Buried in the BBC Trust’s review of bbc.co.uk is some revealing information about how the corporation has adopted blogging.
In a section on accountability, the Trust explores how the BBC’s commitment to “to forge a new relationship with licence fee payers” online and suggests that “recent developments, such as the development of BBC editors and management blogs, mean that the BBC may be able to fulfil this commitment much better in the future”.
What is startling is how the audiences for the BBC’s blogs have grown, with the Trust noting that “usage of the blogs now outstrips usage of the BBC’s corporate site and the Have Your Say message boards. In fact, usage of Have your Say message boards has been fairly static between 2006 and 2007″.
Audience research by the Trust (PDF) found that the BBC’s blogs are already highly appreciated, demonstrated through comments such as:
The Editors’ blog is a great way of developing a relationship between the BBC and viewers. It allows the editors to explain their decisions and viewers to give feedback, and thus allows a continuous dialogue between the BBC and its audience
These figures suggest that the informal, conversational tone of the blogs resonates with audiences. According to the BBC, 70 BBC News and BBC Sport editors made 500 posts and received over 30,000 comments from readers in response in 2006-2007.
BBC Management highlights (PDF) blogs as one of the ways the corporation is trying to create a conversation with audiences:
Editors’ blogs on the news site have rapidly grown to become a key point of engagement between the BBC’s journalists and its audiences. 1.5m user comments and posts are published on bbc.co.uk messageboards and blogs every month
While blogs are providing a new way for the BBC to reach out to audiences, there are limits to this conversation. The BBC itself and my research has found that editors on the whole tend to regard blogs as a publishing platform, rather than as a way of engaging with audiences.
Hi Alf
Thanks for pulling out these quotes. I was pleased to read them! Discalaimer: I’m responsible for the BBC’s blogging platform.
Yep.. These trends are holding up into 2008, with unique users per week for all blogs being over 1m in recent weeks and comments c25K a month. (far more comments are stil left at our traditional boards and the have your say forums though.).
I agree that we shouldn’t overstate their success though and its still true that its a real learning curve across our several editors and management blogs for the editors to respond and engage with the feedback received. This has been hard.
We’ve found that this is possible (and i’m talking about the BBC mgt internet blog here but i’d say it applies to other similar propositions) but only when we’ve had two factors in place;
a) Strong ownership (buy in from senior management even when criticism from users is a “shitstorm” as Ashley Highfield dubbed the initial BBC iPlayer/mac period the other day) and
b) Investment in community facilitation, monitoring and hosting. Monitoring feedback and having the attennae to alert issues to teams ( and thus the knowledge of the tools that makes this now a lot easier) is often overlooked. Doing this well can’t be done by magic.
Its also still true that the initial response to the existence of a blogging platform by some of our teams is to want to use it as a straightforward publishing platform. That still happens although as social media conventions become normalised, there is now more of a consensus across the BBC about what constitutes good and bad practice.
Very interesting…but the main message to me was that so many people are motivated to express themselves online, so willing to contribute their own perspectives and insights – in preference to just passively consuming the usual corporate blurb.
This is exactly what Clay Shirky was on about when he said “media targeted at you but that does not include you” is history.
[...] r under Internet, Social media | Tags: blogs, cognitive surplus Shirky, interactivity | Alfred Hermida found some very interesting information about the BBC’s blogs. Usage of the blogs, maintained [...]
Hope you’re enjoying those looong documents.
Just for clarity, I take the post by Robin Hamman that you link to about using “blogs as a publishing platform, rather than as a way of engaging with audiences” as describing the Beeb’s blogs as a whole – radio DJs; programmes; genres etc – rather than specifically about management/editor blogs. That’s not to say that a more specific criticism might not be valid, but I do think Robin’s post makes a more general point.
See you on the other side of the “Genre Annexes” PDF.
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