The show that inspires the highest level of online social engagement is a soapy teen drama that has been around for six years with lackluster ratings. Yes, from January to July 2009, the most socially engaged TV show — by a long shot — was the CW’s One Tree Hill. That’s the claim of LiveHive, a social TV company which purports to have figured out how best to measure show-related activity online while viewers watch.
LiveHive gave One Tree Hill a “social engagement index” rating of 24.3, far above 14.1 for second-place 90210 (also on the CW), with the top five rounded out by Jon and Kate Plus 8 (TLC), Desperate Housewives (ABC) and So You Think You Can Dance (Fox) (at 8.2, 7.0 and 6.0 respectively).
No, I can’t parse those ratings either — and indeed all LiveHive’s numbers are relative and opaque — since they normalize their own invented measures of such activity against each show’s total viewing audience. Plus, the data is best for shows that are watched by users of LiveHive’s real-time chat, trivia and polls through its Facebook application tvClickr and white-label apps the company licenses to networks like ABC for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and NBC for the Beijing Olympics.
But still, tvClickr hosts social activity related to more than 55 prime-time shows and has more than 700,000 users. And, notably, LiveHive does not have a relationship with the CW to provide engagement tools for One Tree Hill. The startup surmises that the show is especially good at engagement because of its highly discussable story format and its young viewer demographic.
Waterloo, Canada-based LiveHive counts a viewer as “engaged” who participates in something interactive — whether it’s post to Twitter or play a trivia game — every 90 seconds throughout the course of a show. “We just look at what are two buddies talking about,” Dave Bullock, president of LiveHive, told us. “Whether it’s Kate [Gosselin]’s haircut, or if Tom Brady should go for it at fourth-and-1.”
What’s clear is that traditional ratings systems are due for an overhaul — and indeed, NBC, Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom, CBS and Disney are forming a new TV measurement system to take on Nielsen. But what LiveHive’s early efforts show is that social activity related to TV will be very hard to measure, given that it’s so informal and amorphous. But hey, that’s OK; I’d rather keep my IM and text messages about Kate’s hair and Tom Brady’s chances private, thank you very much.

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