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Melvin, BBC Three Counties Radio and social media

2011-05-23T14:43:00+00:00

Editor's note: Brett was previously the interactive editor of 5 live before becoming the managing editor at Three Counties Radio. I asked him for his thoughts on the role of social networks in local radio. (PM)

Last July I left BBC Radio 5 live after six years and drove north to Luton. I hadn't worked in local radio since the early nineties, but the chance to run my nearest radio station was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The 5 Live newsroom I left was fully engaged with social media, with a variety of Facebook and Twitter accounts, presenters engaging with the audience and audio and video shared and distributed daily.

At BBC Three Counties Radio I quickly found that social media was not really on the agenda. So as we set about putting together a new schedule and defining how we were going to re-shape the programming, I thought it was important to get the station working in digital spaces at the same time.

Working with the brilliant Claire Wardle and Sue Llewellyn we designed two days to talk to everyone in the station about what could be achieved. Every producer and presenter spent 2 hours learning the essentials. There was a clear message: if we do this, it will increase the reach of our radio content.

But it's not just about teaching people what to do. Integrating social media into the radio station needs support from the very top. The management needs to be engaged and actively involved. It's not enough to have a lone person in the newsroom responsible for social media, it's everybody's job.

At 3CR the two news editors that cover the broadcast day now have it as part of their job description to update social media, share content and engage with the listeners. We created time in their day to do this. Just as crucially the journalists are using it as a newsgathering tool.

In just a few weeks we found on Twitter a gamer addicted to playing 18 hours a day that tied into a Panorama programme, friends of a murder victim and a local man who was designing a space mission to name just three. We uncovered local stories, new guests and shared masses of content. When we tweeted and engaged on Facebook about a local park being closed in Bushey, the callers that rang in were keen to point out that they had never listened to 3CR - and didn't know it covered their area. We found an 18 year old dancer from Hertfordshire waiting in a queue outside the Hammersmith Apollo to audition for Britain's Got Talent.

Additionally, and just as importantly, the presenters are connecting with the listeners in digital spaces for the first time. Social media is being used to extend the reach of the radio station and bring new ears to 3CR content. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was Melvin, a caller ranting about how much he hated the Royal Wedding. He was on air at 0920. Laura Miller, who produces the mid-morning show, had this on Audioboo and in the Twittersphere by 0935, as she continued to output the show. To date, as a result of social media, it's been played 115,000 times, that's greater than the weekly reach of some stations. Melvin may have called his local station in Luton, but the next day he could hear his call being played and talked about on WNYC in New York.

So has this strategy it worked? Well admittedly it's difficult to equate social media activity directly to gains in listeners. But last week BBC Three Counties Radio had its best Rajar for six years. I would like to think the two are connected.

Brett Spencer is currently working on social media innovation projects for BBC English Regions. Follow his personal account on Twitter @brettsr

Follow BBC Three Counties Radio on Twitter at @bbc3cr
Read radio and new media consultant Matt Deegan's blog post on radio and Twitter ("...Overall, Twitter is a great resource and platform to help grow audience and engagement. Remember though that the vast majority of your listeners probably don't care..."): Radio's Twitter Obsession

Purveyor of the anti-pop

2011-04-08T16:37:28+00:00

Editor's note: a brand new 6 Music show that's designed from the ground up to be interactive - it's even named after a hashtag. The nerve centre for NowPlaying @6Music is the show's blog - SB

I think it's taken a while for 6 Music to find its niche but now it has really found a sound. You wouldn't find bands like Warpaint or Beach House - who have both been really big acts for us in the past year - on the A-list of any other station. We're all about alternative spirit. It can be many things; it can be an artist's sound and/or their influences. A great recent example has been the Jamie XX and Gil Scott-Heron track 'I'll Take Care of You'. It's been on the 6 Music A-list and is a fantastic example of what the network does best - it's a new act collaborating with a heritage artist both in alternative music to create something new.

I've been producing shows here for four and a half years and I'm just about to launch a brand new show with Tom Robinson on Friday nights (7-9pm) called Now Playing @6Music, which is all about the digital conversation with music. Music has never been more digital. A music fan will listen to radio but also probably look at blogs like Drowned in Sound.

