It’s Not a Broadcast Medium


This video from Influx Insights discusses what the BBC should do with it’s twitter.com/bbc account

. Listening to the beginning of the video it reminds me of the quote posted yesterday on Ad-Lab:

    “They collect followers on Twitter as proof of how brilliant they are at social media marketing, without realizing the irony that they are just turning their Twitter feed into a broadcast medium that reaches more people than they could possibly hope to have a “relationship” with.” – Kevin Rothermel

If the goal of the BBC is to turn Twitter into a broadcast medium, then a lot of the answers in the video are good ideas, but why would you want to? Yet another broadcast medium? Isn’t digital today more about a patchwork of smaller arenas – all folding into this ONE big Idea?

notabroadcastmedium

The genius of Twitter is that it’s an incredibly simple and agile tool, allowing any twitterer to tailor it to their use

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. But for the BBC my personal recommendation would be that they should explore it as something other than a broadcasting mechanism, and it should be used for listening, participating and connecting with larger or smaller audiences.

What the BBC needs isn’t twitter.com/bbc, what they need is /bbcBluePeter or /bbcScience or /bbcChrismoyles. People, programs, common interests, social objects, the works
. Not just one big broad channel to pour all their information through.

To put it into other words: Did Microsoft embrace blogging by creating ONE big blog? Or did they encourage their employees to create thousands of small ones?

Isn’t this also the case Twitter?


2 Comments

  1. February 28

    Helge – I agree with you 99% of the time, but not this time. I think it’s a mistake when we put false barriers around what a tool like Twitter should and shouldn’t be used for.

    The reality is that Twitter CAN be used as a broadcast medium, AND a listening/sharing/relationship tool at the same time. Somebody can have 96,000 followers and still have an intimate relationship with a smaller number of those people.

    Keep up the great work – I’m shocked that more people aren’t following your work and interacting with you.

  2. helge
    March 1

    Hi thanks for the polite correction Steve, and the very nice comment.

    I was thinking along the same lines as you the day after posting, remembering it’s not about technology, it’s about people. And that it is about how we use the tools in order to ignite people that is important, not any given template for how to use it.

    So, I was trying to enforce a rule, when there are non :o)

    Again, thanks for the contribution!

    Best
    Helge

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