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1. links for 2007-07-24 « David Black
   

   July 23rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm

Comments

1. Robin Hamman
   

   July 24th, 2007 at 4:17 am

   Whilst there are lots of dangers, as you point out in your post, to having audience participation on third party websites, there are also some strong benefits to doing so.

   Owning the participation platform - that is inviting audience members to come onto your site to participate using your registration system, your content upload and management systems, your discussion spaces - means also owning all the technical, editorial and legal risks.

   Online community doesn’t scale well, neither does the “send it to us” approach being used by many broadcasters. The more people use these services, the greater the costs and risks involved to the service provider.

   Hosting stuff onsite has an additional, and often forgotten risk, in that when people take time and expend effort (not to mention, in some cases, cash) to submit content, in many cases that content isn’t used.

   How many times are you going to do that before you give up hope, and potentially lose trust in, the company providing the service?

   By off-shoring audience content and discussion, you allow anyone and everyone who wants to share to do so. There is no loss of trust. Everyone walks away having achieved what they set out to do: to share their stuff with an audience.

   Those people get to use tools that are often more familiar to them than, in this instance, a bespoke video uploader unique to Al Jazeera.

   Any libellous, harrassing, inciteful, or copyright infrindging content isn’t the broadcaster’s problem, at least not directly (damage to brands could still occur).

   If the system goes down, or content is lost, or registration details hacked it’s nothing to do with the broadcaster.

   Yet the broadcaster can very efficiently go to a single place, in this instance YouTube, to review all submissions. Then they can take away and embed the very best of those and bundle them up with editorialised links on their own site.

   The result is that the broadcaster helps make it possible for all would be participants to create, publish and discuss content with other audience members without the usual editorial, technical and legal risks. The broadcaster also still gets access to the very best of that content which it can editorialise and link to. The whole process is much more efficient than what most broadcasters currently do - advertise an email address and then get flooded with contributions that have to be opened, viewed, and often reformatted before being put online.

   And that last point, I think, is probably the key to why broadcasters and big media companies are beginning to experiment with the 3rd party option - with audiences of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions or even many millions, when we make calls to action for contributions the flood can be overwhelming. It’s one thing to wade through a couple of dozen contributions, another thing entirely to, as teams at the BBC had to do following the explosion of a fuel depot about 2 years ago, have to wade through 40,000 emails submitted in a matter of hours.

   There is, of course, the danger that people will upload unsuitable content or attack contributors but overall I think it’s a more fair, transparent, and efficient way to encourage audience contributions.

   (My personal opinions, of course!)

   Robin.
   BBC

2. Steve Petersen
   

   July 25th, 2007 at 8:07 am

   Robin,

   Thanks for your thorough input from point-of-view as someone who does social media work for a mainstream news organization. You do make some great points that by outsourcing the interaction, it spares the news organization plenty of work and expense.

   I just attended the CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday as a guest of Google. We’ll see what CNN learns from partnering with YouTube for this and the Republican Debate in September. Will they partner again? If the YouTube/Google people I interacted with are representative of the rest of their colleagues, I think CNN will.