BEYOND PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

posted by James Reel

We had a staff meeting yesterday at which senior staffers outlined Arizona Public Media’s growing use of social networking media. It’s great that we’re going to make a bigger push with Twitter and blogging and Facebook and such, but I’m not sure that some of us completely understand its potential.

One of the major guidelines, at the PBS level, is don’t blog or tweet anything you wouldn’t say on the air; as the senior staffer said, we don’t want to alienate the core PBS audience. (I’ll leave aside the fact that I work in radio, which has nothing to do with PBS, but that’s common shorthand.) If we’re afraid of offending the average existing viewer/listener, we’re using social networking for the wrong reason.

OK, tweeting “The boss is a jackass” is a bad idea wherever you work, if you hope that the jackass will continue to employ you. And it’s poor form to overuse the Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television (although “piss” seems pretty commonplace today).

But the basic problem with worrying about putting off the core listener/viewer is that, first, the core listener/viewer—some nice 60-year-old who likes Mozart and British mysteries—probably isn’t that into Facebook, blogs and Twitter. And second, the whole point of using those media is to attract new followers to public broadcasting. Most of those people have a much looser attitude toward acceptable content, and they particularly need to see material that’s honest and witty and a little edgy if they’re going to trust is as honest or at least entertaining.

One of the arts organizations I help run, the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, has a MySpace page simply because a teenager related to the board president took it upon himself to set it up one day. Somebody on the board is supposed to be supervising it, but a friend request I sent last spring still hasn’t been answered, and the page itself hasn’t been updated since January. Most of the board members just don’t understand that things like MySpace are not simply billboards in cyberspace; they’re interactive, and require a little bit of maintenance. Organizations that don’t get this end up looking clueless, and as foolish as a parent who tries to be “with it” to connect with his kids, without really grasping a single thing about the kids’ music and clothing style.

If you’re going to do this, do it right or not at all.