Will my TV vote go to Facebook?

In a no-shit-Sherlock moment of clarity, MIG has proved that people want to interact with TV using mobile. And there was me thinking that is what they had built their business around – shows how much I know. Anyway, the findings of MIG’s study are interesting in that they show that much of this mobile interaction with TV will be carried out through social media portals (for which you can read Facebook).

MIG believes that interactive events run via Facebook will generate $51.7 million (£32.04 million) in the UK by 2012 and $2.9 billion globally by 2016. All very good and I am sure there is something in this. But the findings seem to be at odds with what is actually happening on the ground with businesses and social media.

Retailers – who I know are not TV companies, but I am sure there are parallels in terms of how a commercial business looks to using social media – are flailing and failing to leverage the power of social media right now. Research by One iota finds that of the top 100 UK retailers, only one – ASOS – offers a fully transactional facebook site. On mobile, the study finds that a third of retailers now do have a transactional mobile site.

This disparity between mobile and mobile social shows that there is still a very long way to go within businesses to create a proper social commerce eco-system.

Now you could argue that its because retailers just don’t get it and those stubbly, retro-spectacled ‘dudes’ in TV really understand social media. Or you could look at it that usually canny retailers are simply not embracing social media because they don’t need to and don’t see the point.

On the fifth birthday of microblogging social site Twitter last week a study by Virgin Business Media found that only 9% of the UK’s top 500 businesses had used Twitter in a business context.

Why not? Well there are many reasons: there is no real business case for using Twitter (and only a very limited one for Facebook, I believe – its just a website that hosts you); there is a distinct flattening off of Twitter, Facebook and other social network use amongst consumers; and there simply is no need to run things over these services. Yet.

To my mind, no one is using Facebook or Twitter commercially because there isn’t the need to: the consumers are there, but there are many other ways of buying – not least through transactional mobile sites and apps – and so social media is not there yet.

I think the same applies to TV interaction and events. However, they do lend themselves more to social interaction. If I am watching TV – mainly the news about News International’s slow unravelling – I like to shout at the TV and my family and friends. Facebook lets me do this both quietly and remotely. So I can see that there is a role for mobile social interaction around TV; I just don’t get how it will be monetised. And that is what will ultimately bring all this in to question. If its free and easy then great for consumers, but bad for everyone in the value chain. I am watching and waiting keenly to see how this pans out in second half of the year when the massive interactive shows return to out TV screens for their autumn runs. Will my vote go to Facebook?