They might well use a third-party music service like Hype Machine or Spotify to either play music or aggregate their tastes in recommending music, and they probably get their music news from an online source rather than a copy of NME. So the idea of this new show is to take part in this online music conversation. We're going to create a space once a week where people can share and recommend tracks related to the week's music news, and find out what's happening in the world of digital music. The show will be a weekly iteration of the activity going on 24/7.

I try to go to a couple of gigs a week to see what's out there and make my own judgement on bands who music PRs have 'plugged' to me. For example, there's a group I went to see last week called Holy Ghost who a PR had pitched to do a 6 Mix - the other show I produce. They are quite hipster and signed to DFA - which is James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem's label. On paper they look pretty good - they're on a very cool label and their music has an electro vibe about it - but, as a producer, I needed to see if they've got more legs than just a single.

To do this, I saw them play live with Cut Copy, gauged their popularity on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and was ultimately really impressed, so commisioned them to do a mix. It's all about thinking if they're a career band and, if they're not a household name yet and I'm offered them early doors (which we are at 6 Music), it's always worth seeing them perform to get a stronger sense of their talents and where they're heading. I don't want to get really excited about someone, put them on a show or argue to put their record onto playlist and then see them live and they're rubbish. In my position I've always got to think about bands in a broader sense.

Rowan Collinson produces Now Playing @6Music.

Listen to the first programme on BBC Radio 6 Music at 1900 tonight.
The picture shows Warpaint, in session for Radio 1 earlier this month.
Interact with the show on the show's blog, via 6 Music's Facebook page or the Twitter account.

Using Twitter to control a slot-car race - MistaJam vs Scott Mills

2011-02-15T15:02:23+00:00

Editor's note: engineers in radio used to concern themselves with balancing audio and locating transmission towers but they now have a whole set of rather more pressing concerns - like how to stop slot cars spinning off the track when too many people tweet Scott Mills. Patrick Sinclair - a software engineer in the Radio 1 Interactive team - explains how connecting social networks with physical things (Using the volume of tweets from listeners to control a slot car race, to be specific) makes for good drivetime entertainment - SB.

Behind the scenes, we used:

The Twitter Streaming API.
A Ruby script using the TweetStream gem to fetch tweets in realtime.
The Ruby script posted to an HTTP -> USB server written in C.
The Velleman K8055 USB board connected to a K8056 relay board.

We built a computer-controlled 'fake controller' that plugged into the track, just like a normal manual controller. Slot car controllers are basically just variable resistors. We varied the resistance by connecting relays across resistive load. As we turned the relays on and off, it enabled and disabled the resistors, varying the speed of the cars. Each of the resistors were potentiometers, which allowed us to calibrate the speed of the cars ahead of the race.

The relay board was connected to a USB interface board, which was then plugged into a laptop. We wrote a custom HTTP-to-USB server to make it easy for the Ruby script to turn the relays on and off.

The hardware allowed for a range of seven speeds: from 'slowest' through to 'fastest' and then 'eleven' where the car would spin off the track and finally 'out of this world' where the car would literally spin off into orbit!

We timed how long the car would take to track for each of the speeds so in theory each tweet would make the car go around the track once. Each car would have a queue of outstanding laps based on the number of tweets received, and the size of this queue would affect the speed the car ran at.

Compared to our previous efforts, using SMS messages, Twitter's API was amazing because we could get real-time feedback - within seconds of users tweeting, the car would respond. With the SMS feed, there was a delay of a couple of minutes between a message being sent and us receiving it.

The lessons were:

It was incredibly difficult to calibrate the system. There were too many variables - from variations between the cars, how the brushes on the cars were set up and how the resistors performed. It also performed very differently once the cars and resistors had warmed up.
It's hard to anticipate the volume of tweets. We received 82 tweets in one second at the start of the race while we were anticipating a few hundred during the course of the race. So we had to tweak how the system was set up a couple of times during the race, causing the cars to stop whilst the system rebooted.

For next time:

We'll allow the configuration to be changed without having to restart the system.
Be more accurate by measuring when the cars actually cross the finish line as opposed to guessing how long it took the cars to go around the track.

Patrick Sinclair is a software engineer at BBC Radio1

Watch the Twitter race or listen to the whole programme on the Scott Mills homepage.
More pictures from the race on the Radio 1 web site.
The BBC's staff magazine Arial ran a feature about Radio 1's recent social media experiments.