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Customer Relationship Management & PSB

Greg Lowe from YLE, a man from Ohio living in Finland on CRM. (We had an interesting chat about the weather as a source of the Fins' melancholic manner in the coffee break.) Anyway...

How you define your audience dictates how you handle them. Almost every media company wants people to participate - audiences are almost overburdened with calls to take part. What we consider participation is actually kind of weak, eg: sending in an sms. To what extent are we providing people that we want to serve with opportunities to collaborate in the design of what we do, not just the content?

Foundation principle in CRM: as customers, audiences are not equal. Some are more valuable than others. An interesting point when you think about. As PSBs we do tend to try to serve everyone all of the time. And we fail (no time, no resources, no expertise). So we must make strategic decisions about what we do and who we do it for. People want to be treated differently, they want to be treated as individuals.

So decide: what are you going to offer, and at what level of service? Eg: if you're a platinum member of an airline you'll be treated differently to jo public.

Priorities should be established by company strategy but instead it's often defined by technological limitations, or the new big thing we want to try out.

Relationship planning is about customer aquisition, retention and development. Aquisition costs 5-10 more than retention and twice as much as development. So you have to target your aquisition work very carefully. You won't see growth without work on retention - and considering the cost ratios it's vital to work in this area.

Interesting point about companies' tendencies to segment audiences by age. Surely audiences have now become so diverse in terms of activity and experience that we would do better to segment by interest.

"Interaction drives success". it's about building a dialogue - learning from our audience, listening to them and acting on it in an ongoing cumulative conversation. And our dialogue can't only be about media, it should be about how what we do fits into life.

Some big questions there about how much we really listen to our audiences. We ask for a lot of interraction, what's the experience like for them? What do they get back from us? Again, resources become a big issue here. Are the conversations we start truly two-way, and if not, should we really be asking them to participate in them? Put differently, do you ask bits of your audience to participate more rather than blanket requests? And if so, how? It goes back to the analogy I trot out regularly around levels of engagement in Big Brother - you can vote online, text in, call in, visit the website, watch streamed content, contribute to forums... or just watch the TV show. Each level of interraction should generate a different, and appropriate, response from the broadcaster. Hmm.

5Live's Audience Editor

Louise Birt on being 5Live's audience editor. This is the 5Live's audience top 5 hot topics:

1. Immigration
2. Roads
3. Sport
4. NHS
5. War Against Terror

She's talking about hoaxing being a huge risk for the network, and how the checking she does on potential contributors is now more extensive than it was when she worked in newspapers; "I'm checking the electoral roll, talking to their family, sometimes visiting them at home...". There's a lot of fear here about people using UGC channels to steer the BBC's programming.

Manchester Blogging Project

Robin Hamman & Richard Fair
Originally uploaded by cowbite.

Robin Hamman is talking about the importance of developing sustained (and sustainable) trust with the audience. If they're spending time and money creating content for you, there's got to be something in it for them. It's a big issue that I think we frequently gloss over. Building big moderated communities creates problems of scale and resource, so it's only worth doing when it's part of the core editorial proposition. This is clearly the case with their blogging project, which requires fulltime involvement. Interesting to hear how they're getting bloggers on the radio. I wonder if they can do more - unnofficial correspondants perhaps? It's really blurring the lines between citizen journalism and broadcast journalism. But that argument will run and run.

YLE & UGC

Tuija Aalto from YLE (Finland's PSB) is talking about user generated content, posing the questions "when our users make content perfectly well without us, what is our role?". Are we ready for the conversation that will develop when users start sending us content? What motivates people to participate? (recognition, need to share etc). Her view is that UGC is not an end in itself, it's part of the storytelling process. I like this, I like the sense of ongoing threads of stories around the web, appearing in multiple places.

Their youth community website features a section for unsigned music. They've received around 900 bands in two years - small but specific community. Members upload their tracks, which are premoderated. They have a commercial competitor who don't moderate but YLE consider it part of their public service remit. As ever, there is a question of people resource for this. The site is closely tied to a radio show, with a TV show in the pipeline. Unsigned music has featured a lot today, it makes me think we're lacking an uber-music service in this area. Where's our Flickr for musicians? Myspace comes closest but is still a way off a dedicated music space.

YLE are launching a new TV channel next month focussing on viewer contributions. They're trying to find ways of motivating their audience to send in their stuff. Some thoughts are around appealing to users sense of community, and also crediting them with backlinks. Also in the works is a digg-style recommendation system.

More digital rights

RTBF in Belgium have a different rights agreement - RTBF pay per download based on the percentage of music in the podcast. Very complicated, and lots of potential to get expensive. They don't intend to pass on those costs to users as radio should continue to be free. There's got to be space for collaboration between broadcasters to leverage better deals from the music industry.

As a consequence they seem to have podcasts online for only a short time, but keep all their radio show streams up for a month or so.

They've started digitising their archive and offering that on deman as stream or podcast. Can you imagine if the BBC did that with all their sessions or classic shows?

Danish Digital Rights

Mads Fink has just been talking about the Danish podcasting experience. They publish 78 across the site. Most interesting is that they have an agreement with digital rights owners for the next 2 years. They pay one fee upfront to use the music on all platforms – streaming & download – and can now podcast programmes with 49% music. That's a huge breakthrough. Interestingly, they also podcast books, with a more arduous rights process - clearing for each individual show.

He showed their long tail – main uptake is for music (4 free Mozart concerts, similar to the BBC’s Beethoven project. No DRM so users are sharing them on P2P), talk shows, current affairs & literature.

They've just soft-launched podcasting via wap - verrrrrry expensive if you haven't got a flat-rate data package.

I loved the idea of their "instant clever" podcast - 1hr of useful content that will help you make clever conversations and dinner parties. I need that in my life!

EBU: Multimedia Meets Radio

Just finished presenting my piece on Radio 1's project in Second Life, which Robin has blogged. Tuija has put a bit of it on youtube... the bit where the video almost didn't work... bit of a scrum up there on the podium. I've got a raging cold, which is why I sound a bit like Kathleen Turner... (in my dreams...)

 

Guillaume du Gardier has also vlogged a converstation we had about it.