Spent a bit today watching the Twitter in sync with television broadcasts. As the TV industry prepares to embrace “companion television”, thought I’d share some insight on where the audience is already talking – twitter hashtags.

I’m a bit of a news hound, so the Sunday morning talk shows, and 60 Minutes were on my radar. Hashtags of course, are the #string phrases used by bloggers and marketers on Twitter, to help coalesce audiences around a subject.

In todays case I monitored #MTP for Meet The Press, and #60Minutes, which CBS runs prompts for on screen.

Client side, I used dual screen PC setup near the teevee, along with Tweetdeck, from the Chrome marketplace, and twijector.com, a Twitter wall system.

Some bullet points from today’s third screen interactive experience:

• With an audience of over 10M,  CBS could only muster 18 audience tweets in sync with their show (tonight’s show was a repeat, so probably a big factor there).
• MTP was much more robust. I didn’t count, but with no broadcast prompts, #MTP was constantly fresh with audience chatter – similar to, but not as much volume as I saw last season around NFL games.
• The tone on #MTP seemed civil, though the program content was not that controversial.
• 60 Minutes stepped up with what looked like an auto-tweet to start their show, but after that nothing more from the shows producers.

Companion TV properties to watch:
umami.tv
OtherScreen.com
intonow.com
roquepaper.com (platform)

Buddy TV (ipad)
getglue.com
gomiso.com