Authentic Buzz

I was reading Rafat Ali’s excellent paidcontent.org (and you should to) and he was talking a little about a CBS’s new interactive strategy. More importantly, he snapped a demo of the new CBS site, and what’s that in the right-hand corner but a nice , fairly prominent, section with an integrated Last.FM.

Now, obviously, if you pay $280m for something, you want to give it some love, but that would put Last.FM, for the first time, front and centre of a very mainstream audience. It would also make it one of the first properly integrated acquisitions from the web2.0 world. Especially compared to Flickr which isn’t anywhere near Yahoo’s homepage…

I was reading thelondonpaper on the way home on yesterday which ran with a story about Boris Johnson for Mayor. It’s a story that’s been running for a couple of weeks, but the new angle is that Boris’ website jumped the gun and published a Boris Is Running! splash.

It does somehow play to Boris’ main strength - bumbling. thelondonpaper reports the web incident as an error, but i’m not so sure. You only have to look at US politics and see how many pre-announcement stories candidates produce before they disappear to a TV show, New Orleans or medical-looking living room before revealing the (unsurprising) news.  Pre-announcements and slips provide the most important thing in any political campaign - momentum.

A ’slip’ like this on a Friday keeps the story in the news all over the weekend as ’speculation’ and then from Monday when he’ll probably announce officially, it’ll keep the story live for the next few days as well. The pre-treatment from the press will also give Boris’ campaign vital intelligence about the direction coverage is likely to go, and allows them to co-opt and respond to the stories around the real announcement.

Ypulse has flagged up these two great quotes about the importance of getting young people involved in your marketing plans.

“I would say you have experts at the age of 14 of fantastic value because those people are extremely intelligent, they have time and they produce a lot of very good counseling on technological issues.”

- Pierre Bellanger, chief executive and co-founder of Skyblog, Europe’s top social network site.

“The people coming into and out of college don’t look at things in terms of media or marketing. They look at what is cool.”

- James Hilton, co-founder and executive creative director of advertising consultancy Akqa.

I’ve recently been spending some time with team from the BBC World Service. They asked me to come in and make some suggestions about their email mailing list – BBC Email Network.

It’s very easy to decry traditional e-communications, but a mailing list is a great way to keep people in touch with what you do. It’s also technology that’s easily trackable, giving you details about delivery and open rates as well as decent demographic data of your subscribers. Used well, it’s an excellent opportunity to develop a relationship with your consumers. Done badly, it becomes annoying spam.

Thankfully the World Service has the right idea, creating new and exclusive content for the subscribers as well as providing functional information about schedules and programmes. There’s also great focus on the content with a dedicated employee working on creating unique video and audio material.

Amongst other things, I spent some time with them looking at the entry points for subscriptions, how to describe the content to potential users as well as techniques for testing phraseology to increase open rates. We also spent some time looking at objectives for the network and exploring opportunities to give it a personal feel and make it more club-like. The special content for subscribers already provides real added value, but we also wanted to make the Email Network feel more connected to the World Service, rather than be just a weekly marketing push.

As well as looking at how we generate and respond to responses from the group we also wanted to experiment with some social network aspects to help build that relationship with the listeners. With producer Phil Smith and Editor Steve Martin already Facebook users we were keen to use that network to reinforce the value created by the Email Network.

Using some clever data management techniques we were able to identify Facebook users within a test section of the Email Network subscribers. We weren’t sure how many from our sample would be members of Facebook, but it turned out to be around 400 users. We then talked to one of the station’s presenters, Gareth Mitchell, who presents Digital Planet to see whether he would be willing to open up his own Facebook profile to Email Network subscribers and become an online public face of the World Service. He agreed and created a group for BBC Email Network Subscribers.

It was important that we persuaded someone who was already a Facebook user, as we wanted his profile (and updates) to be truthful and authentic and develop a relationship with his listener ‘friends’.

Gareth then invited the listeners we had identified as Facebook users to become his friend. Within 24 hours about a third of those requested had signed up, many also spontaneously joined the BBC Email Network group, the others will get a request to later in the week. It has also been nice to see the response he’s had on his ‘wall’ and also the emails he’s had directly from listeners.

The great thing about using a social network like Facebook is that your friends see some of your activity on the network. So the friends of Gareth’s friends (keep up at the back!) will see them joining and interacting with the World Service. This is a great reach builder for the station and likely to encourage people to trial the network. With Gareth as ‘host’ there’s also good encouragement for new people who stop by to join the Email Network and interact with other World Service content. Facebook was also a good choice, in this instance as the BBC World Service aims to attract well-educated internationalists in their 20s and 30s – a demographic served by Facebook well.

As the Editor, Steve Martin, said in an email to me: “in global broadcasting it’s very easy to be distracted by the immense reach figures, but every one of our 183 million listeners has made a separate personal decision to be with the BBC. That’s why I’m keen to nurture individual connections with listeners wherever we can.”

Using a social network in this way has been a great experiment for the World Service and is a great example of taking the conversation to listeners rather than merely hope they come to you. As an international broadcaster the World Service is used to taking content to new locations where there are listeners, and what’s Facebook really, than another location where listeners live.