Today I'll be giving a short presentation as part of my participation in a panel on social media at News:Rewired, an event organised by Journalism.co.uk and being held at City University, where I'm a Visiting Journalism Fellow. That is, if my train can actually get me there in time for the panel.
I'm planning to talk through some examples showing how news and media organisations can create an editorial framework around content created, hosted and shared elsewhere so that the best can be brought back to the original proposition but without the usual technical and moderation costs involved. I might call it "off-shoring user generated content", but only behind closed doors.
Also on the panel is the Telegraph's Kate Day who does this very thing using flickr, where she runs a weekly photo competition, finds the best shots, then republishes them on Telegraph.co.uk.
The other examples I'm hoping to point out are:
- The BBC's Shownar, an experiment in reflecting what audiences are saying about BBC programmes on third party social networking sites, blogs and forums.
- Channel 4's Picture This, commissioned by Adam Gee, where a Channel 4 branded "layer" sits on top of functionality provided by flickr.
- One & Other, a SkyArts/Artichoke production (website created by Headshift), where the public's reaction to Anthony Gormley's Fourth Plinth project was monitored, with the best tweets and flickr images highlighted on the site while the rest were simply ignored.