Ouch. Media companies respond about 1% of the time, while the Telecom industry — the best in the study — answers just north of 25% of the questions. “If you want to be social and enter social media, then be social and talk to your fans, have them ask questions, do customer care there if necessary,” writes eConsultancy.

As you can see by the graph, there appears to be a positive correlation between volume (the proxy here is “page size”) and response rate, and media companies typically have a high volume of questions. It would be interesting to know what constitutes a question on a media organization’s page as compared to a customer service question to an airline (which raises the question, aren’t they both customers anyways?) But I think it’s safe to say that many of us are guilty of not using Facebook and Twitter to its fullest potential as a listening device to deepen relationships with our customers. (Via RRW)

Here’s where it gets fascinating. The graph below explains what tablet and smartphone users are doing while they watch TV. As you may have suspected, the majority of activity is unrelated to the TV program at hand — viewers are checking email and looking up other stuff online, equally during the program and commercial breaks. After all, we’re a nation of multi-taskers:

The next most popular activity is visiting a social networking site/app — substantially more popular than looking up websites with “info related to the TV program.” Unfortunately, the study doesn’t break down if people are 1) participating or just listening to social conversations and 2) if the conversations are related to the TV program at hand. But it’s probably safe to say that more viewers are more inclined to talk about (or listen to) conversations about a TV show than proactively look up expanded content about it.

On the advertising end, 19 percent of smartphone and tablet owners searched for product information and 13 percent searched for coupons or deals while the television was on. That’s a very strong number which helps balance the concern about all the unrelated tablet/phone activity during commercial breaks.

The goal of many second-screen apps, of course, is to bring this all together: social conversations, expanded content and interactive (even synchronized) advertising. Compelling second-screen experiences, in theory, will move the needle more in the “related” direction, making TV viewers more engaged overall. Stay tuned for a flurry of innovation here.

Earlier: Does social media drive TV ratings? Yes, finds study

“We have access to tons of data on how, why, when and where consumers are consuming TV shows,” explains TVGuide.com GM Christy Tanner. “We think this feature is a great way for us to showcase the highlights of the data that we’re gathering day in and day out.”

The Power Rankings also include a highlighted tweet, Facebook update or TVGuide.com comment next to each show, curated by TVGuide.com’s editors, which helps explain why the particular show appeared high in the social rankings. For example, All My Children currently ranks #4, sparked by Susan Lucci ripping ABC over the show’s cancelation.

TVGuide.com joins Trendrr and SocialGuide offering a public social TV ranking. While Trendrr and SocialGuide measure Twitter, Facebook and check-in services, TVGuide’s addition of its own data — some of it tied to editorial content — yields a different result for some shows. All My Children, for example, does not appear on Trendrr and SocialGuide.

Earlier this summer, TVGuide.com rolled out Watchlists, which allow users to follow their favorite TV shows across linear TV, video on demand and online video services like Netflix. “One of the surprising things for me is how many new shows are being added to Watchlists,” Tanner told Lost Remote. “Shows that aren’t even available for preview are being added.”

Watchlist data helps serve “as an indicator of intent to tune in,” Tanner says, which may help explain why TVGuide.com just picked up its second network TV sponsor for the Watchlist service. “I think it’s a sign of American enthusiasm and optimism when [viewers] are adding shows to their watchlists that may or may not stay on the air,” she says.

Over the last few months, TVGuide.com has aggressively ramped up social features as part of its ongoing transformation from a print product to a multiplatform destination for a new generation of TV. “There really is only one TV Guide – and it is social, personalized and mobile,” Tanner told us. “We own the brand, and we innovate continuously while delivering on what the brand stands for…. This is how we have grown from 3 million to 23 million uniques in a few short years, and how we have maintained the #1 engagement metrics in the comScore TV category for 5 years straight.”

As the social TV guide space heats up — with new startups appearing nearly every week — Tanner says TVGuide.com and its mobile apps are “a one-stop entertainment destination incorporating 5 or 6 sites in one” spanning original content, a TV database, social listings, online video, social discussion and syndicated products. “We don’t really see anyone as a one-to-one competitor,” she said.

As for the fall season, Tanner sees an excited few months ahead. “I think it’s going to be a blockbuster season for social innovation,” she said. “We’re really excited and interested ourselves to see what innovative things the networks come up with.”

“Media companies are in a race to boost revenue from their online offerings. They know the audiences are there, but are unable to fully monetize their online inventory without the right metrics to prove its value in reaching their clients’ specific targets, relative to TV. On the other side of the fence, TV advertisers know their customers are online. But they don’t have enough evidence that their online media buys are reaching their desired audience well enough to justify allocating more of their ad dollars to the medium.”

Their answer to this problem is to team up with data providers for information and produce reach, frequency and Gross Ratings Points comparable to the way television success is measured. One of their key partnerships is with the Walmart of the Internet, Facebook. According to the announcement from The New York Times last September, Facebook will provide Nielsen with data but not on an individual basis:

If a user logs on to Facebook (a Nielsen media partner) and then visits another Web site where an ad that Nielsen is tracking is shown, Nielsen will put a pixel in the ad that will prompt Facebook to send Nielsen the age and gender of the people who viewed the ad. Nielsen insists that the data will be viewed in the aggregate and not on an individual basis.

It almost seems comical that it has taken Nielsen this long to attempt to judge the Internet the same way that television is judged. This new measurement tool might provide advertisers spending online the reassurance they need to shift budgets to the digital world. On the other hand, many believe that Nielsen’s age-old way of measuring TV is inaccurate and unfair. Has Nielsen made a good move or are they trying to monopolize online spending measurement as they have with television measurement?

Bluefin’s data, published in Ad Age, showed that Mountain Dew influencers’ (users who tweet about Mountain Dew the most) favorite show was Cartoon Network’s “The Problem Solverz,” and not surprisingly many other comedic programming.

