The BBC have hired us to work with them looking at the overlap between their enthusiastic entry into the world of social media (especially blogs) and their responsibility to be accountable to the people who pay their licence fee. This is getting us into some extremely interesting conversations with some brilliant people at the BBC, but the conversation has now also widened to address the public as well - scarily (and ironically given my earlier thoughts on the subject), I've just published a post to that end on the BBC Internet Blog from beyond the grave (or beyond the P45 at least).

Matthew

Once again, we said this at the head of the previous post, but in case you’re coming in afresh… We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of a presentation and workshop.

The Boss, NIN and a new relationship with your consumers

We kicked off by discussing the different strategies employed in the business of conversing with their audience taken by two very different rock musicians, Bruce Springsteen and Nine Inch nails’ Trent Reznor. You certainly can't rely on the old ways of doing things, that's for sure. Having already run foul of the blogosphere by releasing his new album Working on a Dream as a Walmart exclusive, it seems that in the week after playing the Superbowl, watched on TV by 90 million Americans, Bruce Springsteen managed to flog just 100,000 units of the album. (And it’s not just poor old Bruce. Remember, U2 opened up the Grammys with their new single Get on Yer Boots without managing to get it into the top 100 songs on the iTMS. And all this against a background of 2008's most talked about about album - G'n'R's 17-year-hiatus-ending Chinese Democracy charting only at No 3 on its US release.)

As for Reznor, well, this presentation at the MidemNet conference earlier this year by business associate Michael Masnick tells the story better than we can.

The really essential thing here, though, is the different tone and approach used by each of these rock musicians when talking to the public - their fans. This brief slide show walks through some of the points made above but crucially ends with an email newsletter to his fans from Reznor and an "open letter" to the New York Times, apparently from Springsteen, addressing his Walmart error.

Justin then talked everyone through two sets of slides:

Losing Control illustrates the development of conversational approaches by broadcasters, from one to many, through one to many with a small back channel, through the viral approach and ending with the uncontrollable and difficult to scale up conversational approach.

Who are you and what are you selling? illustrates Double Shot’s views of different “families” of brands. We stress that these are our observations; there's no science in this and some of our attendees disagreed with some of our conclusions, not least about the brand structure of the Beeb.

We then briefly looked at how the advent of digital communications technology had seriously confused this already confusing relationship between customers/audience and brands, looking at some specific examples of BBC brands in new relationships to the audience.

Specifically, we asked about the ways in which multi-platform, on demand, and "additional" or user-generated content had changed this relationship.

The examples we used included...

The Wire. Yes, "those in the know" know it as an HBO show... but what about an audience who knows it only through the BBC's broadcasting of it? What about the people who write letters to the BBC to complain about it, or to praise it?

Mock the Week. Do you know what BBC channel it's on? Out attendees, between them, watch it on the iPlayer, on Virgin or Sky+, on Dave, over Torrents (naming no names). Some people even watched, well, on BBC2. You get the picture. (And if you need to "the picture" out - just look at that website; who's behind that?!)

Or here's 1Double Shot favourite, Radio 1 DJ Mary Anne Hobbs, who, earlier this year,  did a special for her Radio 1 show about the emerging electronic music scene in Los Angeles and San Francisco: West Coast Rocks.

Here's the tracklisting on the Radio 1 site.

Here's a video she made while there, now on the BBC's Introducing site.

But where's the show, dammit? Well of course it's not there - thanks to the 7-day only window catch up. This is what we call the Seashell: when the evidence of a broadcast outlives the show itself.

Of course, it's even more fiendishly complex than that, because you but know where to look, you can download the show, from such sites as Core News - which you have to know, was just one among many.

And what about Stephen Fry's famous twitter feed?

Let alone mash-ups like this University Challenge-meets-South Parl pro-Cannabis video:

Or even straightforward user-uploaded BBC material like this classic Youg Ones University Challenge sketch:

Unpick this lot then. What is the BBC brand? Channel? Talent? Strand? Show? Genre? The BBC itself?

We have no definitive answers here; we're just convinced that it's immeasurably more complex than many are prepared to admit... and only going to get more so.

Enjoy!
Simon

Yes, we said this at the head of the previous post, but in case you’re coming in afresh… We’ve just finished a series of three social media training or awareness-raising sessions for the good people at BBC Scotland, in the wonderful studios on Pacific Quay. These sessions were to some extent a remix of the sessions we did in London during the winter and spring earlier this year (which we blogged) but of course, times move on so there a whole load of new stuff in there too. So we’re going to our notes and resources up here both as follow up to the attendees and as – just possibly – a useful bit of “stuff” for the casual reader (with the obvious caveat that this is NOT an essay, but the basis of presentations punctuated with some great Q&A interventions from some brilliant guests)…

Tracking the conversations
The first thing to do if you want to start talking… is to start listening. That’s all very well, but how can you pick out apposite, useful conversation amongst the chattering Babel that is the web? Well let’s have a look at some specific tools.

Capture
Google Alerts
Google Blog Search
Twoogle
Technorati
Blogpulse
Icerocket

Twitter specific stuff
Twitter Search
Twitterfall
Trendistic

Feed Readers
You really only need one of these – and Google is great, but in case you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Mountain View basket, we’ll include a couple of others:
Google Reader
Bloglines 
The cryptically-named Feedreader

Another approach: Handy homepage aggregators
Netvibes
Page flakes
iGoogle

OK… that’s a lot of stuff… NOBODY uses all of ‘em (with the exception of social media consultants who HAVE TO!)… You do need to play with them and create your own “ecosystem”… 

Breakout – the art of listening

We then asked the attendees to break into 3-5 groups. Each group was given a different news story from that day (or previous couple) and asked to use one or two (at most) of the tools listed above in order to find posts/threads/conversations related to the story. These questions might be useful to you when looking for conversations “out there”:

•What new aspects of the story emerged – if any?
•Did you manage to find interesting voices?
•How did the tools compare to each other?
•How easy were stories to find?
•How did the tools compare to standard new gathering sources – the wires, cuts etc?

Best practice in action 1
John Connell then gave a presentation and answered questions from us and the audience. John is a former teacher and head teacher and an educationalist who works full time for Cisco. Somehow he also finds time to maintain not one but two blogs and has – with the aid of the fabulous Tweetdeck – properly mastered the art of Twitter.
John Connell: The Blog
John Connell's Travel Blog

Best practice in action 2:
Bringing the Conversation Back into the Broadcast

Ros Atkins is the main presenter of World Have Your Say, our favourite show on the radio, a 5-day-a-week, hour-long show which involves callers from around the world debating a hot topic. However, to call WHYS a call-in show would be to grievously underestimate it. Rather, it’s a forum in which participants talk to each other, with Ros (or one of his colleagues) “simply” wrangling the conversation. This wrangling, of course, is all in the preparation and the preparation is all about the adroit use of social media.

Simon

Justin's going to love this: a data visualisation of the phrase "goodmorning" being tweeted around the world over a 24 hour period. It might not be quite as revealing nor indeed as useful as anything coming out of the Gapminder camp but it's pretty lovely for all that.
Props to the tech-geist hoovers at Gizmodo for pointing it out.

And - a little older this - a presentation to Google's Zeitgeist 2008 conference by IPR lawyer James Boyle arguing that human beings have a systemic inability to see the importance of open, networked systems, and consequently are prejudiced in the beliefs, generally preferring to support closed systems. That's hamfistedly put. Watch Boyle instead... he's remarkably clear-thinking while discursive and wide-ranging in his topics.