A&M Interactive departmental meeting
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| 14:45 UK time, Wednesday, 16 December 2009
I spent Tuesday morning at the very enjoyable A&M (Audio and Music) Interactive departmental meeting. They organise them every three months or so to update A&MI staff on what's happening with different projects and across the department. The reason that it works so well is that it's structured as a series of show and tells topped and tailed by fairly brief departmental overviews of the last few months and what's coming up. There was a bunch of things shown that I can't talk about - mostly products in development - but you'll get to here about them all in due course.
Two recent things that caught my eye that I can talk about:
Bullyproof: a stop bullying campaign from Radio 1 that featured amongst other things videos with various celebrities with advice on being more confident and that ranged across the bbc website as well as social media partner sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Habbo, Bebo and Twitter. One of the main aims of the campaign was to alert users to the range of preventative measures they could take while online.
Meet the listeners: A day when Radio 1 listeners could send in MMS messages for free and have them displayed on the website in different formats. A simple but effective way of connecting with listeners. It also highlighted the vast array of different situations and places that people are in while listening to Radio 1. They received more than 42,000 messages on the day. There's a video of the pictures being made and should be up on the Radio 1 site by next week.
There were various break out sessions that ran in parallel and I chose this one:
Online storytelling or why links matter "Storytelling isn't just content. Online, it's just as much about links". Chris Sizemore, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Head of Navigation and Service, argues that the connective tissue online is nearly as important as the content itself. Chris looks at the significance of search-engine optimisation, links, url structures and information architecture. Join him to discuss how we help the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to tell stories in the interactive space. Chaired by Jem Stone.
The summary above, well, pretty much sums up what it was about. Chris argues that we should start allocating time not just to make things for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ website but also allowing time to make sure they're findable by users via search engines and across bbc.co.uk. He showed some examples that pull together output across news, TV, radio and standalone web products that were pretty compelling.
The morning was rounded off with Richard Bacon, shortly to move slots on 5 Live, in an entertaining conversation with Brett Spencer, the interactive editor for 5 Live, that covered topics like the use of to interact with audiences and Richard's recent appearance on The Thick of It.
(Ed's update: By popular demand, here's a picture of Richard and Brett.)
Images: the top picture is from Chris Sizemore's presentation: "Online storytelling or why links matter" and shows how ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ online (the red and pink blobs) should be full integrated with the rest of the web (the blue and green blobs) with links in both directions; the Bullyproof image is from the presentation given at the departmental meeting; the last slide shows Chris Sizemore and the 60/40 slide - "60% of our effort on content, 40% on links".
Paul Murphy is the Editor of the Internet blog.
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