With every major event we now experience as a country, whether it’s the Super Bowl or the presidential inauguration, it becomes more evident that the conversation on social media is as tied to the event as is the process of physically tuning into the broadcast. There’s nothing new about this — the rise of social media and the second screen has been clear for years — but as soaring numbers for social media sharing are revealed after each event, we shake our heads at just how quickly things have changed.

Even within a year, the connection between television events and their small screen counterparts has grown at a remarkable rate (13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets in 2012 versus 24.1 million last night, and from 100 million active Twitter users in September 2011 to 200 million in December 2012).

That growth is changing how we view and consume media and how advertisers work to reach us. Suddenly, they can fairly reliably cross-promote between television and online, and consumers are increasingly sucked into experiencing both events in real time. And I say events, because watching Twitter during an event like the Super Bowl is an experience in itself.

One predicted trend that hasn’t come into existence yet is the merging of the television and social experiences into one, as Om once predicted and brought to my attention this morning. People are still pretty much watching television on televisions and tweeting from phones or laptops. As we wrote this morning, the majority of Super Bowl viewers did so through traditional broadcast methods, and tweeting from your TV still hasn’t exactly caught on.

But with every event comes the inevitable blog posts from Twitter and Facebook and Instagram about how this was the most-tweeted or the most-photographed or the most-shared event EVER. Frankly, those posts will only be newsworthy if the numbers ever decline, but that seems unlikely at this point. The dual forces of television and social media are dragging us into experiencing live events as they happen, turning on its head the idea that portable computing devices and streaming will let us watch whatever we want whenever we want. And they are setting different standards for how viewer engagement is measured: we all know the Nielsen ratings are a bit of a joke in this day and age. With Twitter’s reported acquisition of social tv analytics company Bluefin Labs, it’s something everyone is interested in figuring out.

My friend’s attempt to watch last week’s heart-wrenching Downton Abbey episode a day later was cheapened when a pivotal plot point was spoiled by a parody account for the Dowager Countess on Twitter (obviously do not click that link if you live under a rock and haven’t watched yet). It was a rough way to find out. And the experience cured my friend of wanting to DVR an episode ever again.

Because if you care about the content and you’re tied to the internet as so many of us are, saving anything for later is a losing battle. And the rapid wit of the Oreo jokes on Twitter during the Super Bowl can’t really be appreciated at a later date. Even as the Dowager Countess parody tweet ruined the episode for my friend, it probably entertained thousands of Downton fans who felt more in the know when they saw it, and felt more connected to the show as a result. There’s nothing like seeing a witty remark from someone you follow about an event you’re also following — suddenly it’s a joke you share with other people. And that experience is extremely hard to replicate after the fact.

Most of us will have to accept the fact that seperating live events from their social media counterparts is a losing battle at this point, but for brands like Oreo, the knowledge that they have a dual-platform audience creates real possibilities. And as they proved last night, can be a delicious combo, both for advertisers and witty twitter users who want in on the joke when it happens.

According to a Pew Research study released Monday, nearly 8 out of 10 Americans say they’re following the London Olympics on either traditional television or via the internet.

As a media event, that makes the Summer Olympics bigger than the Super Bowl, which draw attention from about 7 out of 10 Americans. (The latter data came from a Harris Poll conducted last year.)

Not surprisingly, traditional television is the dominant consumption platform for the London Games, with 73 percent of the 1,005 individuals surveyed by Pew saying they watch events on the tube (see chart).

Also read: BBC’s super-served Olympics shows how narrowcast can go wide

However, among younger demographics, usage of internet platforms to follow the Olympics is significant.

For example, among groups aged 18-29 and 30-49, 22 percent are tracking the Games online. And 31 percent of 18-29-year-olds are using social media to get their Olympics fix, far away the most social-media use of any demo surveyed.

Also notable: The level of Olympics consumption rises along with wealth and education.

Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

While it is a milestone of sorts for online video, in reality because the Super Bowl is the biggest appointment television event of the year, there isn’t much new value to viewers from making it available online too. It’s important to remember that those billions of views online video racks up each month occur because of the incremental – or in come cases transformational – value that it provides. Look at the success of some of the biggest video players today – YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Hulu, VEVO, Facebook, etc. What they and others all have in common is that they deliver thing(s) not currently possible on TV – massive choice, convenience, control, community, sharing and interactivity.

