Viewership ratings of live TV events, including award shows, are experiencing a resurgence after several years of precipitous declines and rumors of broadcast TV’s imminent demise. Aided by social media (e.g., Twitter trending topics and Facebook status updates), live TV events have experienced significant ratings increases during the last year. A recent article in Ad Age offers several specific examples:

• MTV’s Movie Awards in May of 2009: online “buzz” about “Bruno” and “New Moon” fed interest in the event, which racked up 5 million viewers. In addition, traffic to MTV’s microsite surged by 205% over 2008

• The BET Awards in June of 2009: this event was the highest rated celebrity telecast for all of 2009 thanks to a BET Twitter account (which had more than 40,000 followers) and a tribute to Michael Jackson. More than 10.45 million viewers watched it live. BET also paid unusual attention to its Twitter participants by hosting a “Wall of Tweets” which showed Twitter updates during the live show. Traffic to the BET website grew by 100% over 2008.

• MTV Video Music Awards in September of 2009: Thanks to Twitter, Kanye West’s inappropriate interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech prompted a surge in viewership for the remaining two hours of the broadcast.

• The Grammy Awards in January 2010: The increase in viewership spiked by 35% over last year, bringing total viewership to nearly 26 million. Ad Age attributes this positive trend to a “high volume of real-time tweets and a decent amount of pre-show buzz.”

To be fair, not everyone is convinced that social media should be credited with the resurgence. Brad Adgate, a Horizon Media research analyst, offers this alternate explanation, “Last year was record-low viewing for most awards shows, so there had to be some sort of bounce-back. Having windows of insight from regular consumers’ opinion has its place, though I don’t think that would necessarily fuel ratings. The truth is these shows have gotten more entertaining.”

Regardless, Nielsen is developing a way to analyze the impact of social media on TV viewership, in real-time. Soon, programmers will be able to correlate surges in online buzz to specific moments in a live show.