The Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, mounted a digital campaign to promote the awards show this year, signing up Facebook fans and monitoring Grammy-related Twitter messages.
There are other factors contributing to the ratings spikes: attention-grabbing shows (the Super Bowl featured the New Orleans Saints, a popular underdog), gradual population growth and an economic contraction that some analysts say is leading to more people spending more time at home in front of their TV and computer screens.
Along with those reasons, “increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings,” said Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen. He said the Olympic data showing simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience.
Some of the marquee Olympic events are tape-delayed this month, even though Olympic results are instantly available on the Web. But people are still watching the Games in prime time.
Brad Peterson, a lighting designer in New York, heard about the skier Lindsey Vonn’s crash before Thursday’s replay of it on NBC, but watched regardless. After all, he said, “I didn’t know when, how and who won.”
For Mr. Wurtzel, the Olympics are a lab, and so far he said he has found that people who follow the Olympics both on TV and online wind up being heavier viewers of television.
Media companies are starting to consider how to incorporate that water-cooler effect — and how to harness it for day-to-day TV shows, too. For the Olympics, NBC is promoting something called “You Be the Judge,” which lets viewers submit their own scores for figure skaters through a Web application and compare their scores to other viewers. The network’s Web site also features a gadget that tracks Twitter opinions about the Games.
词句笔记：
big-ticket event: 大型活动
credit：把……归于
Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
许多电视台行政人员都把电视热回归的部分原因归于网络。
water-cooler conversation：办公室饮水机旁的闲谈
capitalize on：利用，从中获利
spike：长钉，长而尖的东西
rating spikes：收视率增长
