Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl VIII has reported some extremely impressive numbers on how they leveraged social on a day when everyone assumed all eyeballs were on a football game. An hilarious excerpt from their press release says it all: “The most pivotal performance was turned in by rookie addition @meepthebird, Animal Planet’s tweeting correspondent, who grabbed 21,000 followers in just one day and received countless marriage proposals.”

Additionally they recorded 8.7 million unique total visitors throughout the 12-hour marathon. AnimalPlanet.com also had 1.4 million videos streamed throughout the day, a record for the site. Most impressively, “PUPPY BOWL VIII ranked #1 for social television in cable this past Sunday.”

It gets better, the Puppy Bowl even beat out NBC’S The Voice on the overall social TV charts. There were, “200,000 Puppy Bowl-related tweets on game day – some from celebrities including LaToya Jackson, Zooey Deschanel, Homer Simpson, Snooki and Kelly Osbourne.” This made the show one of “Twitter’s top trending topics.” Throughout the day #puppybowl, #animalplanet, #kittyhalftimeshow and #fumble (this year’s Most Valuable Puppy–MVP) trended worldwide.

They even showed great numbers for their partner Petfinder.com, proving how important social can be for bringing on sponsors. We spoke with Grace Suriel, Manager, Social Media & Strategy for Discovery Communications about Animal Plane’s Puppy Bowl success story.

Lost Remote: How did you prepare to engage people on social with so much attention around the ads and football?

Grace Suriel: We didn’t really take a competitive approach. Puppy Bowl has always been wildly popular on television and on social media – so we focused on making this year the best ever for digital and social engagement by creating a fun 360-degree television experience. We featured the official #PuppyBowl hashtag prominently on air directly below the Animal Planet logo, and our official Puppy Bowl announcer reminded viewers to tweet along with @MeepTheBird several times throughout the show.

LR: Besides Petfinder, what partners, agencies, social tv companies did you work with?

GS: In terms of social media, we did not work with any external parties; this was a true internal collaboration between production, marketing, communications and digital media. Production came up with the idea of a tweeting bird and executive producer Melinda Toporoff named him. From that point forward, it was a team effort to bring @MeepTheBird to life on Twitter.

Lost Remote: Why do people love to talk about puppies on social media? What have you learned about passionate puppy lovers on social?

GS: It’s no secret that cute animals dominate the Internet, and this is especially true for cute puppies. I think it’s just one of those universal truths that no one can deny. Passionate puppy lovers on social media are among my favorite people in the world. Their Tweets are very fun to read and often hilarious takes on the action we all witness on the field of Animal Planet Stadium. They have such a passion and enthusiasm about spreading the word about pet adoption, and the fans are truly one of the best things about working on social media for Animal Planet.

Lost Remote: How does the Puppy Bowl work?

GS: Animal Planet worked with Petfinder to secure animals from 32 shelters and rescue groups representing 20 states. Some come from as far west as Washington and as far south as Florida…and from everywhere in between, including Mississippi, Vermont, Rhode Island and Kentucky. The puppies range in age from 9 – 17 ½ weeks and there are a variety of breeds represented, including dachshunds, terriers, an Italian greyhound, and collie and miniature poodle mixes. From then on, the puppies each get a chance to play on the field with close supervision from a representative from the American Humane Association.

Lost Remote: Why is this great TV?

GS: I mean… we’re talking about puppies pretending to play football, a kitty halftime show and a piggy pep squad – what’s not to love?

Scott Rosenberg, Cofounder and CEO of Umami TV has created one of the compelling second screen experiences for TV via an app. The user interface is simply designed and catered not to distract you while watching TV but to let you tap to information you might want access to while you watch. The company just presented at NY Tech Meetup, the gathering in NYC that’s now attended by over 800 people and has even had Mike Bloomberg speak to. Umami is facing a lot of heavy competition in the coming months. What is Scott cooking up for 2012 and what exciting new features will Umami be offering?

