As I've explained in my previous blog posts,
the 2009 Reith Lectures team was keen to extend the reach of the
programmes beyond the traditional Radio 4 and World Service listeners.
A
key part of our strategy was social networking site Twitter. We wanted
to find people already talking about Professor Sandel and his work, or
related ideas, and establish a community of listeners which could start
engaging with the lectures' themes before the programmes were even
broadcast.
Some people found being followed by a broadcasting legend rather unsettling. One user commended Twitter for its ability ""; another wondered if we were "".
But most people seemed pleasantly surprised to discover the programme's Twitter incarnation: "", "" and "".
We also wanted to collaborate with our colleagues who run ,
an exercise in "social listening" which invites people to tune in to
particular radio programmes while logged into Twitter, and then share
their comments. And we promised to let you know how it went.
I
write this after the first transmission of the second Lecture, and
although the experiment has not quite followed the path we intended, it
has in fact completely exceeded our expectations.
We had issued invitations for a event during the first Reith lecture repeat on Saturday 13 June. But the Twitterverse had other ideas. Ten minutes before the first transmission of the opening lecture on Tuesday 9 June, a few messages ("tweets") started to appear, urging people to listen.
That
trickle became a torrent, as users spontaneously twittered about
Professor Sandel's lecture on the moral limits of markets. Some were
already following our feed, but most were not. As radio producers, it
was electrifying to see the tweets come in - we were effectively
watching people listening to the programme.
The comments were almost universally positive, praising Professor Sandel's arguments, timeliness and approach: "", "", "not to be missed", "", "really exceptional", "challenging yet inspiring".
Or as one particularly vivid tweet put it afterwards, "".
Many people made explicit reference to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's public service broadcasting remit:
""
""
There were some critics - one listener was " - no new ideas, or new ways to approach the 'ethic with a busted gut', unhelpful". Another wondered whether " [republished]?". It was.
What was also fascinating was the number of unprompted references to listening to the podcast or via iPlayer.
Lots of people who had not been following our message stream were so
keen to recommend the programme that they published their own links to
the podcast, website etc. Many heard the original transmission but
wanted to listen again online.
We were able to build on the tremendous response generated by the first lecture - helped in part by
in the Guardian, which highlighted our "new-fangled" approach to
promoting this year's lectures and the "overwhelmingly positive"
response.
Our band of followers continued to grow - sometimes a
tweet about Reith was a user's first, suggesting they may have signed
up to Twitter just to participate. And the appreciative messages kept
piling up.
In Twitter's world, popular topics are given a hashtag (ie "")
which users include in their tweets, thus allowing all related messages
to be easily aggregated. As the number of people using grew, so did our sense of an increasingly engaged community.
The culmination of the week of the first lecture's broadcast was to be the planned event during the Saturday night repeat.
As
a warm up, one user proved you can say much within the famously tight
140 character limit of Twitter, summarising the lecture in a few pithy
messages: "markets replace moral judgements with costs" and "".
As
before there was a real sense of occasion as we watched the debate
unfold in real time. There was a small but dedicated group of active
participants joining in across the world - from the UK to New Zealand,
Berlin and Tehran. But by tracking the number of people who followed
the related content links we posted during the programme, we know that
a much larger group was watching (and clicking) in silence.
And
more clever technology meant that people who missed the debate could
recreate it afterwards, prompted by recommendations from users - many
of whom had not apparently taken part the night before: "".
The event went very well. In some ways it didn't quite match the excitement of the informal ""
which exploded into life so unexpectedly during the first lecture - and
indeed during the second as well. But in terms of
plans-not-going-to-plan, the result is pretty good.
As I write
this, we have almost 850 followers. In turn they have hundreds - or in
some cases thousands - of followers of their own, many of whom find
themselves knitted together across the globe by a common interest in
the unashamedly challenging thoughts - or "High brow shiznit" - of the
Harvard Professor who wears this year's Reith laurel.
- The Reith Lectures home page and the 2009 lectures on the Radio 4 web site.
- The Reith Lectures 2009 podcast.
- Follow on Twitter.
- Professor Michael Sandel's biography on the Radio 4 web site.
- Scroll to the bottom of this page for a video of Professor Sandel discussing the lectures.
- Professor Sandel on the Philosophy Bites blog.
- Lots of useful additional material on the .
- Shiznit .
- , by Steve Bowbrick, illustrates the response to 5.