After the time I spent at BBC Radio Manchester last month, they asked me back to take part in North West Fest, a day of presentations for BBC English Regions staff in the North West. Richard’s blogged more about the day here.
The purpose of they day was to let staff, across all disciplines, spend half a day hearing about new technologies and developments from both internal and external people. For my part I talked about the nature of ‘attention’ and how new platforms, specifically social networks, are taking greater shares of the audiences attention resulting in audience pressures for established broadcasters. I also covered the opportunities these new platforms provide broadcasters, especially public service broadcasters and how they can use them to get closer to listeners and users.
It was a great day, and a good opportunity to here more about the challenges and new possibilities facing the BBC. It was also an opportunity to play Dr Wesch’s great video and talk about the new iPhone.
I’ve just got back from Glastonbury (after a brief soujorn to Manchester) so i’m a little tired. It was however quite interesting to see people’s use of technology on site.
One of the most popular areas was the Orange Chill and Charge tent, a place where visitors could re-charge their mobiles, go online and listen to special sets from artists. There were hundreds of different points for all the different phone types and it was jammed packed, all the time. Most of the people hooked up were those with the more feature-intensive phones that drained batteries quite quickly.
It was also interesting to see the websites that everyone was logged on to (well, you had to do something whilst you sat waiting for the juice to flow). I would say about 50% of the usage was to Facebook, with the rest a combination of MySpace, email sites and BBC articles on Glastonbury.
The whole Orange installation was managed by Cake and facilitated incredibly well. They managed to create a really great atmosphere for all mobile users (as they supported all networks) under intense pressure (and mud!).
I thought Glasto was also a good opportunity to practice what I preach and so recorded a video blog live to YouTube, and sent some pics to Flickr. Also popping up in my mobile feed reader were live blogs from friends David and Nick. No doubt something lots of people did. I think this kind of mobile access throws up lots of interesting questions about the nature of ‘access’ and worth a more thought out blog post when I’m not quite as tired.
Authentic Buzz has commissioned a poll of 500 London Facebook users asking their opinion on the new London 2012 logo. A whopping 64% thought it was terrible, with a further 18% thinking it was poor.
The ease of which social network users can disseminate opinions online is a massive problem for new brands. The value of an expensive marketing campaign can be destroyed in hours if a bad write up flows through the users on sites like Facebook. The content for all of these sites are driven by friends, so a ringing endorsement or poor review instantly becomes the prevailing opinion for many users.
The new London Olympic logo has already incensed many Facebook users with hundreds of groups appearing demanding that the Organising Committee revert to their old version.
Big companies ignore social networks at their peril and need to ensure their marketing messages are authentic and inclusive to get on side a huge number of these influencing consumers.
I was on Radio 2 this afternoon talking to Stuart Maconie about Facebook and Social Media generally. Describing web2.0 in a sentence is quite tough…
Anyway in the segment it was revealled that Sally Traffic (the high priestess of travel) had a group. Now, it was quite a small one with just a few users, then by the end of the record loads more fans joined up. Now, that’s no great suprise as a drivetime on Radio 2 is a massive show with millions of listeners.
But for me it highlighted how when you engage with someone in an environment that they’re comfortable in (in this case users of Facebook), that you instantly reap the rewards. There were no web addresses given out, or links from Radio 2 online, just through informal discussion a load of people were activiated and they joined in.
Over the next 24 hours those people, through the newsfeed, will alert hundreds of other people (their friends) about Sally and Radio 2. They have endorsed it and told their friends about it.
Media is still often obsessed with control - it stems from the old relationship people had of ‘tuning in’. I think it’s actually more interesting to look at your objectives and think about how they can still be met (and targets beaten) if you cede away control and work to do interesting things within your audiences lives.
