Fizziology – social media for showbiz
By Simon Fuller. Online Fizz. Plenty of people talk about entertainment across social media, discussing the latest films they’ve loved or hated, the trailer they’ve been awed by. But who’s listening?
Well, lots of folk in entertainment – among them content creators and marketers – are thanks to Fizziology, the website which tracks industry-related social media chat and then turns it into info pros can make use of.
Fizziology launched in September last year with the goal of turning this online conversation into meaning. One tool the outfit has created is Fizz10, a free snapshot of social media conversation available weekly on the Fizziology site. The idea is that Fizziology checks out what’s being said, how much is being said and why it’s being said… and then turns this into useful business intelligence.
As well as providing reports to industry insiders for a raft of purposes, such as performance tracking and production insight, the site has caught the eye of the Webby award team, with Fizziology nominated in the Best Guides/Ratings/Reviews website category for this year’s show.
“We’ve been used for everything from measuring the success of a newly released movie trailer to helping make casting decisions to predicting the box office performance of a film,” says Ben Carlson, co-creator of Fizziology.
“The big benefit [to those in the entertainment industry] is access to the world’s biggest, fastest, most honest focus group. Millions of people are registering opinions about entertainment on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We listen, analyze and report. So it’s just like what would happen in a focus group room. But instead of 12 people behind the glass, there are millions.”
But what about the perception in of social media on showbiz?
“A lot of marketers and researchers have been slow to embrace social media as a legitimate place to harvest business intelligence,” says Carlson. “Until very recently, there was still doubt that the social conversation reflected real world behaviours and results. But I think that’s changing rapidly. No one is saying anymore that the only people talking about movies online are geeks or teenagers. There is now an understanding that nearly every demographic group is represented in the social conversation.
“It’s a new field, but there is a lot of interest in the space. Six months ago, we had to start at the very beginning of the conversation – why social media matters. Now we can skip ahead to the good parts – how we can use the social conversation to help clients gather more and better information in a way that impacts their business.”
