FreshNetworks Blog

Image by iwona_kellie via Flickr

We’re going through quite a momentous period of change in the UK at the moment. Slowly but surely, the analogue TV signal is being turned off. In it’s place we have digital TV. This is a huge change, not just because people need new equipment to receive the new signal, but also because this change lets us consumer television in the way we have always wanted.

No longer do I have to start watching a programme on the hour. No more must I be in on a Wednesday night to catch the latest episode of The Apprentice. No longer is my TV schedule dictated to me by the broadcasters. They may think I want to watch game shows on a Saturday evening, every Saturday evening. But perhaps I don’t. Digital TV gives the possibility for real choice and control over what you watch and when you watch it.

This reflects a change in consumer behaviour we are seeing across media. When users (consumers) are given the chance to personalise and control their own experience, they use this. This is natural – not everybody wants to do the same things in exactly the same way. And so whether it’s allowing you to personalise a site’s homepage (as with the BBC), tag content in a way that makes sense to you, or choose what you want to see when, personalisation is key.

When we are planning and designing online communities with our clients we work hard to understand the target audience, the people we hope will be members of the community and benefit from being a part of it. However, it is important that some degree of control and personalisation is given to the user – be that letting them arrange their own profile page, choosing which view they see when they join the community, or just giving them an easy and simple way to navigate the site according to the content that matters to them most. Finding ways to allow this kind of personalisation (be it simple or complex) will enhance the community member’s experience. And watching and analysing how people personalise their experience helps us to understand them more too.

Users like personalisation. They like to have some control over how they navigate and use the online community. As their other media consumption becomes more tailored and within their control, their expectations here will only increase.

We return this week to our series of Online Community Examples. There is a lot of talk about the way ‘old’ and ‘new’ media combine – how newspapers are using Twitter and how television broadcasters and production companies are working with online media. So this week we take a look specifically at examples of online communities in the TV industry

Online communities in the TV industry

The TV industry has a relatively long history of online communities – both fan sites and sites sponsored by the brand itself. People like to discuss both within the fantasy of a programme (fan plot lines, character diaries and so forth) and also discuss the content itself – evaluating what happened, talking about the acting, new characters or a twist in the plot. What is more, there is a real rise in people discussing TV programmes whilst they are being broadcast – people combining the online community experience and the TV experience simultaneously. This industry is fertile ground for online community examples, as the three case studies below show.

Rate My Space

HGTV in the US set up their Rate My Space online community to accompany their broadcast schedule which, as their full name suggests is Home and Garden Television. The concept was originally very simple. Users could upload an image and brief description of a room or part of their house that had been renovated. Others could then vote for or comment on these images.

As we’ve discussed before, simple concepts can often be the best ones in online communities, and so it proved in this case. HGTV wanted to both generate engagement and discussions with it’s viewers, and to use the increased volumes of content to increase revenue from advertising on the site. And from an outside perspective they seem to have done both quite successfully. Just looking at the site you can see the speed at which images have views, votes and comments – the engagement they have created and the interest in the site is huge. And also there are reports of considerably increased traffic and advertising revenue from those parts of their site that have online community elements.

A further sign of the success of Rate My Space as an online community site is that it has now spun off a TV programme of it’s own. Users are asked to pick rooms on the site that inspire them and then a designer will come to their home and use elements from these to make over a room in their house. So an online community grew out of the broadcast element, and then a new broadcast element grew out of the online community.

Heroes

Heroes is a well-known case study of how a range of online community and social network tools can be used to support a TV show. It is also a good example of how a hub and spoke approach to social media strategy can be the most successful. As well as a central hub (NBC’s Heroes site) they had presences in a range of spokes – other social networks and sites where viewers and fans might be. This approach allowed them to engage with users in a place and in a manner that was appropriate to them, but also to bring them back to their own site where they could share their interest for the show and meet people like them.

The range of spokes employed by Heroes was extensive and impressive, from the Ninth Wonder fan site, through social networks like Facebook and MySpace, to widgets, games and a Wiki that explained everything Heroes. The benefit of this approach for them was that it enabled them to reach out to people where they were, often in very active fan sites, and then bring them back to their own territory where they could interact with them and get value from this. They also worked the other way – letting those on their site take widgets and content out to their other social networks and communities and spread the word for the show.

This shows that sometimes, in fact in our experience more often than not, a standalone online community does not get the most benefit possible from your target audience. You need to work with the other discussions and online communities out there and build a hub and spoke model of engagement. Engage where people are but as a way to bring them back to your site, where you can both get most benefit.

The Sex Education Show

Channel 4 in the UK has run two frank and educational series on sex and sexuality as part of their public service remit. The first, the Sex Education Show, gave advice and information on sex issues. The second, the Sex Education Show vs Porn, looked at how the portrayal of sex in porn compares with real life experiences. Both shows were successful and both were accompanied by a strong online community: Sexperience.

The subject matter of the programme was clearly sensitive, but also highly suited to an online medium. Subjects that can seem sensitive or difficult to discuss face-to-face can be much easier to talk about online. Especially in an online community where you know you are with people like you. You have the benefit of the level of anonymity that online can bring, with the reassurance and community feeling that you get in a well-nurtured online community. And this is why on Sexperience you get a range of discussions that would not happen elsewhere – discussions on penis size, premature ejaculation, and sexually transmitted diseases.

