By: Jim Bono, Vice President, Research, Crown Media Family Networks

We started Day two of The Media Insights & Engagement Conference with our event producer, Rachel McDonald introducing co-chair Jess Aguirre who gave us a recap of Day a, and informed us of what's in store for today.

Our first keynote speaker was professional poker player Casper Berry, who gave us some insights about Risk Taking and Decision Making. Casper shared his thoughts on uncertainty. What is it?  What causes it? What do we do about it? We deal with it every day, but are not always aware it's there. Like poker, the business world is a game of limited information. Our lives are impacted by the butterfly effect, however, most of the time it is invisible to us. As humans, we want to be able to control events in our life, and we need certainty. But Casper tells us we should embrace uncertainty. Interestingly, the pain we suffer from loss is greater than the joy we experience with gain.  There is always a "fear of failure." But failure is a necessity and we need to learn from it.

The morning's keynote panel, Big Data Overload: Getting Creative with Data in the Digital World, was moderated by Christine Kawada of GfK MRI. The distinguished panel of Fabio Luzzi (Viacom), Mike Clark (Google), Bryan Mu (NBCU), and Sandy Padula (Turner) gave us an interesting look at all of the data and options that are available to us. Fabio gave us a humorous definition of Big Data - It's like Teenage Sex. Everyone is talking about it, no one knows how to do it, but everyone claims they're good at it. Meanwhile, Bryan made a great point that he doesn't look at big data vs. small data, but which data helps him best do his job.

Erica Faust of Nielsen Social was our second keynote speaker of the day. In her session, How Does Social TV Drive Impact for Your Brand Partners, Erica discussed how social media (mainly Twitter) can help anticipate audience size for certain programs. Over the past 6 months, there have been 433 million Tweets by 18 million people about TV, and there were 335 million Tweets by 20 million people about brands. And people who tweet about TV and brands are more influential and 3 times as many followers. We saw how social can help drive brand sales and TV viewing.

Shari Swan of Streative Branding closed out the morning in her keynote speech Better Beginnings.  Shari presented us with information about data decisions we face daily. Using Moles, Makers, Mavens and Mavericks in her business model, we learned that we are no longer in the business of sales, but we are in the business of culture. We don't necessarily need bigger data, but more accurate and relevant data. We use the term "insight" incorrectly. Insight is not equal to research. Insight is an understanding. It's not an idea, but can deliver hundreds of ideas.

About the Author: Jim Bono is a TV industry veteran of nearly 25 years, working in Cable TV research for over 20 years.  He’s coming up on his 15th year with Hallmark Channel and Crown Media, where he is VP of Research and heads the department on the East Coast.  A Long Island native all his life, Jim is married to his best friend and wife of 23 years and has 2 wonderful teenaged sons.