Lisa Hsia, Executive Vice President of Bravo Digital Media (NBC Universal) and her colleagues at BRAVO continue to create a fascinating world of reality TV shows that their traget demographics obsess over and that newer ones are starting to check out. Andy Cohen’s curation of the Housewives brand is making TV history, Chef Roblé has been having a great season and It’s a Brad Brad World is off to an amazing start. Hsia and her team continue to innovate on using social within the shows, online and through major social channels.

Alex Iskold, Founder/CEO of GetGlue is someone you don’t want to miss hearing in person. His company recently announced $12 million in funding and that they’ve acquired 2 million users. GetGlue stickers have become a standard for any social TV campaign, a simple but effective way to give super fans the chances to stick with the Show. What’s next for what many consider to be the largest social TV startup?

Sabrina Caluori, VP of Social Media/Performance Marketing for HBO has lead the team that’s captured millions with the social media efforts behind True Blood, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire and more. Besides carefully nurturing and providing for the intense fans of Thrones and Blood she took a bold step at launching HBO Connect, a second level domain of HBO.com that we believe should become HBO’s landing page eventually if not right away. What’s the future of HBO Connect and HBOGo? What’s in store for the new seasons of True Blood and Game of Thrones?

Tom Thai, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Bluefin Labs has helped grow and position Bluefin Labs as one of the thought leaders and provers of social TV information. Bluefin’s “mapping of the TV genome” has scored the company $12 million in funding to continue to expand into 2012. For Lost Remote, we look forward to the infographics and data they are able to consistently provide us with for some of the biggest TV events. How will Bluefin differentiate itself from its competitors? How will they improve their data? How will they connect business goals to social TV information?

Do you have any questions that you’d like us to ask the panelists? Let us know.

Does this mean “cord cutting” is on the rise? Nielsen avoids such a declaration in its report, but I think the best explanation comes from Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, who coined the term “cord nevers” last year. “The real challenge to the pay TV business model are behaviorally-driven cord-nevers,” he said in November report. “These are tomorrow’s householders that are in their teens (and younger) today. They are growing up in an Internet-based video culture, in which the mantra of ‘why pay for TV?’ and ‘pay TV is a rip-off,’ develop.”

What’s also interesting to note is the industry still distinguishes between “streaming video” and “watching TV.” If you ask many people in this 5% group, they’d say that watching a Hulu show on their TV set is watching TV, not necessarily streaming a video. It’s just like on-demand TV — especially with devices like Roku that makes it so easy — and an emerging demographic of younger viewers make no distinction. This is one terrific reason why pay TV providers are making their services more social and portable, hoping to engage this elusive, tech-savvy demographic.

The BBC explains: “When they have some breaking news, an exclusive or any kind of urgent update on a story, they must get written copy into our newsroom system as quickly as possible, so that it can be seen and shared by everyone – both the news desks which deploy our staff and resources (like TV trucks) as well as television, radio and online production teams.”

The BBC says it will still break news on Twitter, but it will ensure that rest of the organization knows about it first. (By written copy, the BBC is referring to a short alert summarizing the new information.) As Sky News says, the goal is “to ensure that our journalism is joined up across platforms” and reduce the times when different information appears on Twitter than other Sky News platforms “or the news desks learning from Twitter details that should have been first passed on to them.”

(Sky News also issued controversial limitations on what its journalists can tweet and retweet, which is a different matter. For the purposes of this story, we’ll stick to breaking news.)

Wearing my TV news hat, both BBC and Sky News’ breaking news policies make a lot of sense. I worked as a an assignment editor for years (both local and network), and we hated surprises. Everyone expects the desk to know what’s going on, communicate immediately across platforms and ensure adequate resources are dispatched ahead of the competition. If everyone’s on the same page, the organization reacts quicker.

