Sunday was a clean sweep for the Melissa Harris-Perry Show, winning best hour and best day.

One interesting thing about Sunday is that it was a rare day that Hannity did not appear in Fox’s line-up and, as a result, it did not get to compete for best hour or best day. Nonetheless, it received almost 4700 mentions  (that would not have displaced the MHP Show from best day, to be clear).

But the high number of mentions shows two things: First, how laggy Twitter mentions can be compared to a broadcast — the conversation can echo on Twitter for quite a while. Second, how other media (in Hannity’s case, his radio show, which has a weekend “Best of” program) can combine with the a show to produce higher and, perhaps, synergistic engagement.

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What an unusual day Saturday was! Judge Jeanine had the best hour on Cable News, and The Five (when you take into consideration all of the individual hosts’ Twitter accounts) had the best day.

Random Notes:

TJ Holmes (@tjholmes) was substituting for Craig Melvin on Saturday.  @tjholmes received about 560 mentions during the day, which, if split across the two hours he was on the air (which is a high estimate), gives him a very respectable engagement.  He’s a great talent, and it just amazes me that MSNBC has a strong bench and yet wastes hours of time on caught on camera and lockup.  We all know the path those shows lead to: HLN.

Apparently Chris Matthews doesn’t like infrequent MSNBC guest-anchor Ezra Klein’s Vox. Or maybe Ezra. That was about as close to “get off my lawn” as I’ve heard in ages. Do you get the feeling that Chris doesn’t spend a lot of time surfing the web?

There’s an interesting story on HuffPo about Phil Griffin’s mea culpas over the Cinco De Mayo incident.  Apart from the contrition, what’s interesting is the quote “Having José [Díaz-Balart] in the newsroom has already changed our world.” Since Díaz-Balart’s 10am weekday show was announced after May 5 (if I recall correctly), one wonders if that day’s events helped motivate José’s selection of a replacement for Chris Jansing?  This is not to suggest that Díaz-Balart was not the best choice regardless; the man is a supremely talented and experienced journalist and an amazing addition to MSNBC.

By the way, MSNBC, if you’re looking for another, witty voice who is Mexican-American, may I humbly suggest Gustavo Arellano, the editor of the OC Weekly, would make a great guest?  The guy is smart, funny, and spends a lot of time on radio so is broadcast-friendly.

One more thing about José Díaz-Balart…  Since he’s that important to MSNBC, maybe he should a set that doesn’t look like a cubicle with travel posters of Miami on the walls?

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Kind of a quiet day on Friday.  The Ed Show took the best hour and Hannity took best day, both on with lower than usual numbers.

Random notes:

Realtime with Bill Maher is off for its summer hiatus.  But, amusingly, he still got more mentions, during the day, than many shows that were on the air.  This shows the advantage and difficulty of Twitter statistics: personalities have lives outside of their shows, and it’s nearly impossible to tease apart tweets that are specifically in reaction to a show and those that are more broad-based.  This is why, for example, Hannity almost always wins the best day — his hours of radio broadcasting adds thousands of mentions to his timeline even if they have nothing to do with his Fox News show.

I tend to focus on the “best hour” winners because those are shows that got the most mentions while they were on the air, which I think are a lot more relevant.  Only when a show wins best day that rarely gets high daily numbers do I call it out.  Normally, though, best day measures someone’s overall popularity within and outside of the confines of their cable news show.

How do you interpret the Twitter ratings vis-à-vis broadcast ratings? You cannot, really. These statistics measure conversations on Twitter, which is a sui generis medium. Broadcast ratings measure a completely passive activity, watching. Twitter is an active medium, and the Twitter ratings measure the activity inspired (in part) by viewing a show and, specifically, the topics discussed on a show.

Still, I think there’s untapped potential for using Twitter data for refining shows to achieve higher broadcast ratings. Were I running a show, I would monitor the specific topics that people discuss online and use that as an input (but just an input) into topics to focus on in the future.  It wouldn’t be hard to do (from a software standpoint), and it would be sort of like free “dial-testing”…

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