TEN tries to get social
The launch of Big Brother today marks a significant step by Network TEN to ramp up its approach to social networking. And it does so without being encumbered by the Yahoo or MSN portals of Seven and Nine.
The network is developing a series of complementary internet media channels to cater for the core 16 to 24-year-old fans of the reality show.
TEN’s head of digital media, Damian Smith, said the network experimented with a Facebook profile for So You Think You Can Dance Australia, which ended its first season last night with about 28,000 Facebook fans.
It also launched a Facebook application, a “Which Top 20 Member are you most like?” quiz that users could add to their Facebook profile.
The Big Brother Facebook profile will include a news feed and other features.
“Over the next week there’ll be interesting things you can get for your Facebook profile,” Mr Smith told The Australian. In the past, TEN used MySpace.com.au and video-sharing website YouTube to promote its programs online, in addition to the official TV show sites on its ten.com.au platform.
Australian TV shows have been relatively slow to develop a big presence on stand-alone social networking websites, although ABC productions such as Summer Heights High, Spicks and Specks and Kath & Kim (now on Seven) have made an appearance on sites such as Facebook. Another to make the leap is Nine’s Underbelly.
“We’re very happy to work with a range of social networking sites,” Mr Smith said.
“We regard them as complementary to the core website,” he said. “Everyone’s a competitor and potential partner right now.”
He said TEN had more freedom in relation to the websites that it could form alliances with, as it did not have a partner offering its own social networking services.
“We’re hopefully in a better position than some to exploit (social media),” Mr Smith said. “We are a little more Swiss (in that) we are not linked with a US portal.
“We all want the same thing: access to the advertising and marketing dollar,” he said.
Advertisers are sponsoring the official Big Brother 2008 website, which will for the first time include user-generated videos and vastly expanded blogs.
“We’ve got an audience that loves to interact, express its opinions and create their own video, and that’s pretty exciting,” Mr Smith said. “There’s going to be a lot more blogging on the site (such as) Big Brother’s Little Sister, which will be a different-toned blog from the rest of the site. It’s from people working for (production company) Endemol Southern Star and taking an interesting perspective on what’s going on in the house.”
Last year the Seven Network made news for banning Facebook on staff computers. Meanwhile Nine’s CEO David Gyngell promised his network would better embrace social networking platforms in 2008.
But TEN is already attracting comment from fansites for banning members on Big Brother forums who have sourced information from behindbigbrother.com after it leaked details of the launch show, ahead of its premiere.
The Big Brother launch show was recorded last night for screening tonight on TEN.
Source: The Australian
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Oh wonderful, yet another spam application for Facebook that I’ll be blocking in no time.
I do love the “Block all Facebook application” Greasemonkey script, I really do. But I digress