That said, I can’t tell you how many times I was surprised before Twitter came along: and the surprises happened on TV. The cable channel would scoop the broadcast channel, or vice versa. Local reporters on a developing story routinely broke new information on-air without telling the desk or the producer. Most of the time, it wasn’t negligence: in the speed of new information — especially if you’re on the air at the time — it’s often difficult to alert everyone before you broadcast it.

That’s certainly not ideal — and news organizations have set up internal alerting systems to help — but it still happens routinely. And it’s not the end of the world, because TV is the “core” platform, and there’s a bit of an expectation that the newsroom is watching its own air.

So if Twitter is just another distribution platform from the perspective of the consumer, why the hard-and-fast rules to delay breaking a story for a few moments until you ensure the newsroom is notified? If you’re a reporter in the field about to go live, would you delay your live shot to call it in first? If breaking something on Twitter under your own brand (reporters are brands, too) carries the same value as breaking it on TV, then what’s the difference? Is it just as easy to monitor your reporters’ tweets as it is to monitor your own air?

This is certainly not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison, and I’m not suggesting that BBC and Sky News are wrong. But I am suggesting that there may be exceptions to the rule. For starters, defining “breaking news” is a difficult task to begin with: a policy could make reporters think twice before tweeting, constraining their social reporting and slowing the organization overall. Often, it’s those unfiltered new developments tweeted straight from a field correspondent that are so powerful.

Yes, everyone should work hard to avoid surprises, which TV newsrooms still despise as much as I did years ago. But I think it’s OK if they happen occasionally on Twitter, just as they happen on TV.

What do you think?

(Full disclosure: I work for @breakingnews and BreakingNews.com. We also have a UK account, @breakingnewsUK, that often RTs the great work of BBC and Sky News.)

Instead of just announcing it on air, @wsbtv built anticipation with a tweet promising big news that will “change Atlanta TV.” Soon thereafter, they sent a personal video message from Pearson, one personalized for Twitter (she calls them her “tweet-hearts”) and another for Facebook. “I wanted you to be one of the first to know,” she said, plugging the 4, 5, 6, and 11 p.m. newscasts for more.

Then @wsbtv suggested a hashtag, #Monica, and WSB staff shared pictures and goodwill wishes on Twitter and Facebook. It all added up to a ton of trending topics in Atlanta: 6 of the top 10 trending topics were about her departure. She received hundreds of @ messages to her personal Twitter account, @MonicaWSB, (she answered many of them), and the station’s series of Facebook posts attracted over 1000 likes+comments.

WSBTV.com also created a special section commemorating Pearson’s 37 years.

It’s a great example of a coordinated social media campaign at a local TV station that respects consumers on all distribution channels — not just TV. (Although WSB was sure to promote the newscasts several times.) It also goes to show that integrating social media into the planning process for marketing and news events — not tacking it on after the fact — can make a big difference.

Now the San Francisco-based company is the latest social TV startup to raise a large chunk of cash. August Capital is placing their bets on this company’s success, and we think it’s a good one. Major social TV innovations aren’t always in the form of a brand new app with tons of functionalities and a dream at becoming a platform. Identifying small problems, like building an Apple Air-Play type technology for all web video and allowing a one button-remote tap to social media are exactly the kinds of tools that will help TV become more social in a connected-TV world. Here’s an explanation from their release on how they’ll spend the money:

“The funding will be used to expand Flingo’s device footprint as well as its automatic content recognition (ACR) infrastructure, which identifies thousands of broadcast network programs around the world in real-time. Once identified, Flingo’s SyncApps technology can immediately bring contextually relevant content directly to the viewer’s TV, laptop, tablet or smart phone.”

This proves Fingo will be making a major play at all the second screen apps that already exist.

• 6 of the 10 said they experienced “social disruption” in engaging with a second-screen app during the game, including negative reception from others in the room.
• 4 of the 10 said the second-screen ad experience distracted from the primary TV spot
• 7 of the 10 said they had trouble getting the apps to work properly, including “poor content recognition, loud group conversations and a general confusion as to what ads actually held synced capabilities.”
• But… 8 in 10 said they derived value from the second-screen content experiences. “There was also a widespread acceptance and deeper engagement found for ads that rewarded their viewers with specific incentives.”

