capacity constraints faced by the wireless industry.

It’s a bit strange for AT&T to use a one-off event as justification for more licenses, since a big annual sporting event is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. Operators scale network capacity to meet average peak demands. If carriers built their networks nationwide to handle Super Bowl-levels of traffic, they would go broke, regardless of whether they had the spectrum to do so. If AT&T had permanently doubled it’s normal peak capacity in Indianapolis for the game, that bandwidth would have sat their idle for the remaining 364 days.

In fact, AT&T addressed the traffic increase exactly as it should have, by bringing in temporary cell sites, or cells on wheels (COWs), deployed 15 Wi-Fi access points, to offload smartphone data traffic and used distributed antenna systems to bring coverage and capacity to every nook and cranny of Lucas Oil Stadium. Afterwards the COWS get packed off to the next event, while the access points and antennas remained place as they’re a relatively cheap way of meeting huge capacity spikes at other events.

What’s perhaps most interesting about AT&T’s figures, though, is the direction that traffic headed in. AT&T reported that 40 percent more data was uploaded than downloaded during the game as customers posted photos, videos and messages. Normally traffic flows in the other direction, which is why networks have been designed to support much greater download speeds than upload speeds. This could wind up being a big network engineering problem for operators as traffic patterns become more symmetrical, especially at big events like Super Bowl. But again, it’s a problem that can probably be solved much more easily and cheaply with Wi-Fi than by loading up on macro-network capacity.

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Here’s how Twitter itself broke down the numbers in a blog post Monday afternoon:

• There was a total of 13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. EST.
• Last night’s peak was 12,233 tweets per second, up from 4,064 during last year’s game and a mere 27 during 2008′s Super Bowl. The peak came during the game’s thrilling final 3 minutes.
• Super Bowl watchers also tweeting might be more interested in the games other aspects than is the average sports fan: the top hashtags were all about commercials, and Madonna’s halftime show averaged 8,000 tweets per second with a peak of 10,245 tweets.

IBM released some interesting stats of its own leading up to the game last week. As part of an ongoing project with the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, Big Blue analyzed fan sentiment across 600,000 tweets to determine which players and teams have the most support. Among its findings:

• Fans were generally more positive about the New England Patriots players, with wide receiver Wes Welker and quarterback Tom Brady achieving 71 percent and 65 percent positive sentiment, respectively. Their New York Giants counterparts Victor Cruz and Eli Manning achieved positive scores of 62 percent and 69 percent, respectively.
• The Indianapolis Colts might be wise to reconsider their reported plans to cut Hall 0f Fame quarterback Peyton Manning. Although he wasn’t playing in the Super Bowl, Manning received a positive-sentiment score of 63 percent.

But those results were released on Feb. 2. On Feb. 3, IBM’s analysis showed a role reversal that ultimately mirrored the result of the game: Eli Manning (66 percent) overtook Brady (61 percent) in positive sentiment. Interestingly, Las Vegas oddsmakers favored the Patriots — perhaps leading to the team’s early lead in fan sentiment — but Giants ended up winning the game.

Of course, Twitter has potential outside of measuring interest in the Super Bowl and its players. In October, IBM did a similar analysis around the World Series, and some firms are even using Twitter trends to predict the stock market. On a global scale, some have even analyzed Twitter data to draw correlations between user activity and world-changing events such as the Middle Eastern revolutions and the spread of disease. In the era of big data, Twitter is about as big as it gets when trying to figure out what’s actually happening among the people, as it happens.

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