The most interesting finding was that many of the shows that Dew fans were tweeting about were not popular social media shows:

In the case of Mountain Dew, the top 15 affinity show all have middle-of-the-road social-TV ratings — which means that although people who are prone to comment about Mountain Dew are also excited about commenting on these particular shows, the general population of TV viewers is not nearly so excited about doing so.

Bluefin is smartly sending a message to advertisers that trending shows are not necessarily the best shows for everyone. They make a good case that every brand that’s investing in television commercials should check their data to find out if their commercial play is also the right social media play.

On the cable side, VH1 (12%) narrowly beat HBO (11%), followed by USA (10%), TeenNick (9%) and MTV (7%) for the most social share of voice. Although HBO’s True Blood drained the competition as the most social cable TV show for the month.

Trendrr measures social mentions across Twitter, Facebook (when public), GetGlue and Miso. For daily numbers, visit our social TV leaderboard, powered in part by Trendrr.

Called the “Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings” service, it’s currently in testing by 80 brands with a public launch date of Aug. 15, reports ClickZ. Nielsen explains how it works:

The new system will use an innovative, patent-pending process combining traditional Nielsen TV and online panel data with aggregated, anonymous demographic information from participating online data contributors. Using its unique approach, Nielsen will be able to provide reach, frequency and Gross Rating Point (GRP) measures for online advertising campaigns of nearly any size, running nearly anywhere on the web.

Facebook has been an early partner, working with Nielsen to make its ad platform more approachable to traditional media buyers. Facebook is also working with Comscore, which just launched a tool for Facebook advertisers based on GRPs. “The (Comscore) service focuses on measuring the impact of how big companies use Facebook’s fan pages and the ‘like’ button as well as what individuals say on their own pages about specific products and services,” explains the WSJ. Facebook will add GRP metrics in an upcoming release of an expanded Insights product, its suite of audience and advertising metrics.

Will a reach-and-frequency approach attract more advertisers? Perhaps, but even Nielsen admits its an incomplete view. “Reach alone doesn’t tell the whole story, however, and Nielsen intends to combine the ratings with cross-platform advertising effectiveness metrics,” explains Nielsen’s Steve Hasker.

The free “Social 100″ is just the beginning for SocialGuide. “In the coming months we look forward to offering a premium service that will give networks, programmers, marketers and research executives deeper data and analysis of the social activity and reactions around their programming,” explains Sean Casey, founder and CEO of SocialGuide.

SocialGuide competes with a new crop of social TV data startups — like Trendrr (which powers part of our social TV leaderboard) and Bluefin Labs — that are measuring social interaction around TV programming.

After the top 10, Walt Disney comes in 11th with Scripps Networks at 14th.

Local TV is the most social industry on Twitter, according to the report. Newspapers came in second place. (If you’re interested which TV stations are the most popular on Facebook and Twitter, head over to our social TV leaderboard for details.)

Finally the reports breaks down the cities with the most social workers. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and San Jose top the list, with NYC coming in third. Then it’s Austin, Ventura (CA), Stamford (CT), Seattle, Dallas and Boston.

Response level is “the number of commenters for any given episode of a show” based on a 10-point exponential scale. Response share is the percentage of a program’s share of social response within a specific daypart, which roughly maps to the traditional Nielsen “share” metric.

For example, in this sample report (click to see larger) Glee scored a 7.7 response level with a 32.5% share of the social conversation around TV shows in its daypart. In another example, here’s the response levels for the May 24th episode of American Idol compared to several big live events:

1. 2011 Super Bowl = 9.2 Response Level
2. 2011 Academy Awards = 8.8
3. 2011 French Open Mens Final = 8.2
4. American Idol Finale (May 24th) = 8.0

“With the introduction of Response Level and Response Share, we can provide new insight into audience engagement in a way that has not been possible before,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs. “With these contextualized metrics in hand, media and marketing executives can interpret all responses to any particular show in aggregate.”

Bluefin is also rolling out Bluefin Signals, a web-based analytics product that allows programmers, marketers and buyers to break down the numbers beyond response level and share on over 3,000 distinct shows with 105,000 individual airings. This example above (click for larger) shows “cross-show engagement” for One Tree Hill fans with other TV shows. Every month Bluefin’s technology fingerprints 2 million minutes of TV and correlates that data with 3 billion social media comments — the “TV genome.”

“With the combination of science and large-scale computing, we are solving a problem that has eluded TV for more than 60 years: how to measure actual audience engagement and not just simple media consumption,” Roy said in our story about Bluefin a few weeks ago. Roy and his MIT team developed “deep machine learning algorithms designed to uncover the relationships between spoken language and context,” Bluefin’s website explains.

While there are several services that measure social interaction around TV — for example, Trendrr which powers part of our social TV leaderboard — Bluefin is the first to take a crack at setting an industry standard with similarities to Nielsen’s TV rating and share. Nielsen offers cross-platform reporting spanning TV, web and mobile devices, but it hasn’t gained traction with a social TV standard of its own.

“We are in-market with multiple broadcast and cable networks, agencies and brands looking at this data day-in, day-out, (and) we feel Trendrr.TV is the industry utility,” explains Trendrr’s Mark Ghuneim, responding to today’s Bluefin announcement. “I think it is very important right not not to confuse the marketplace anymore than it needs to be – IE new metrics and new weighting systems.”

While it’s unclear this early if Bluefin will succeed at setting a social TV measurement standard, it certainly has the mathematical star power. Founder Deb Roy made a splash at TED with his project “Birth of a Word” explaining how he videotaped and analyzed 90,000 hours of footage of his son’s life to understand how an infant learns language. Fitting, perhaps, because social TV is just beginning to say its first words.