It’s true that the streaming Super Bowl will offer some of the engaging features that NBC’s Sunday Night Football Extra’s streaming experience does, but it’s hard to imagine all of them, even combined, will be so compelling as to draw viewers away from the TV. That’s been the case with SNF, which  gets only 200,000-300,000 viewers compared to the average 21 million who tune in on TV. This is where I think the NFL and NBC partially missed the boat yesterday. By not identifying anything new or truly distinctive for Super Bowl streaming, they didn’t create a call to action for viewers to try it out, in addition to or instead of TV. As a result, most average viewers’ reaction is probably along the lines of “why do I need that?”

Other sports events like the Olympics, March Madness, PGA golf have all benefitted because they are partially played during weekday or non primetime hours. The Super Bowl on the other hand, has been well-crafted to be the biggest TV event of the year. If the NFL and its broadcast partners want to make it an online success as well, they will need to be much more creative in the future.

This article originally appeared in VideoNuze.

Kantar found that the 10 most popular ads online generated an additional $1 million in impressions–more than half of which accrued to the list’s top entry, Volkswagen’s “The Force,” which has drawn a stunning total of over 26 million streams.

Of course, Super Bowl exposure also cuts both ways: Surely GroupOn could have emerged with fewer scratches from its own current debacle had its spots not been endlessly replayed and dissected online all of this week. No wonder the company had to take the extraordinary step of shelving the ads (though enterprising minds should have no problem digging them up online even if they’ve been yanked from YouTube).

Keep in mind that Volkswagen was among the marketers that not only scored extra points after the Super Bowl, but started generating interest days before kickoff. While extending the impact of a Super Bowl TV ad online is nothing new, the 2011 event underscored the notion that Madison Avenue may still be only scratching the surface in terms of unlocking the total value of these spots across platforms.

No wonder NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA), which has rights to Super Bowl 2012, has already floated the possibility that commercials will cost upwards of $3 million per 30-second ads. To some degree that hike is just an acknowledgement of how valuable the big game’s TV window alone is from a scarcity perspective; as it becomes harder and harder for most TV programs to amass truly mass audiences, those that can do it dependably like the Super Bowl will only become that much more valuable.

But you’ve got to wonder whether NBC is already thinking about how to hold onto the spillover value of Super Bowl ads when they continue to exert marketing muscle online. There’s got to be a way where NBC ad sales can make this more of a cross-platform opportunity, perhaps putting more weight behind Hulu, in which it has a stake, or even NBC.com, as a place to drive all those TV eyeballs to an online location for repeat viewing or extensions of the marketing experience.

As it stands, that additional audience simply scatters all over the internet to watch Super Bowl ads, from YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) to Facebook. But 2012 presents an opportunity for NBC to justify its $3 million-plus price tag with a sales opportunity that really gives these ads their due.

Mason isn’t apologetic though. Instead, he says the Super Bowl ads Groupon ran compare favorably to those that he says are “built around the crass objectification of women.” Mason writes: “Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously. Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact – and this is part of the reason we ran them – they have the opposite effect.”

That doesn’t seem like much of a defense, i.e. “Hey, stop getting upset at us! Look at those other people that are doing bad stuff!” But Mason does point out that Groupon is raising money for the causes it was seemingly mocking. Groupon, however, didn’t make that fact evident in the ads themselves — an omission Mason doesn’t explain.

I have to admit I was a little horrified by the whole sweatshop/grimy operating table aesthetic — whose thumbs are those, exactly? — but then again, I don’t think that phone is aimed at me.

What is still a question is whether PlayStation and Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson have strong enough brands — and if the phone works well enough as a gaming device — to make the Xperia Play device into a success.

Will it cut out (excuse the pun) a new place for itself in the market, or follow in the footsteps of the Nokia N-Gage, which, as a standalone device, didn’t get past the beginners’ stages of the competition?

The Play will be competing not only against plain old smartphones, which have proven to be a hit with gamers already; but also the many handheld gaming devices that are looking more and more like mobile handsets (such as Sony’s own NGP device, which has 3G connectivity, a microphone and speakers and cameras).

The device will be formally unveiled next week during MWC in Barcelona. For now, a Facebook campaign (pictured) and, of course, the commercial…

The Verizon ad, which begins with a larger-than-you-and-me look at the (black) iPhone 4 and, yes, that much-touted Verizon network, ends with a very normal-looking network guy smugly saying into his iPhone, and at the camera, “Yes, I can hear you now.”

