As social networks grow, and the time spent on these networks increases dramatically, it’s worth considering the CBC’s strategy on social networking sites.
First let’s look at some background on social networks. The number of people using social networking sites is increasing. A recent study in the U.K. found 80 per cent of that online population visited a social networking site in May. In March, Nielsen published a report that found that two-thirds of the global online population spent time on social networking sites or blogging sites.
But even more dramatic is the increase in the time spent on social networking sites. The Nielsen report said social networking sites now account for 10 per cent of the total time spent online – and it’s growing dramatically. The report says that “time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth.”
Television networks in the United States are trying to capitalize on this trend by using social networks to promote their fall lineup in the summer, often months before their conventional promotional campaigns start. “TV networks are trying to determine whether promoting new shows earlier can bring them bigger audiences come September and October,” an AdAge article from a days ago says.
The U.S. television networks are using sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to post early peeks at upcoming shows. The idea is that this promotional material can build a community of die-hard fans that will translate into larger audiences in the fall. ”What we’re doing now gives us four months to try to get people to sample and come on board,” Joe Earley, a communication executive at Fox said.
Recently the CBC started to try to mimic that strategy with their fall launch communication plans. For instance the CBC created an official Facebook fan page yesterday. The idea behind that page is to do something similar to what NBC is doing with their network page on Facebook: to give the entire network a voice, highlight content, and provide an entry point to the various NBC shows.
Currently the CBC’s social network strategy is ad-hoc. It’s essentially a victim of its own success. CBC shows, and many CBC staffers have been early adopters on Twitter and Facebook, and as a result there are hundreds of different accounts with different agendas.
This doesn’t sit well with Jill Atkinson whose working on the communications strategy on social networks. “There are way too many CBC Twitter accounts,” she said, “the volume of CBC sites *is* massive, and should be culled.” Atkinson said there’s nothing wrong with individual shows having social networking accounts, but they need to reflect the CBC’s priorities, “not just because it’s a cool thing to do,” she said.
While she was digging around the various social networks Atkinson found that the CBC already had both a Facebook and Twitter account. Neither had posted anything. “We had a Facebook page with 400 plus followers, there was zero content on the page,” she wrote in an email “And we said ‘come on,’ what a missed opportunity.”
Atkinson wants to correct that. “The plan is to reflect… our television priorities and to create a community that acts as a conduit to the show’s individual promotional websites,” she wrote.
It’s an area that has lots of potential for community building and communication. Currently the CBC communicates primarily through newsletters, and although they can reach tens of thousands of readers, a newsletter once a week does not compare to a large Twitter account, like say Anderson Cooper’s, which has almost 300,000 followers, blasts out dozens of updates a week, and allows for back and forth conversations between the viewers and the show.
The trick is to balance the CBC’s adoption and innovation on these networks, without overloading the audience, “In a nutshell the whole point to doing this is to value add for the audience,” Atkinson said on the phone yesterday.
What are your thought on the CBC’s social networking direction? Are there areas we miss, stuff we need to work on, or converselly pull back on?
