Richard MacManus (@ricmacnz)  of ReadWriteWeb asks a good question in this article about whether “social entertainment” (entertainment content experiences augmented with social  features) is leading consumers back to a consumptive, passive content experience.

(Richard’s article is in part a commentary on data from the GlobalWebIndex‘s Social Entertainment Annual Report 2011 report.)

For more than a year now, we’ve been observing consumers’ interactions with entertainment content/brands on Cisco Eos-powered web sites.  Based on that behavior, I’d agree with Richard’s conclusion:

(my paraphrasing) that as entertainment brands “find their footing” on the web, consumers are actively engaging with content through two-way social features.  These may be lower investment actions like commenting (versus producing a UG video)  but it is still interaction with, and around, content.

What Survey Data Doesn’t Tell You

We’ve observed a wide-range of behaviors and types of consumers engaging on the 100+ social entertainment sites powered by Eos.  As some of the GlobalWebIndex data suggests, this includes a vast majority of audience that display a passive, “consumer of content” profile despite the presence of embedded social features.

But you’d miss the real opportunity in social entertainment if you only looked at that top-line audience.

One data point GlobalWebIndex’s data misses (because it’s hard/unreliable to collect from survey data) is that more highly engaged consumers (as measured by repeat visits and site registration) DO tend to use more “active” behaviors such as commenting, rating, sharing, uploading content.  It is this active, more engaged audience that can drive value for media brands.

Let’s look at some real data about the audience behaviors across 65 of the Eos-powered sites live in the Summer of 2010.  Of the more than 14.5 million unique visitors for these sites, less than 1% engaged in an “active” behavior (see graph).  The highest observed behavior — outside of visiting the site and clicking through pages — was the 30% of folks that watched at least one media asset during their visit.

Now, let’s look at those same behaviors (below) for folks that indicated they had a preference for that content / brand by taking the extra step and few minutes to register on these same sites.

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Tags: active, cisco eos, entertainment, Eos, media content, passive, readwriteweb, social entertainment, social entertainment experience

At the Web 2.0 Summit 2010, internet analyst Mary Meeker presented data, shown above. The chart she offered drives home an important point to media and entertainment companies -- 28% of our time spent with media in the US is on the internet -- so we expect our media brands to deliver online. And Nielsen also released data this summer  showing 22% of the time people spend on the internet is with social media. In aggregate, Web users spend a total of 110 billion minutes on social Web sites and blogs each month. Therefore media companies must tailor and create engaging digital content to speak to the audiences who want to interact with content brands online and across social media sites. But what’s more important when trying to create appealing media experiences for socially engaged audiences who are spending 28% of their media time online: Is the technology experience more important than the content? Or is the content more important than the technology experience? Vivi Zigler, President of NBC Universal Digital Entertainment (bio link here), attempted to address this question at the Digital Media Conference West in San Francisco:

Vivi Zigler tells us in the clip that NBC Universal has to tailor and tweak existing technologies to the story lines of the NBC TV shows and to the shifting tastes of the online audiences to create engaging experiences.  How does NBC Universal adapt technology to changing television story lines and still create an engaging and quality experiences? (continued ..)
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Tags: cisco eos, costs, digital media, entertainment, NBC, revenues, social media, technology, webisodes