AT&T ad also takes the humorous approach but in a more personal way. It shows off the phone’s ability to talk and surf simultaneously, with a spot looking at an overworked exec nearly missing his anniversary and booking a table at an LA restaurant while sweet-talking wifey.

Apple first aired its own “1984″ ad, directed by Ridley Scott, when it launched the Macintosh computer, nearly 16 years to the day Motorola aired its Xoom ad yesterday. Both take a page out of George Orwell’s novel of the same name, and lay out a world that is closed, creepy and soulless — to be broken, of course, by their respective products.

When Apple made its commercial, it was playing against the status quo of personal computer brands on the market at the time, which was largely dominated by the Commodore 64. Motorola takes the same form of Apple’s commercial — grey automatons trudging along in life — but uses it to rage against the status quo of today’s tablet market — created and dominated by Apple and its iOS system.

While Apple’s advert uses a colourful athlete slinging a hammer to literally shatter the automatons’ world; Moto goes for the rom-com angle, and seems to be quite happy to keep up the automatons’ life as long as we can add a bit of colour and love into it.

Will the Xoom really manage to make a dent into the iPad society as we know it? Some are skeptical of its reported $800 price tag, although that will likely see subsidies from service providers to bring it down.

And the Apple ad for good measure…

The spot, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky and featuring actor Timothy Hutton, starts off like a public awareness campaign about Tibet and human rights issues. “The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture is in jeopardy,” Hutton’s voice over begins with deep solemnity. After a series of images of mountains and native Tibetans, the camera fixes on a man’s serious visage. “But they still whip up an amazing fish curry.” It turns out the man was a waiter serving Hutton at a Himalayan in Chicago restaurant — where the actor and 200 others got $15 off a $30 meal.

Get the joke? Well, hundreds of Twitter users didn’t.

In the words of New Yorker writer Tad Friend, who in a tweet, calmly echoed many of the sentiments still building on Twitter over an hour after the commercial aired, “groupon’s tibet commercial was so appalling it made me cancel their daily email; it turned a vague dislike into enmity.”

See the ad for yourself below and let us know if you think it went too far.

Updated: As commenter Jon Garkfunkel pointed out below, Groupon does have a charity associated with Tibet. As Groupon’s “Save The Money” site shows, the site has several other ads with celebrities lampooning popular causes; it’s also matching funds in some cases. For example, there’s Cuba Gooding on Saving The Whales (by going on whale watching) and Elizabeth Hurley on Saving The Rainforest (“Not all deforestation is bad… 100 of us are saving money on a Brazilian wax!”). The site also mentions that singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow has a spot in the Save The Money campaign that will support the building of schools in poor villages around the world with up to $200,000 in matching funds from Groupon and anonymous donors. (A worthy cause, but she might want to check with her agent — now.)

I was watching Gooding’s and Hurley’s spots with my wife. We agreed that they probably won’t attract the kind of condemnations that Cole’s tweet and the Tibet ad did. That’s because the respective issues of the rainforest and whaling aren’t in the news involving current political events where people’s physical safety are being directly threatened — and therefore aren’t among Twitter trending topics that have touched people emotionally in the past few weeks.

Updated 2: On Groupon’s blog, the company tries to explain its motivation for deciding to “blow millions of dollars” on a TV ad. In the past, the company was content with word-of-mouth and search ads, primarily because it wasn’t that impressed with most creative shops. For one thing, ad agencies didn’t get its “peculiar” sense of humor. In spite of all the growth, Groupon decided that it still hadn’t received enough attention, so it seemed like a Super Bowl spot would satisfy that need for greater exposure.

In Groupon’s view, the ads poke fun at the company, since it started out as a philanthropy site called ThePoint.com. The ads are meant as self-deprecation, noting how Groupon ended up selling coupons, not saving the world.

As far as attempting to help the causes it includes in its commercials, Groupon will contribute matching donations of up to $100,000 for three featured charities – Rainforest Action Network, buildOn, and the Tibet Fund – and Groupon credit of up to $100,000 for contributions made to Greenpeace. Although not an insignificant sum, that’s probably not enough money, but it could help. But the bigger question for Groupon is whether these donations will help it save its image after the initial bitter reaction to the Super Bowl spot.