In a week where I was about to pounce on Nielsen’s thin-skinned, backbone-less reversal of a rule intended to alleviate appointment only television ratings (basically, they were measuring multiple viewings of a single show as a count, but NBC, Heroes and Nissan tricked the subsystem and made them look foolish),  I am making a reversal myself and lauding them. A little.

“Hey! Nielsen” is, wouldn’t you know, a social network. But the fabric and this model is interesting and completely in line with their brand and how technological shifts in the marketplace are influencing it. First some basics:

Nielsen is widely known for their measurement systems, particularly the TV audience analysis that drives the entire media economy. A dusty old model itself, there are basically a few thousand sample households nationwide that use a clunky, television set-top box to record how many family members are in a room watching a particular broadcast. This data is used to set ratings that guide commercial costs, which steers which shows (and types of shows) get to live, die, or be put on “Hiatus”.

That covered, they also have an interesting product called Buzz-Metrics, which measures chatter densities and positive/negative spin for any number of products or topics, trolling the blogs and chatter spheres throughout the web to figure out what people are talking about and how. Dove has a new “Real Beauty” campaign? Buzz Metrics helps them figure out if people are talking about it, how, where/when etalk rises and falls, as well as how the campaign affected the chatter levels of their competitors.

Hey! Nielsen is kind of a blending of those two systems – a social network where contributors talk about, rank, dis, opinionate or just basically fight over Movies, TV Shows,  websites , and personalities (Jensen Ackles, it seems, is going to be the next that guy who was Dawson on Dawson’s creek, you know, with the forehead). It then layers on data from Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, and Blogpulse – other Nielsen products - to create a score.  You can also track the score over time. Pretty neat.

The good news is that Nielsen’s stated goal is to eventually use these scores to help drive and influence their primary products, namely TV ratings and panel data, but not until they have enough user mass and a foolproof methodology. How will they get there? By enticing enthusiasts with exclusive screenings and invite only events.

It’s an interesting start, but back to Nielsen’s feeble cowering before the media community … it would be great if they had a category for scoring ads themselves.