Authentic Buzz

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.