Obituaries and Focus Groups: The History of Audience Research
Twitter is trying to turn itself into a cornerstone metric for any form of media, since sentiment and text analysis are simple when you deal with the quantities of data created by this social networking site. This early prototype of opinion-mining will undoubtedly improve substantially as viewers and media producers come to expect it as an integrated part of current news content.
Before the advent of the internet, marketers had to get much more creative when trying to establish how audiences viewed media outlets or individual programmes. The Handbook on Radio and Television Audience Research offers examples of a number of different activities for focus groups that were used to gauge audience interest, such as roleplay, collages, personification and word association.
And obituaries:
“Imagine this radio/TV/newspaper were to die and you had to write an obituary. What would you say about it?” “What were the strengths and weaknesses?” “What will you remember it for?” “What do you think that radio/TV/newspaper would like to be remembered for?”
While I wonder whether this would provide reliable data or just meme-worthy, community-generated content (more desirable?), I’d be interested in hearing about any recent examples of this.
Have you seen any effective social media messaging around the death of a series?
“ Economic growth increases the value of time.
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