BBC’s new approach to online community in Manchester

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 June 2007 at 08:30
Tags: BBC

North West media site How-Do looks at BBC “überblogger” Robin Hamman’s plans for the BBC Manchester blogs project.

Hamman, whose personal blog is the consistently enlightening Cybersoc.com, has been arguing that big media organisations’ online strategies for encouraging interaction and community need to change. Getting users to submit material or bring all discussion onto in-house online forums requires media organisations take on all the technolgoical costs and legal risks of community building.

“Success doesn’t scale well,” Hamman told the Journalism Leaders Forum at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston a few weeks ago, neatly summarising his view of the problem he and other news organisations’ community managers face as their projects grow. The bigger media community-building activities get, the more costly they become to host and monitor.

Instead, organisations like the BBC should encourage active users to provide feedback on existing external platforms. It should join and support an existing conversation rather than trying to own it. This increases trust and transparency between the news organisation and the community which has joined — without forcing it to shoulder the costs of hosting and moderating the discussions.

As Hamman explains in the How-Do article, the BBC Manchester Blogs project is an attempt to build this approach, where the Corporation monitors and links to local bloggers and users of other social media.

Tags: BBC