#bbcsms: Session report - Changing audience expectations and behaviour

The first day of the BBC Social Media Summit (#bbcsms) discussed changing audience behaviour. Paul Bradshaw writes:

The two overriding themes here were different audiences and different contexts.

Web and social media platforms are challenging news organisations to address different audiences in different ways, and at different times. For broadcasters, for example, social media offers a way to reach audiences during the day when most do not watch television: even those who do not have access to social media on their computer check social networks on their mobile phone. Newspapers meanwhile have online audiences that are many times the size of their print audience; they are younger and not limited to the UK.

Younger and older users use social platforms in different ways, too. Younger users take advantage of a wider range of functionality, organising with each other and sharing items of news - quite often items that they expect their friends not to have seen rather than those dominating the headlines. Older users limit themselves to status updates and using the 'send' feature.

There is no single audience whose expectations are changing - different audiences have different expectations, at different times and across different platforms.

Finally, this diversity of audience means that journalists can take less for granted in terms of the context in which the audience experiences their content. Journalists need to look at their language across social media from the perspective of someone who doesn't know them and may even dislike them: how might they misinterpret it? That's journalists' responsibility to judge; not the audience's mistake if things go wrong.

Likewise, journalists need to be careful about making insensitive appeals for material and experiences. The phrases 'give us' or 'we want' are not likely to work - instead, phrases like 'help us' and 'show us' are much more successful. It's about involving members of the audience in the process rather than exploiting them.

Paul Bradshaw - @paulbradshaw - is founder of the Online Journalism Blog and the crowdsourcing website Helpmeinvestigate. He is a visiting professor at City University, London and runs the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University. 

Julie Posetti writes: One idea emerging from these discussions that fascinated me, as a practitioner and researcher operating in the nexus between journalism and social media, was the concept of different platforms being imbued with different standards of verification and different audience expectations.

One journalist spoke of the lower threshold for publication of unverified information on Facebook.

"We might put it out there unverified on our Facebook page, but we wouldn't print it until we'd verified it." A newspaper journalist said: "Our journalists use social media to correct and verify over time in between print runs."

These comments reflected a view that audiences also have lower expectations of accuracy and verification from journalists and media outlets' social media accounts than they do of 'appointment TV' or the printed page.

Debates around the role of media consumers and collaborators in verification are likely to evolve over time, but one thing was clear at the end of #bbcsms Day One: audience engagement is now inextricably linked to editorial processes. And the fear of audience interaction is no longer the barrier to journalists' entry to social media that it was when I ran a similar conference at the ABC in Sydney in 2009. Then the question was: "Why should we engage?" Now it's: "How can we best engage?" and "How do we manage the logistics of this new journalistic function?"

Julie Posetti - @julieposetti - is a journalist and journalism academic from Canberra, Australia. After a TV and radio career covering politics, documentaries and social justice issues, she teaches radio and television journalism at the University of Canberra.

Graham Holliday writes: The discussion on audience expectations focused predominantly on the interesting new ways audiences are effectively curating information among themselves.

While it was noted this is not a new phenomenon - "RSS is and always has been a total minority sport", noted one editor - the opportunity is in newer, more social and far more user-friendly tools.

"Social filtering is a very good way of effectively getting a 'social newspaper'. People are not going to maintain a Google Alert email, but they will maintain their friends."

Facebook was seen as a very positive way to share and discuss news, whereas there were some worries about Twitter:

"Using your friends to curate is good. You're going to be exposed to a broader range of views and subjects from your friends."

"Twitter makes you feel like you're centre of the universe on any given subject. At the end of the day, Twitter and Facebook are two very different things. Twitter is for news and Facebook is for friends. Friends who recommend good stuff."

There was further discussion on how to create a 'newspaper' from your social network: 

"If the Economist, Slate and the Atlantic are popular in your network, it could help to create a 'newspaper' out of recommended links from those sites within your social network."

Graham Holliday - @noodlepie - is a foreign correspondent, photojournalist, university lecturer and BBC journalism trainer. He has worked on blogs, social media and citizen journalism projects since 2002.

Daniel Bennett writes: A journalist's 'audience' is not what it used to be. Audiences have become fragmented, distributed and global. A journalist might find their news reports crossing time zones, languages, and cultures.

Journalists are no longer in control of where or how audiences are consuming news content. They need to be aware of where conversations are taking place on the web and how they can reach new audiences online.

Harnessing feedback, reading comments and tapping into new perspectives offers the potential to produce journalism that is more audience-centred.

Journalists can benefit from listening to members of the audience who have become active players in the news process - the people who are uploading their own news content, editing and curating material, offering their own analysis and opinion, and acting as news distributors. 

But there is a balance to be struck. If some journalists are struggling to grasp aspects of the online world, it is dangerous to assume that all members of the audience are keeping up with the 'runaway world' of new media.

In the rush to embrace the next new thing online, journalists need to ensure they aren't leaving vast swathes of their audience trailing in the latest technological wake.

And perhaps more importantly: what stories might journalists miss if they become immersed in their own social media bubbles? What parts of the world are journalists not covering because they are less digitally connected?

Daniel Bennett- @Dan_10v11 - is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department at King's College, London, writing a thesis on the impact of blogging on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism.