The managerial relevance of Social TV: a theoretical and empirical examination

The main goal of this PhD thesis is to provide an analysis of the social TV phenomenon from a managerial viewpoint, supported by an empirical analysis focused on a specific TV show’s case, i.e., “The Voice of Italy”. In the first stage, following the methodology developed by Tranfield, Denyer & Smart (2003) and considering also the so-called “grey literature”, I perform a systematic review of the literature, in order to collect all the research studies focused on social TV phenomenon, thus building an overview of all aspects that have been already analyzed. The “grey literature”, such as papers presented as conference proceedings, dissertations and theses, represents an important source of information since social TV is a recent topic. The review provides a summary of the main gaps and future research directions, in the attempt to further stimulate the academic debate on the topic. Findings are presented by distinguishing the two main aspects concerning the social TV: the technological development, since technology had a key role in the diffusion of this phenomenon and the viewers’ behaviors analysis, relevant both for technology and social strategies development and to understand the impact of social TV experiences across different contexts. Results highlight the need of further research concerning the social TV phenomenon, despite the larger number of applications already developed and tested. On the other hand, it would be relevant also to systematically analyze the factors influencing the viewers’ behavior on social media while watching TV. Moreover, one of the unexplored topics is the value of the amount of data generated around TV shows, therefore it is useful to show how the huge number of data generated while watching TV can be used to offer TV producers valuable insights. In the second phase, I provide a first empirical analysis of data concerning a specific TV show, in order to demonstrate that the huge number of interactions on online social networks allows TV producers to obtain relevant insights to effectively design the TV shows. Indeed, the social TV phenomenon can be positioned within the big data issues. Social media can be considered a relevant kind of external sources useful for innovation for firms, since they generate a large amount of knowledge about customers’ preferences and reactions. Particularly, few works explored how the social media data can be useful for TV stakeholders in order to improve TV show’s quality. Therefore, I analyze the generation of social media traffic defined as the amount of the viewers’ interactions around a specific topic, in order to obtain valuable knowledge concerning all the different elements of the TV show that can be used to increase the social media traffic through a better design of the TV show. Findings highlight that, through the social media data analysis, broadcasters and producers can better design the TV show’s contents as well as the social media elements in order to reach their scope, e.g., increasing the Twitter traffic. Particularly, producers should dedicate a wider space within the TV show to specific TV contents, such as the performances and the web room, and combine different hashtags in order to increase the social media traffic. Finally, in the third phase, data concerning the same TV show are deeply analyzed by considering the different kinds of interactions occurring on Twitter. Specifically, I show that, in order to obtain valuable insights, it is useful to consider three different kinds of interactions, since viewers can post tweets, thus generating original tweets, they can share existing tweets, thus generating the so-called retweets and, finally, they can reply to existing tweets, thus generating a reply. Results show that viewers decrease their posting behavior, while increase their sharing behavior during commercial breaks. Moreover, certain kinds of Social TV strategies have a positive effect on the number of original tweets, while they do not affect retweets and replies. Therefore, TV producers should take into account the different types of online activities and the different relationship between them and TV show’s contents and elements, in order to encourage viewers’ interactions on social network sites.