By Steve Safran, Editor, Lost Remote

We are more interactive and social than ever, if a new study from Nielsen is accurate. The study, "Nielsen Three Screen Report" paints a picture of Americans as TV multitasks, people who use their computer and mobile devices even as they are watching television. And that tells us a lot about what it means to be social.

There are a few big headlines to this report: - Americans spend 3.5 hours a month using TV and the internet simultaneously. - We watch 35 hours of TV a week, two of which is time shifted (think TiVo and DVRs), four hours per week online and watch four minutes of mobile video per week.

Cross-media usage is up nearly 60 percent over the same period (Q4) a year ago. Cross-media usage is what we're most concerned with here, because it tells us something about user behavior. You've seen the success "American Idol" has had with getting people to text their votes. (Genius.) Local television tends to be stuck in the dark ages of cross-media usage, only occasionally asking - at best - for "you to vote now in our online poll." We can do so much more, and yet there's very little effort to go beyond that level of interactivity. What are people doing with their three screens? They are socializing. They are texting each other during "Glee," they are checking other news sites even as they watch your newscast, and they are constantly Facebooking. (Is that a verb?)

We need to go beyond the "for more on this story visit our website" tease and run a constant dialogue during our newscasts. The TV station Facebook pages I've seen run from terrible to merely OK. But is anyone using the pages to their true advantage? The real competitive advantage Facebook use gives you is twofold: 1. It allows a real-time conversation about the news on the users' own turf and 2. The stats you get from it (for free, mind you) are terrific. While people aren't watching a whole lot of mobile video - yet - they are texting like crazy.

I hear entire sports talk shows where listener texts have nearly replaced phone calls. This makes sense - you can be sure what the listener is saying, and you don't have to worry about the "beep" button. There's also a benefit to the listener - you don't have to wait endlessly on hold. For truly social news, I invite you to look at what WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul has just launched. "The Wire" is a combination timeline/news river/social blog, but it's actually much more.

As MinnPost puts it: “Here’s how it works: A WCCO reporter or staffer kicks off a story in the timeline. As the story unfolds, updates are done, but where it gets interesting is this: We — formerly known as the audience but geared to be highly participative in today’s online world — are able to submit relevant perspective, information and media we capture digitally and report on the story!”

Even this description doesn't do The Wire justice. Visit it, and you'll "get it" in a minute. This is the kind of experimental social media we should be encouraging our staff to develop. Your web team is, I promise, far more capable of doing original work than you give them credit for. Charge them with finding new - and I mean new - ways of being social and you'll be doing justice to your own work while rewarding and informing your audience. Be social.