Wow.
Piers Morgan received 270K+ mentions on Saturday. On Saturday! What’s more, they were essentially all between 2pm and 4pm, ET:
Piers Morgan Mentions
All this at a time where his show is not on the air. Why? The boy band One Direction held their 1D Day event, which had Piers Morgan fielding questions from devoted fans via Twitter.
One Direction mania spilled over to E! News, which had the best broadcast hour as well.
Piers … get them on your show!
Friday marks the anniversary of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, TX, and the networks were full of memorial programming throughout the day. It’s nice to remember the President, but the deluge of programming seemed better suited to slip in between showings of “Pawn Stars” on the (so-called) History Channel.
On Friday, MSBNC’s The Ed Show pulled in some of his best Twitter mentions lately, and easily won the best-hour category. There is no doubt that Ed’s team is consistently the best at using Social Media. What’s at doubt is why the rest of MSNBC doesn’t learn best practices from him.
MSNBC closed out the evening with a variety of programs about the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder, although they silently dropped Alec Baldwin’s “very enlightened and well-researched” coverage they had prepared. The ongoing radio-silence of MSNBC about Up Late is reminiscent of the way they mis-treated Ed Schultz earlier this year: taking him off the air with virtually no advance notice and then keeping him in limbo for a long time. Suspending Baldwin’s show supposedly because of a slur he made off the air just reeks of trying to pull a fig leaf over the disappointing ratings: we all know that the real debate at MSNBC is if and how they can generate better ratings for his show. Making matters worse, leaks of complaints against Baldwin by MSNBC just sound like typical corporate CYA trying to shift blame.
It’s hard to fathom why MSNBC treats their talent, staff, and audience with this kind of contempt: the perennially distant-second-place news network has too little good-will to waste on inept office-political machinations.
The Ed Show continues with its mastery of Social Media with another best-hour win on Thursday. But a surprise best-day win for E! News, driven by chat about One Direction, pushing Piers Morgan back into second place. Piers’ show was not broadcast on Thursday, in favor of a re-run of “The Assassination of President Kennedy”. Unfortunately, there were no hashtags or show specific accounts for TAoPK, so it was hard to track Twitter’s response to the show. Come on, networks — it costs nothing to create a hashtag and virtually nothing to publicize it. If you’re going to take an hour or two of network time, why not at least stick a hashtag on it?
The topliners for the day were the normal pairing of The Ed Show for best hour and Piers Morgan for best day. But also interesting is that The Rachel Maddow Show came very close to The Ed Show for number of mentions during the broadcast hour; TRMS also managed to beat out occasional best-in-hour winner The Kelley File in its time slot.
MSNBC’s The Ed Show won the best hour again, as Ed frequently does. We’ve seen, recently, that the Kelly File and Anderson Cooper have been able to win their hours with specific hot topics (Obamacare, Rob Ford, resp.), but they seem unable to sustain peak levels of Twitter engagement day-in, day-out.
Today’s report includes Al Jazeera America for the first time. @AJAM (and related accounts) actually gets almost twice as many mentions on Twitter than HLN! I will probably be refining the AJA tracking over the next few days; right now, I just have the “marquee” prime time shows and the general @AJAM Twitter account in the system. I’ve seen a couple job openings in social media at the network; it will be interesting to see if they up their social media game over the next few months.