All this, according to CTV Advertising, adds up to one conclusion. “”There is a lot of power within the second screen, but also a lot of considerations and difficult factors when creating brand experiences for consumers,” said Zachary Weiner CEO of CTV Advertising. “Our belief holds that true two way interactivity found within the first screen holds the potential to have more seamless user experiences, such as our main practice area of connected TV advertising.”

Now, ten “couch consultants” are not a statistically-significant sample by any stretch, and CTV Advertising certainly has a vested interest in attempting to prove the point that second-screen apps are distracting. But I think there’s some truth buried in here.

As we mentioned in our Super Bowl social wrap-up, the big game is a different animal and not a good gauge for daily TV programming. Many people are watching with their friends — more than any other TV event — and the social TV experience is happening in real-life. “Second screen experiences are very unsocial when watching with friends in real life. Not sure of solution,” tweeted NBC News’ Ryan Osborn during the game. If I’m watching alone, that’s another matter.

Second-screen ad experiences are still in their early days, and they have a ways to go. “So few of them were done with any forethought whatsoever,” wrote Alan Wolk, managing director of the social strategy department at KIT Digital. Wolk argues that most second-screen ad experiences are “way too time-consuming and confusing” to conduct while trying to watch TV. “Let me save something for later in a basket, bookcase, coupon book – whatever you want to call it. But don’t make me stop and make decisions I have to think about.”

Wolk also raises one of my longtime concerns about Shazam. Unless you’re lightening fast — and know exactly where you’ve stashed your Shazam app — tagging a 30-second commercial is a challenge. (For the record, Shazam says it saw “record engagement” during the Super Bowl.)

In the world of companion TV experiences, the second screen has a big head-start over connected TV. That’s because 1) a touch screen interface beats a remote control hands-down and 2) the iOS and Android platforms have tremendously more scale than all of the fragmented connected TV experiences combined. But what happens as Android (underway now) and iOS (probably soon) apps begin to extend into connected TVs themselves? Will the first screen or second screen become the primary “companion” experience? What if it’s both, synchronized together? This will be a very excited time over the next two years.

What do you think about the first screen vs. second screen debate?

Most-talked-about moment: There wasn’t a jaw-dropper this year, but the game came down to the final moments, generating an average of 10,000 tweets per second (peaking at 12,233) in the final three minutes of the game, Twitter says. That surpasses Madonna’s halftime show, which drove 8,000 tweets per second (peaking at 10,245) over a five-minute period. Those are both English-language records for Twitter, falling behind the all-time record of 25,088 tweets per second in Japan.

The highest Tweets per second #SuperBowl peak came at the end of the game: 12,233. 2nd highest was during Madonna’s performance: 10,245.

— Twitter (@twitter) February 6, 2012

The 53-year-old Madonna (yes, her age was actually part of a trending topic) dazzled on stage. Most of the tweets were positive, but not by much: Networked Insights found 28% positive, 21% negative. Some viewers starting buzzing after MIA briefly flipped off the camera — a moment lost to many, but pointed out by Deadspin in this clip. If you’re a football fan, the biggest moment had to be when Bradshaw sort of tried to fall down before scoring a touchdown.

By the way, the game set a Nielsen TV ratings record of 111.3 million people.

Best missed opportunity: “If Madonna would have Tebow’ed at the end of Like A Prayer, Twitter would have crashed,” tweeted @had2sayit, among others. Twitter, by the way, didn’t crash for us at all during the game.

