Last month the girl geeks blogging team went to Media City in Salford for the BBC Academy Digital Skills Day, part of the recent Digital Cities Week programme.
The day was FREE to attend and included a number of interactive workshops on topics including live streaming, creating content for social media, digital storytelling, virtual reality and various tech master classes, all led by industry experts. We picked up loads of useful insights, some of which we’ll share here.
The event was held in the super cool BBC offices, complete with a VR blue-room and giant Pudsey banner!
We were welcomed by Alice Webb, Director of BBC North and BBC Children’s, who outlined the BBC’s commitment to
investing in digital skills. It was great to hear that 7,000 of their own staff had been on the workshops we were about to take part in, and that the highest number of people working for the BBC work in digital, design and engineering.
Big impact on big platforms
The first workshop we attended was ‘Big Impact on Big Platforms - making YouTube and Facebook work for you’, and it took place in the Alan Turing Imagination – named after the computer scientist and creator of modern computing.
We went through what makes content shareable, and how to ‘bottle’ what captures people’s imaginations and apply it to content production.
Research conducted by Sign Salad for the BBC pointed to a list of 10 popular tropes that result in shareable content. Seeing the list, most of these were immediately familiar:
As the number and scope of online channels are increasing, many media organisations are trying to play catch up. Broadcast audiences are falling and the majority of opportunities are now in short form content.
With this in mind we went through the differences between publishing content on Facebook and YouTube, and looked at examples from Buzzfeed and YouTube to examine how they matched up with the shareable tropes.
The key points to takeaway were:
- Be shareable
- Be collaborative (with key partners who will also share your content on your behalf)
- Be discoverable (help your content get found with key words and search terms)
- Be accessible
- Be consistent (repeatable content is always popular)
- Be human
- Be authentic
- Involve your audience
The future of journalism
There was just enough time for a quick coffee before heading back to the breakout space to hear from Nic Newman, an ex-BBC strategist and journalist, on the digital future of journalism.
Nic is a Research Associate at the Reuters Institute, and he presented their findings on changing audience behaviours, and how mobile is taking over news consumption.
It was interesting to hear how the BBC package stories differently for distribution on social media compared to more traditional broadcast channels, and how “digital leaders” including the Guardian, New York Times, Buzzfeed and Washington Post, plan to use digital in their news production.
Key trends that the Reuters Institute has identified as important are:
- Notifications as the new battleground – content creators are now looking to push notifications to get their content flagged to readers
- Messaging as content in itself
- Immersive storytelling and VR experiences
- The rise of virtual assistants
- A move to measuring engagement rather than clicks on ads
- Robojournalism (we love this one!!!)
The session closed with an interesting discussion about the difference between trends and fads, and the growing concerns around the rise of ‘fake’ news.
Shortform content workshop
Shortform content is defined by the BBC as:
- Under 500 words
- Video under 10 minutes
- Audio under 10 minutes
- Infographics
- Photos
- GIF’s
- Quizzes
- Memes
The key to creating shortform content is to stop the scrolling. As we’ve reached saturation point, the biggest challenge for content creators is to make their audiences take notice and importantly, engage.
Dan Foster, a Producer at the BBC, took us through the CODE approach:
Content – create content that audiences want to watch and engage with.
Optimise – optimise your content for mobile, making use of mobile features such as facial recognition, swiping, GPS.
Distribute – release your content at the time of day your audience is most active, get your content embedded in other places, and aim to become a part of the wider dialogue.
Evaluate – use analytics to identify where your content is succeeding and failing. Use facts to create content based on viewing habits and ‘reverse engineer’ (or re-purpose) existing content to capitalise on your most popular pieces.
We really enjoyed getting an insight into the inner workings of the BBC’s content creation, and how they react to current trends to create content that stays relevant and is distributed effectively.
Want to know more about Digital Skills Week, or attend next year? Visit the website. #digicities
Written by Emma Riley