Twitter at PBS

I just finished a panel called "Let's Get Social" at the PBS Showcase in Palm Springs. Pam Osborne from Rocky Mountain PBS was also on the panel.  She talked about the Panorama project on their site.  It gives an opportunity for the audience to have a conversation with audience around programming.   She also mentioned how they were beginning to experiment with Twitter.  They are setting up twitter accounts linked to programmatic areas and affinity groups.   For example, here's the arts programming account.  This PBS station just started their social media experimentation less than a year ago and is already seeing increased audience engagement and visitors to their site.  She reports to the general manager of the station and says that she did not me with any resistance as he understood the importance. 

The questions from the audience, mostly general managers or programming producers - "What was your budget?" and "How much time?"

There is a lot of tweeting from the PBS Showcase, plus several PBS staff have accounts.  I'm sure we'll see more particularly as Kevin Dando urged stations to get a twitter account with their name.

In an afternoon session, I heard an interesting presentation about how the Tavis Smiley show is using Twitter.  Go to the KCET's landing page for the show and you'll see them promoting the Twitter account,(but not with a Twitter badge streaming the actual tweets.)  Twitter is being used for conversation, along with tidbits from the show and interesting quotes from guests.   Twitter isn't the only tool that is part of the strategy, there is also a video blog that is shot by an intern and shows a more informal side of Tavis answering people's questions.

Notice how he refers to how the questions get to him, including Twitter and encourages viewers to send them his way.  In addition, they are tracking conversations, summarizing, and using them as audience feedback for producers.

After the panel, I caught up with Liz Burr, who started as an Internet at KCET in Los Angeles is now the Interactive Project manager and responsible for social media.   She is responsible for developing and implementing the social media strategy for the station's shows.  She also provides internal tech support to other staff who may be implementing social media strategies for programs or marketing.  She a wide range of experience on different social networking sites, video sharing, widgets, and social applications.

She oversee the development of a Facebook Application for Wired Science app, "What Element Are You?," an interactive periodic table personality quiz. She notes,  "It is been going viral on Facebook without much promotion because it's fun.  People want to play on Facebook, so we wanted to design something that was fun and got people interesting in the show.

She's been involved with a number of Twitter experiments, being an early adopter of Twitter herself.  Her PBS station's first foray into Twitter was to set up a feed for Wired Science.  She notes, "Wired Science site had a number of feeds and we thought it was appropriate way to experiment."   She contacted the people at Twitter and got them to mention Wired Science on their blog and in their newsletter which brought them many followers.   She notes,  "I try to connect with the social media companies and get help.  They're very interested in nonprofits and particularly a PBS station."

On the other hand, the Tavis Smiley Twitter strategy was more conversational and as Liz points out, "that really fit the style of the show.  It's a talk show!"  Liz says that she thinks it is important to choose an approach and be consistent.  She also says that you need to cross-pollinate across different social networks/media.  "For example, as you saw on Tavis's video blog, he specifically mentions questions that come from the audience via Twitter."

Burr notes that people really get excited and more engaged when Tavis directly answers their questions on Twitter.  It makes them feel special.

Burr says that measuring success is important.  For them, being able to show the producers of the show that people are talking on Twitter about them is valuable.   "We don't have all the benchmarks yet, in part, because social media is so new."   Liz also observes that you need to collect and document some of the conversation in an accessible form to people are not actively using Twitter or other tool and might be decision-makers.   "For example, I favorite important 'tweets' and then I send the public url of my favorites to the staff.

Liz Burr has become as the internal social media expert, although modestly she points out - "Well, I think of experts as people like Chris Brogan, but because I keep up with reading his blog and others - I'm considered the in-house expert."   She spends about 30 minutes a day reading blog feeds by RSS.   She suggests, "Keep your feeds organized so you can browse them quickly and be on alert for new developments or new tricks or tools to make your work more efficient."  She also notes that it is important to not only track social media strategy in general, but also your specific industry's use of social media tools.

Liz is about to graduate with a masters degree in online communities and writing her thesis about Seesmic.  She offered this advice to "digital natives" who are working on social media implementation in nonprofits:

• Be prepared to explain what the tools and why are they are important in plain English.  And, be prepared to tell it over and over again to different people.   
• Be patient.  Enjoy the conversation with other people in your organization who don't understand social media and what it can do.
• Be sure to keep up with social media trends and what's new.  It's your professional development process to be reading blogs on the topic, not a waste of time.
• Don't be afraid to reach out to social media companies.  They can help you.
• Take baby steps and show the benefits each step of way.

Comments

[John Proffitt]

Great post. Thanks for sharing. Glad to hear the Showcase folks are getting some exposure to this stuff.

I love the question from the audience: "What was your budget?" Hilarious. Budgets? We don't need no stinkin' budgets!

(Okay, yes we do.)

[Beth Kanter]

@john

There always seem to be three questions from senior management:

* How much does it cost?
* Will require extra staff time?
* What is the value?

There's another question and this comes from communications or programming people that are not encultured in social media ..

* What about negative comments? What about controlling our message?

The great response from Pam Osborne - was that the community collaboratively corrects. If someone says something negative, the others correct them.

[John Proffitt]

Agreed. That's been my experience as well. My first real run-in was with a manager that freaked out when a YouTube video appeared on one of our web sites -- with our own uploaded video in it. "We don't want that YouTube logo on our site! Are we advertising for them now? We don't want our video to appear next to all that crap out there!"

I was stunned.

I've also had to educate folks about the negative comments thing. We do moderate comments closely, however, as our audience is not yet very tech savvy and so there's not enough folks to do the self-policing thing. We won't eliminate negative comments, just the ranting nasty stuff or anything that doesn't make sense or is way off-topic.

Controlling the message is a huge thing for old-school public broadcasting. I've certainly had managers stop just short of saying, "We don't want the PUBLIC involved in public broadcasting -- that would be CHAOS!"