NBCU's conference highlights the growing buzz of social media

NEW YORK - Social TV was the buzz Wednesday on the famed set of Saturday Night Live.

With the nation talking about tweets and tagging friends and other social-media jargon, NBCUniversal held a conference to showcase its social-media prowess. Highlights included the Bravo channel's "tweet tracker" and CNBC's 500,000 Twitter followers, which NBCU believes boost its relevance to TV fans and advertisers.

The consensus was that social media have the potential, like Internet surfing and browsing in the 1990s and early 2000s, to radically alter the already-fragmented media industry. But how and when were critical unknowns.

Billed by NBCU as a symposium, the conversations ranged from the tangible present to the futuristic, and how the immediacy and reach of social networking might transform television, including the impact of TV advertising.

About 200 people attended the event, and many of them were advertisers. Among the speakers, in addition to those from NBCU, were executives from Twitter, Facebook, Trendrr, Digitas, and GetGlue, an entertainment-based social-networking site with about one million users.

Jimmy Fallon, the late-night NBC comedian, told the attendees about his smartphone apps, including one that features a person peeling a banana. He also talked about his experiences with Twitter.

"We feel like Twitter is a big movement now, and we're trying to figure out how to be part of it," Fallon said, noting that he offers topics - such as crazy things your mother did - for people to tweet.

The conference was held in Studio 8H at 30 Rock, a place Fallon knows well. It's the home of Saturday Night Live, and Fallon was an SNL cast member from 1998 to 2004.

Twitter's director of business development, Glenn Brown, said, "Social TV is totally inevitable and it's happening right now." He was commenting on people who tweet during TV shows. He and others compared this activity to family members watching TV in their living room and sharing their impressions.

Brown also presented graphs that indicated how people respond nearly instantly to events through tweets. He offered as an example the singer Beyoncé disclosing she was pregnant.

Facebook executive Stephen Zangre called social media a "fundamental shift" and reported that his service now had more than 700 million users worldwide. Those users post six billion pictures online a month.

The power of Facebook, Zangre said, was not just in reaching individual fans of a TV show on a Facebook page but in reaching the friends of that fan - a sort of multiplier effect. As one fan comments on a show, his or her impressions reach a vastly larger audience, said Zangre, manager of Facebook's global marketing solutions.

The conference was organized by Peter Naylor, NBC executive vice president of digital media sales. NBCU officials said they believed that social networks could more fully engage fans with brands that advertise on TV shows.

Jordan Bitterman, senior vice president at Digitas and one of the speakers, was a believer that social media were radically transforming the business.

"We believe we live in a post-advertising world," Bitterman said. "We don't think this is about broadcasting. We think this is about bringing people in."

Others weren't so sure. "It can seem a fragmented space and there are all these conversations going on all at once," said Ryan Osborn, a director of social media for NBC News.