Disbelief and dismissal characterize many of the responses to our findings.  Citing their own and their peers’ television viewing habits, people assert the highly directed nature of their viewing and declare their loyalty to a curated selection of television programs.  With the exception of live sporting events, they engage their TiVo or cable company’s digital video recorder to record their favorite programs for time-shifted playback at their convenience.

We’re sure that people do do that.  We do that.  We’re also sure that most people watch a lot more television than just the programs to which they’re loyal.  We call this difference between all TV viewing and viewing favored programs the Loyalty Gap.

We can understand the reluctance to accept our findings on loyalty.  It’s expected and perhaps natural for our reports of low levels of loyalty to conflict with people’s view of the world.

We’re social creatures.  We need to connect with others.  Projecting our need to connect on media, we identify ourselves by the television programs we choose and seek others with similar preferences.  The challenge of identifying and connecting with others around the more solitary act of inattentive viewing keeps us from looking past our loyalty and recognizing the amount of time we spend channel surfing and sampling programs.

Data from the Video Consumer Mapping Study fits this model.  The study found that people tend to underreport the amount of television they watch.

Television viewing duration and reach is in the upper right of the graph.  From the graph, survey respondents reported viewing over 240 minutes of television daily but were observed watching around 330 minutes.

Around 90 minutes of daily television viewing are lost on our consciousness.  People watched television for those 90 minutes but have failed to include it in their estimation of the time spent watching.

With a gap of that magnitude, people’s reluctance to accept our observation of low loyalty makes more sense.  People are likely to recall viewing the programs to which they’re loyal but may tend to neglect additional time spent watching TV.

Another data point in the Video Consumer Mapping Study, one that’s affirmed by Nielsen’s Three Screen Report, conflicts with people’s reports of highly directed, DVR-intensive viewing.

The amount of time people spend watching DVR playback is dwarfed by live TV watching.  As a percentage of all TV watching, live and timeshifted, DVR playback is 5.4% in Nielsen’s study and 4.6% in the Video Consumer Mapping Study.  Put another way, according to Nielsen’s study, people watch nearly 19 times more live television than timeshifted television.

The imbalance of live to timeshifted television viewing is a stark contrast to reports of heavy DVR utilization and the implied higher degrees of program loyalty.

People are loyal to a selection of television programs, but the data indicates a Loyalty Gap.  Viewers allocate attention, sometimes without realizing it, to a lot more television programming than that to which they are loyal.

Relative to the latter, my team has been spending a lot of time lately analyzing Twitter data to try to see if it could be useful in better understanding how people view television, since so many people regularly tweet about their TV viewing activities. The results have been interesting, but what was most eye-opening was the amount of interest and discussion that was generated in comments when the results were released on a popular technology finance blog, Fred Wilson’s AVC (Disclosure: Fred is an investor in my company, Simulmedia).

What came through the strongest among the 100+ comments was whether Twitter might be able to replace Nielsen and other audience measurement services, or whether Twitter data might even be able to replace set-top-box data as a source for census-based television viewership. Could Twitter someday replace Nielsen ratings, or set-top-box data? In my view, it’s too early to tell, but here are some of the advantages that it might offer:

Real-time results. What Twitter lacks in precision, it certainly makes up for in real time. Tweets tell you what people are doing in the moment. You don’t have to wait hours or days or weeks for results. As more and more marketing becomes real-time, so must the tools that enable it.

Intention data. Twitter can not only tell you what people are doing, but why. Understanding intentions and motivations can take a lot of guess work out of marketing and media.

it’s a focus group/survey tool on steroids. Twitter lets you watch, interact and survey lots of different types of people very quickly and very efficiently. The survey and focus group business will never be the same once companies learn how to leverage Twitter here.

Authenticity. Twitter today is as wide open and uncontrolled as TV panels are closed and controlled. Neither is ideal, but having both means that we’re all more likely to find out the truth about viewers over time.

It’s free. Yes. Hard to beat this one. Companies can tap into Twitter for free. I suspect that Twitter will find ways to charge for premium services and uses over time; now, however, it is free.

Is Twitter the new black when it comes to consumer marketing research? Should Nielsen and others be worried? What do you think?

(This post originally ran on MediaPost’s Online Spin on June 4th, 2009.)