A chance meeting with a news bureau chief led to a great discussion of how television uses the Internet and how it could.
With Radio it is pretty easy to see a strategy because the way it packages and chunks content and it’s connection with place suggest a highly interactive integration of radio and the Internet. TV and the Internet is harder – because of the:
- cost of broadcast time
- its display mechanism makes secondary content appear intrusive
- its audiences and content is typically quite heterogeneous
- the audience affiliation is to specific content while networks content is diverse
- Simultaneous Internet and TV use are fundamentally incompatible as they compete for the same senses
Initially my thinking was that all media should use their broadcast channel as a means to connect and promote interaction between the networks of social networks that is their audience. I now realize that different media need to adopt strategies – but that all need to focus their broadcast and Internet Strategies predominantly around one of the three personality types identified in Gladwell’s Tipping Point.
Radio should be a Connector. Television is a Maven. What does that mean for TV - Internet sites that operate around active listening and filtering contribution for a broadcast to the broad audience. It’s easy to see this works for news – it’s contribution that makes stories before they are stories and details that personalize and deepen existing stories – and it’s not to hard to extend that to any show - and all of it running on an economy of recognition as reward that drives must online contribution.
