The @BBC Twitter Conundrum
The other night I was out for dinner with my other half – who is a Senior Research Manager in the BBC’s R&D department – and we got onto the subject of what should be done with the as yet unused @BBC Twitter profile (and they say romance is dead).
He doesn’t personally have any sway over the future of said profile, but was interested in my opinion, from a Social Media consultant perspective, as to what I would do with it if tasked – which I was more than happy to provide in return for a rather large portion of raspberry and white chocolate ice cream.
The issue at hand is that the BBC has dozens, if not hundreds, of Twitter profiles for its many different departments, programmes and publications – from @bbchealth to @r4today to @BBCHistoryMag and goodness only knows what else. But there is no catch-all ‘voice of the BBC’ profile bringing the myriad aspects of the corporation together.
Clearly the @BBC profile – which already boasts over 19,000 followers and has been listed 864 times despite never having said a thing – would be the natural home for an over-arching BBC profile, but how on earth to meaningfully squeeze so much output into a single Twitter stream?
There must be other large companies out there in a similar situation, so I thought I’d share our over-dinner musings and my suggested solutions in the hope that they may be of use, or at least provoke some further debate on the subject.
The Twitter Overlord Option
One way to collate ‘the best of the BBC’ on Twitter would be to give someone the job of wading through all the various BBC Twitter streams on a daily basis, re-tweeting or syndicating the highlights as they happened. To cover the global timezones and evening/weekend tweets, it would really need to be more than one person and whoever you employed would have to have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the BBC in order to make informed choices about what content to publish. This is possibly the most high-maintenance way to go and not necessarily the most appealing job position in the world either.
The Intrepid Reporter Option
This version would involve a person, or team of people, being responsible for reporting news and views from inside the BBC via Twitter, but not necessarily using content from its other Twitter profiles. Although a less labour-intensive option, you would invariably end up losing a lot of the individual personality that would shine through from utilising a wider bank of tweeters’ content.
The Personal Recommender Option
Another alternative would be to set the editors of the individual profiles up on a multiple account enabled Twitter client such as HootSuite or TweetDeck, from which they could opt to publish the best of their output to @BBC as well as their own profile. This would require a fair amount of set-up and administration in getting all those people on board and suitably briefed, not to mention a reliance on those individuals’ discretion to provide the best content and not abuse their publishing privileges. There would clearly need to be an overall editor to monitor content and reply to relevant interactions, which could become a fairly mammoth task in itself. You could simplify things by choosing only the most popular Twitter profiles, or those considered to be most emblematic of the BBC – but again this is fairly subjective.
The Randomiser Option
This is my personal favourite, partly because it’s the least time-consuming and also because it removes the potentially partisan influence of curators/editors and would instead present a ‘lucky dip’ style snapshot of what’s going on across the BBC. There would be a little bit of development involved in setting up a random content generator fed by all the different Twitter streams, but once it had been set up the profile could virtually run itself. The potential drawbacks are that you would end up with a one-way soapbox style Twitter stream void of any conversational aspect (but then many of the other active BBC Twitter profiles are also guilty of this) and may miss really important news.
I’m sure there are other ways around this problem and I’ll certainly be mulling on it further (we’d be interested to know your thoughts too – especially if you work for the BBC), but these seemed to me the most practically viable and creatively appealing when put on the spot about it. Whatever the BBC decides to do with its @BBC Twitter profile, I really hope they hurry up and do it soon – because the current tumbleweed situation doesn’t look good. Needless to say we’d be delighted to get on board and help the BBC resolve their Twitter quandary, especially if there is ice cream involved.
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Rowstar
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Ian Forrester
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Ian Forrester
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ryanmorrison
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