EduGlu Sandbox

I’m fresh from giving a talk on the work the Open University are doing in YouTube and waiting for news to filter down the grapevine about who has been appointed the Director of Multi-Platform Broadcast here, so it seems a good time to reflect on the OU and broadcast.

At this weekend’s Social Media Camp in London, Will Prestes, a TV brand manager presented his thoughts on what media planners are looking for in broadcast content. He gave some great examples of how producers are creating online content, developing for multi-platforms rather than creating a TV show and sticking clips up online. Hoping he’ll put his presentation up on Slideshare but in the meantime…

He said content should be:

Textually extendable

• Explore the corners of the plot of a TV show online
• Make it worthwhile for your viewer to engage more deeply by recognising that you are moving them from a passive to an active medium. Lead the viewer to take an action.
• Enable active story choices, and provide alternate reality games and parallel investigations online throughout the TV series.

Will gave Lost as an example of how this has been done successfully. The possibilities for educational programming are endless. There are so many corners of a educational narrative (at least in those subjects where essay questions always end with the word, ‘Discuss.’) I can imagine linking up a number of platforms in an offline/online quest for knowledge, getting people signed up to using the various platforms in a bid to find, create and share knowledge for a common purpose. Open2.net goes some way towards this with TV programmes like Coast where you can become a ‘Coastal manager’ in one interactive game and download a virtual guide for coastal walks in the form of a podcast. These kinds of activities combined with social activity online could produce some interesting examples of mass participation and collective intelligence.

Unbundable

• Offer media buyers short clips to use online that standalone, but don’t necessarily repeat the TV content.

Comedy sketches lend themselves to this. Will used an example from a BBC3 show, where a girl is about to introduce her older boyfriend to her friends. In the online clip a dinosaur plays her boyfriend, making the clip perfect for viral distribution.

Findable and accessible

• People want to buy metadata with clips so digital TV viewers will be able to search by keyword for programmes that interest them.

Brand compatible

Will made the point that core content can be edited to suit the needs of different broadcasters and that there are different rules for what can show on premium and free to view channels. More relevant to the OU perhaps was the discussion this provokes around how you manage the user experience as they travel across various platforms where your content is present. It’s a non-linear, intra textual world. Audiences are less predictable and more active. If we think of brands as shortcuts for our tastes, how do we avoid confusing a consumer who is active in different ‘brand communities’ and content streams? In terms of extra-brand, if your brand exists in spaces outside your own domain whose values do you end up speaking to (or should I say ‘with’ if we look to online communities as the arena for dialogue? Will your brand become diversified, defined by the audience, and therefore useless in the traditional sense of what a brand is supposed to do? At this point I have to admit to having a few issues with how old school brand is perceived in a brave new world but I’m not a brand expert so I’ll keep quiet.)

Will then spoke about the Lovemarks matrix which defines those brands that earn both love and respect (as opposed to a fad that may have high love but low respect). It’s increasingly hard to engage viewers so some broadcasters are using ’shockvertising’ to capture people’s attention. One TV show sent out an email to people who had signed up to receive news from them. Inside was a link to a video where the viewer’s face has been embedded (presumably from their online profile) and they were told they were the next victim of a seriel killer. At the same time a text message was sent to them telling them to watch out. Great for strong-minded murder mystery fans, but I wonder what the equivalent would be in the educational world? There are lots of shocking facts - can we shock people into learning? Do people already love and respect the OU - if so how we can ensure we don’t mess up the relationship as new technologies bring new expectations?

Engagement is the first step in a long and happy marriage.