Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve been involved in a research project with the BBC. We’ve been looking at what listeners and fans do online. The project investigated notions of interactivity; it looked at the ways in which fans of specific presenters express their fandom online; it examined the things that fans of radio soap The Archers do in order to connect and discuss their favourite show; and my bit, with Professor Tim Wall, was about specialist music online.
Specifically, we looked at three things:
1) What do specialist music fans do online?
2) What does the BBC do for specialist music fans?
3) How do BBC staff think about specialist music provision?
The findings, I think, are quite interesting – and a summary of the project is being published on the BBC Radio Labs blog.
But one of the things I found most interesting was the notion of ‘orientations’ that we noticed among BBC staffers. There were clearly people who thought about the online world as a central part of what they did, and others for whom the broadcast was the thing – and anything that the radio station did online was simply there to extend and reinforce the brand.
Now, these orientations are not polar opposites, and lots of people had a mix of both orientations, but people were predominantly facing one way or another. And in fact, we considered both of those to represent missed opportunities.
Now, of course, what the BBC does for specialist music, it does so for reasons of public service, and we go into some detail on that in our report. But it got me thinking about radio personnel in general, and the ways in which they think about the online environment.
If you’re the kind of music radio person with a broadcast orientation, all the internet is to you is a bigger transmitter. Or it’s a kind of a trap that you lay out there in the world, and when people stumble into it, you can grab them and pull them in to your broadcast programming.
If you have more of an online orientation, you may consider the medium on its own terms, but may not be making the most of the music programming which, if your station is doing anything right, is where all the real action is.
The trick is to step outside both of those frames and consider your station as a media organisation in a broader sense.
You are particularly good at media that uses sound – music, speech and effects – but a holistic view of your organisation as ‘media in general’ encapsulates both the online experience and the broadcast one, so that these can work together with a common goal in mind.
In the case of the BBC, it’s specialist music for public service. In your case, it might be music and entertainment for commercial purposes. Or information and debate for community purposes. Either way, the cognitive step outside the two orientations into a wider media perspective allows you to think about broadcasting and the internet, radio and new media, as part of one coherent thing.
And when you begin to do that, a lot of the problems facing radio in the 21st century begin to melt away, and a lot of really interesting opportunities emerge. I’ll be talking more about that idea here on New Radio Strategies in the coming months.
Tagged: BBC, broadcast, online, orientation