Best social media moment for a commercial: USAToday’s Ad Meter — which is connected with Facebook this year — scores the Bud Light “Weego” ad as #1 (video below), with two Doritos spots following in the #2 and #3 slots. But data from Bluefin Labs gives the crown to the H&M ad, with 109K social media comments (and as you might imagine, 83% of them were women.) Here are the top 5:

• 1. H&M – “David Beckham Bodywear” (109K social comments)
• 2. Chrysler – “It’s Halftime in America” feat. Clint Eastwood (96K)
• 3. NBC’s The Voice – “Vocal Kombat” feat. Betty White (9i0K)
• 4. Doritos – “Man’s Best Friend” (74K)
• 5. Pepsi – “King’s Court” feat. Elton John and Melanie Amaro (45K)

TiVo has released its real-time data around the commercials, showing the most replayed moments: Doritos’ user-created “Man’s Best Friend” took the top spot, followed by the M&M’s Ms. Brown spot:

The biggest brands and celebrities in social media: Networked Insights crunched the numbers around brands “share of voice” during the big game. Here are the top 5:

• 1. Doritos – 14%
• 2. Budweiser – 13%
• 3. Coke – 11%
• 4. Pepsi – 8%
• 5. Acura – 6%

And the top three celebrities (from commercials) in social conversation:

• 1. David Beckham (H&M) – 39% (4X more conversation than H&M itself)
• 2. Clint Eastwood (Chrysler) – 21% (3X more than Chrysler)
• 3. The Darkness (Samsung) – 11% (slightly less conversation than Samsung)

As for Eastwood’s ad (my personal favorite), “(It) was perceived by many to be a Clint Eastwood PSA for Detroit, and resulted in three times more conversation around him than Chrysler,” explains Networked Insights.

Best social TV play by an advertiser: And the winner is… Chevrolet. The car company’s second-screen app (below), Chevy Game Time, was a smart marketing move. As viewers answered trivia questions (and browsed factoids, tweets and ad replays), Chevy gave away cars and thousands of other prizes. Chevy also sponsored the #superbowl hashtag on Twitter, as well as NBCSports.com’s live stream of the game. It’s Armageddon spot also created one of the most-talked-about moments with a direct jab at Ford, and it gave Eli Manning a Corvette (l@DrewMTips asked, “Why not a Volt?”) Come to think of it, Chevy may have spent the most money in the big game, but it certainly made the best social TV play in our book.

Second best social TV play by an advertiser: Coca-Cola’s Polar Bear Bowl featured a live stream of two animated polar bears watching the game, reacting to the action in real-time. It’s a creative idea, especially as CokePolarBowl.com pointed to Facebook during the game, then to YouTube after. Here are the bears dancing to Madonna’s halftime show:

The best second-screen experience: To start things off, we checked into the game on GetGlue, Miso, IntoNow, Shazam, ConnecTV, Umami, Foursquare and Viggle. Ok, that’s overkill, but we wanted to give them a spin on the biggest social TV event of the year. For starters, GetGlue sailed passed its all-time check-in, counting over 100,000 before halftime and 150,000 total for the game, 3X its all-time record (the company doubled its servers for the Super Bowl.) We’re let you know of other second-screen stats when we get them.

We paged through Miso’s SideShow, sponsored by Hyundai, which provided factoids, polls and other tidbits in sync with the game and the Hyundai ads themselves (that is, if you’re on DirecTV or AT&T, otherwise you advance manually.) IntoNow served up a solid second-screen experience with conversations and real-time stats, although only a little over 4,000 people “tagged” the Super Bowl in the app — and the discussion was a little sparse.

Nearly half of the Super Bowl spots were set up with Shazam, powering over one million giveaways, including a few cars. Today, the company says it saw “record engagement,” and the Best Buy ad — which featured two of Shazam’s founders — topped the list. If you tagged the game, you could browse real-time stats and participate in polls, and tagging the halftime show (below) opened up a free LMFAO remix. Shazam has the largest installed base of any second-screen app, and it will be interesting to see the numbers — anecdotally, we found it hard to tag 30-second spots in time.