An online community can be a safe place and can be a place for people to share information, ask questions and suggest answers on a common theme, subject or issue. The Sexperience site does this well – encouraging and nurturing discussions on sensitive subjects alongside videos, blogs and forums that support this content. Factual programmes and in particular programmes that deal with more sensitive issues or subject matters are prime targets for successful online communities. You can add real value and real service, and you can encourage people to engage at a level they might not otherwise.

See all our Online Community Examples

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

It’s been a while since I discovered a new web service that I immediately fell in love with. There are so many things to try, but so few hit me as a massive winner from the start. Spotify just did.

A friend sent me an invite to their Beta and I was sceptical at first. Anything that asks me to download an application makes me hesitate. Moreover, the information on their site was sparse. It wasn’t until I googled and read a Guardian article that I decide to have a go.

Within 60 seconds I’d signed up and downloaded and was ready to start listening. I clicked on one of their “new” singles – Royksopp, Happy to Hear, and immediately found myself with a smile on my face. A great process, free music and best of all I’d discovered a new song that I immediately loved. Although, to be fair, that was mostly because the sample was taken from an album I’d almost forgotten: The Clones of Dr.Funkenstein by Parliament.

So how does it work?

Spotify is just like iTunes. It has a vast database of music. Probably 90% of what most people might ever want to listen to (I checked and they had the original Parliament track) . After a quick download you have instant access to all this music. You can browse by track or listen to a play list.

What’s cool about Spotify is the business model. For years people have predicted a move by consumers away from owning music to paying a monthly fee for unlimited streaming. Whilst I’ve been happy to believe this might be destination, I’ve never understood how consumers would move from today’s habits to monthly fees. After all it took Sky years and very expensive sporting rights to entice people to pay for TV on a monthly basis. I have a large music collection – whenever I hear music I like, I buy it. So the idea of paying a monthly fee when it would take me over a year of listening all day every day to my own music before having to repeat a track, seemed unnecessary.

Spotify are offering the endpoint (all the music you want for a monthly fee) but more improtantly they are also offering two routes to help get you there. There’s a good old fashioned freemiumservice – you can listen to all the music you want for free, but you’ll be forced to hear a 30-second ad every 25 minutes (just like commercial radio, with less advertising). Alternatively you can pay for one day’s free music for 99c.

This is exactly the sort of kick that’s needed to change the way I listen to music. You can get an invite here

Could it be any better?

Yes. There is one problem. The developers have clearly focused their efforts on the listening experience and securing music rights. Clearly that’s the right place to start. But what they need next is a better way to find new music.

I’ve always been a fan of iLike (which got even better after the Facebook masses were introduced to it back in May 2007) and have also used Last.fm and iTunes to find new music. I find the online community aspects of these services are the best way to discover “songs you might like”. I remember listening to Pandora before the arrival of the Web2.0 music sites. Despite a sophisticated algorithms that attempted to judge what I liked in the music I listened to, it’s ability to correctly predict what I’d enjoy was poor.

Forget the clever maths, the best way to recommend me music is to find what people with similar tastes also listen to. And that’s what’s great about iLike and the others. Every couple of months I spend a few hours listening to the “music that I don’t own” which ”people like me” listen to on a regular basis. To date that’s been the best way for me to uncover new artists.

Spotify is crying out for a similar online community angle. Despite the service being less than a week old, the online community is already organising itself. There’s a user-created Facebook app for sharing Spotify playlists and around 10 websites that users have created for the same purpose.

Good luck with the development. This is an excellent idea, well executed.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Ten Social Music Sites that Let You Listen, Share and Enjoy Music
• Pandora vs Mufin: A Head to Head Music Melee
• Audio here, there, but not quite everywhere
• Music streaming service Spotify wins early fans
• Music recommendation, based on sound

Some more Required Reading to start September. Dan Ariely is a Behavioural Economist at MIT, and a significant contributor to our thinking of why and how people act and behave as they do. I find his observations and theories to be particularly pertinent to online communities, and we use his thoughts a lot at FreshNetworks. I will post my thoughts on his book Predictably Irrational and how it relates to online communities in a few weeks. In the meantime I enjoyed his brief YouTube video on the same subject.

Some more reading

• Is your market “predictably irrational”?
• The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely [Mind Matters]

You may remember a post where I highlighted a video that demonstrated what Web 2.0 was in a very visual form (see here). Well, I came across another great video from the guys at Kansas State University. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and head of the Digital Ethnography Working Group, presents a view of YouTube from an anthropological perspective.

From exploring the fact that more content has been added to YouTube in the past six months than in a lifetime of network TV in the US, through a catagorisation of YouTube videos, this is a really informative video. It’s long (just shy of an hour) but I think time spent watching this is time well spent. Michael is a captivating speaker and manages to express things we think we know in different ways. From social media to online communities and social networks; you’ll learn something new and understand better why people are motivated to take part and contribute online.

Some more reading

• Web 2.0 …The Machine is Us/ing Us
• Serious about Social Media: Are We Losing the of Context of Our Lives?
• YouTube through an anthropologist’s eyes
• Wesch on YouTube
• Michael Wesch and the Future of Education