Facebook Fortnight: A Media Changer?

Some interesting thoughts from Paul Armstrong, Kindred‘s Director of Social Media: Did Facebook just become a (bigger) threat to broadcasters or their saviour?

My own take on this is that this is a good way for Facebook to use it’s own technology to help with  it’s own PR/marketing efforts.

I don’t think broadcasters will be any more threatened by this than by any other kind of Livecasting, but when you look at how many media properties are reporting on interviews and/or delivering highly polished videos, I can’t help wondering if some of them may not be encouraged to go on and adopt the technology themselves (great PR for Livecast). Whether this should be from their own site or from their Facebook site is another debate altogether.

Claire Thompson, freelance PR consultant, Waves PR

2 Comments

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  By Paul Armstrong, August 16, 2010 @ 9:30 pm

  Cheers Claire. Think of it this way… a network with +500 million (or around 36m in the uk per comScore) avid users would be a cause to keep me up at night if I was a broadcast exec. I’d be sweating / thinking about a) how to exploit it or b) how to get those eyeballs back.

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  By claireatwaves, August 17, 2010 @ 12:49 am

  I’d love to know what others think, but I don’t know that Facebook has cannibalised broadcast in the same way as ‘social media’ as a whole has cannibalised print. And I’m not sure that livecasting to Facebook is going to kill our viewing habits. – unless, of course, someone starts broadcasting high quality entertainment and putting some welly behind promoting it.
  Using it to preview and add value as a cross channel promotion is logical – eg interview the stars, the behind the scenes stuff etc – although I would go back to the question: why would you put it onto Facebook rather than your own media property (which you can share across social platforms anyway).
  At the moment I’m finding it hard to see what special quality delivering livecasts through Facebook would give you over and above putting them somewhere else (unless you already have a Facebook page where you are already engaging, but even then, there’s little difference between putting it there and putting it on your own site beyond the promotion mechanism)
  That said,I’m being pedantic over the details: the point you raise about people sitting up and taking it seriously is a really valid one. And if you hadn’t raised it, we wouldn’t be discussing it!

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