This was ConnecTV’s first big moment, releasing to the public a week ago. Like IntoNow, it’s graphically well-done, with live stats and discussions. But again, discussions were sparse. (It also had a bit of a scoring snafu in the first quarter, which it fixed after users pointed it out.) Umami was clean, but relied on others for most of the app: pulling in Twitter conversations and framing ESPN.com’s NFL Gamecast for real-time stats.

The loyalty app Viggle (above) tried a different approach, giving users 200 points to check into the game and offering them as much as 10,000 more points to participate in a second-screen experience throughout the game. By the way, 7,500 points adds up to a $5 gift certificate.

Meanwhile, over on NBCSports.com (below), it offered the first live stream of the Super Bowl with several camera angles, basic stats and discussion. It worked well for us — although we saw some tweets that it buffered a bit. Its social features were limited, and probably the best feature was the live stream worked flawless on the iPad.

Who’s the best in the second screen? That’s a tough call because different apps have different purposes. (For example, for real-time sports stats, ESPN is hard to beat. For pure conversation, a Twitter client.) Data from Trendrr found that GetGlue, Shazam, Viggle and IntoNow (in that order) authored the most Super Bowl tweets, which is one perspective. Also, the Super Bowl is a unique animal. “Second screen experiences are very unsocial when watching with friends in real life,” tweeted @rozzy. “Not sure of solution.” I think that’s a fair statement, and we’re still very early in the second-screen space.

Here’s a infographic wrap-up of the Super Bowl, provided by Bluefin Labs. And scroll below to leave a comment with your favorite social media moment of the big game…

Nearly 60 percent of mobile phone users will be checking their devices during the Super Bowl, according to a new survey by Velti and Harris Interactive. And about half (47%) of all viewers say they expect to check up to 10 times during the game. “There’s no going back now from the fact that the Super Bowl is truly a two-screen experience,” said Krishna Subramanian, Chief Marketing Officer of Velti.

As we outlined earlier this week in our Super Bowl social TV preview, startups, advertisers and media brands are rolling out second screen experiences and campaigns in force for the big game. Here are some other interesting stats from the survey:

• 83 percent of viewers who plan to use their mobile device expect to use it as much or more than they did during last year’s Super Bowl.
• 13 percent of viewers with phones say they’ll check during game play compared to 26% during commercial breaks.
• Men are twice as likely as women (26% vs. 13%) to use their devices during the halftime show.
• Among 18-34 year olds, those who say they’ll check their phone during the game predict they’ll use the device an average of 19 times.

The study did not address what people would be doing on their phones, such as texting and tweeting. But an earlier study by Yahoo and Razorfish found 94% of mobile multitaskers communicate while watching TV (texting, talking, email, social networks and IM), while 60% are looking up content.

In addition to the fantasy game and their announcement to post the first ten minutes of each episode before it airs on Facebook (where they’ve seen a 94% increase in likes from where they started at the season 3 premiere) they’re cleverly using Tumblr to engage their viewers. We asked our readers in September if it was time to take Tumblr seriously and Dan Sacher, Vice President of Digital for VH1 and Logo explains why his network is. “Tumblr brings an added dimension to our show content — whether it’s outrageous commentary, over-the-top animations or mash-ups with Internet memes,” Sacher told Lost Remote. “It’s a great playground for our superfans to gather to celebrate our shows and share unique content with their friends,” he added. To engage viewers using Tumblr in real-time, they strategized with live animated-.GIFing (here’s one) during premiere episodes on Logo’s Tumblr.

Animated .GIFing as a social TV strategy is something that’s perfect for both making you laugh while encourage you to share. While Tumblr is definitely in for a big 2012 brands are still struggling to find the right groove since as Sacher described, it’s a playground and the playground can often get messy. GetGlue smartly integrated with Tumblr in 2011 and accounts like The New Yorker‘s have been able to build a huge audience by translating the quirkiness of their content to the quirkiness of Tumblr. What’s your favorite brand Tumblr?