Our intrepid new media guru, Steve Safran, was right in the thick of things during the Boston bomb scare incident this week. He was the first media person to figure out that the "devices" were actually from a cartoon show, and his expertise in web search and his connections within the web world helped spread the word to others. There's an important Media 2.0 lesson here for everybody in the local media world, and Steve offers his perspective in this exclusive report:
The lesson from the Boston "bomb scare": Empower your audience and use the web to investigate
by Steve Safran
The Boston bomb scare could have been averted with a keyboard.
It was at that point, on Wednesday morning, that they could have known what they had was not a bomb, or even a hoax bomb -- but a sign for a cartoon character from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."
The media began wall-to-wall coverage once the police started turning up more of these devices. The general peg of the story all afternoon was that these suspicious devices -- even called "hoax bombs" were all over the city. But the media and the police made a strategic mistake.
It was a mistake that could have stopped the mess in its tracks, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and prevented the city from being paralyzed with traffic snarls and -- yes -- fear.
They could have put out a picture of the device, and put that information online.
Because the cartoon character on the sign was sticking up his middle finger, the device as a whole was pixilated during the early coverage.
Who can blame the channels for being nervous? With the FCC doling out fines for nearly any "obscenity" infraction, they had a right to be concerned that showing a middle finger -- even consisting of three LEDs -- would mean a $325,000 fine.
But there are no such fines online. If the police had put out clear pictures of the devices, and the media had posted those pictures, online fans of the Cartoon Network would have told them what they had.
This is not exactly hindsight. In the middle of the chaos, I managed to put together what was happening based on the descriptions of the device. A quick Flickr and Google search later, I posted at Lost Remote that the "suspicious device" was a marketing ploy that could be found in nine other cities. After the post went live, reporters started asking police if they knew about this angle. Within the hour, the situation was cleared up.
For seven years, this is exactly what I did during breaking news as the NECN web manager. During breaking news, my knowledge of where to look and what to look for helped my station round out a story and give more context and depth during breaking news. Every station needs to do this. You need your web-savvy people empowered to investigate and report.
I don't write this to highlight my actions so much as share an example with you about how using basic, online tools can change the way you report a story. Anyone could have broken the story -- nationally -- if they had empowered their audience with the facts. By "protecting" us from a middle finger, the Boston police and media prolonged the city's turmoil. And this is not to pick on Boston -- I bet the same result would have happened in any city where this popped.
Bring the audience into the story, especially during breaking news when the facts aren't clear. Don't just put up a "what do you think" question on a discussion board. Demand the police release pictures and information, and share that online. Don't pixelate the news. A middle finger is a lot less scary than 32 potential bombs around the city. If the FCC is so onerous that this is too big a concern, tell the TV audience to go online for the information. Invite leads.
There's nothing revolutionary about this. We do it all the time. Amber Alerts go out with the child's picture and description. And the Amber Alerts work. We show license plate numbers, car descriptions and police sketches of suspects. All we needed to do was follow that same procedure, along with doing some basic online investigation.
The Boston bomb scare was a one-way story. The police and media told Boston what was going on. If it had been a conversation, a two-way discussion online, the audience could have told Boston what was happening instead.
(Editor's note: Steve really does have more than one jacket.) Link
<<< >>>
Include the audience by inviting bloggers in (Terry)
This is smart strategy on a variety of levels, and I'm delighted to see a few of the big boys exploring this space.
The playbook for this comes from AR&D client, WKRN-TV in Nashville, where we introduced this concept a full two years ago. That's two years of building credibility within the local blogosphere, two years of keeping an eye on the pulse of what they're writing about through the aggregator site Nashville is Talking, two years of getting feedback (and biteback) for news programming, two years of creating a franchise for the newscasts, two years of receiving scoops on stories, and two years of actually using bloggers on-the-air from time-to-time. If it feels like smart strategy today, imagine what it felt like back then.
We believe strongly that getting ahead of everybody else is the strategic Holy Grail in the world of Media 2.0. We wrote the play-book that others are now following, and the writing hasn't stopped. Wouldn't you like to know what AR&D is innovating today? Link
<<< >>>
Media 2.0 basics: Building a website isn't like creating a TV program (Terry)
Departmentally, a television station is ideally structured to run web businesses, but each department must be involved. Sales, traffic, production, marketing, engineering and news all have valuable functions in running a successful web strategy. These departments currently serve the transmitter, but they now must all serve the web.
When broadcasters look at the internet, we see complex portal websites built around our brands. We build sites from the all-things-to-all-people school of thought and put our efforts into 10-year old tactics like driving page views and stickiness. These are pure mass marketing concepts built on the economic value of scarcity, but in the contemporary web world, abundance overwhelms scarcity. Niches matter here, and so when I recommend stations build web businesses around a niche, executives cringe, and they do so, in part, because the underlying assumptions for building a web business all come from a broadcasting perspective.
Building a web site is not like creating a television program. Read that sentence again and commit it to memory, because it's really important. First of all, programs are created by committee, and that's a recipe for resource waste in the online world. You will add weeks and thousands of dollars to the mix for every person that's in on the decision-making process. We want it to be perfect. We want to shine a light on it and "drive traffic" to it. Every detail we examine leads to more questions and more details, and soon the process is so bogged down that the strategic goal is threatened, because technology has moved to a different level.
In the TV world, we want to see what the program looks like (the pilot) before offering our input, and all of our production systems are built around the flexibility to make changes spontaneously. This is just not the case on the web, unless you're building it yourself. And even then, it can take resources just to move an item from one side of the page to the other.
On the web, smart people launch sites in "beta," because they know that web applications must evolve, and they want the input of users to help make it better. People understand this (Google is the master), but we don't. That's because we'd never do that with a television program. It has to be perfect before launch, or it won't garner an audience.
And when we do launch websites, we want to shout it to the world using the muscle of our legacy platforms. This is what we know and why the "program" has to be perfect before launch. But pay attention to the internet pure plays, and you'll find that they all simply ease into new things, as if they've just grown a new arm. They trust the viral nature of the web to get the word out, and before you know it, the new appendage is functioning like it has always been there.
Bloggers are web site creators of varying skill levels. Many are not geeks, and they prove every day that you don't need to be an expert to build a nice Website. WordPress, for example, is a sophisticated open source (meaning the code is available to anyone) blogging software. Out of the box, it will-out perform the content management systems that run many websites. It outputs in xml. RSS and Atom feeds are automatic. Interactivity is built-in. Everything you need to create content for a niche Website is available in this free piece of software. And the open-source community is filled with people who can help you with design and functionality without spending a fortune.
A site you build in WordPress may not be all that it can be or all that it will be, but it's a start. Speed to market is important when you're staking a claim in the local internet land grab. Link
|
You probably heard about the debacle. Police converged upon a suspicious device early Wednesday morning. It was electronic, had wires and a battery, so they -- wisely -- decided to bring in the bomb squad to blow the thing apart with a water cannon.
Not just that it was a cartoon character -- those can still disguise bombs, after all -- but that it was a well-known guerilla marketing campaign with pictures that could be found on Flickr, among many other sites.
I wound up on "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," MSNBC's "The Most," two local newscasts and a radio segment in St. Louis. All because I did two online searches lasting less than 30 seconds. An NBC producer asked me the best question of the day -- "No offense, but how come you could figure this out hours before the authorities?" No offense taken. She was absolutely right. I only figured it out because two friends IMmed me some ideas in the middle of the chaos.