The new BBC iPlayer launched this week to a chorus of applause. You may take a look at it and wonder what makes it so special. The truth is on first glance, you might simply think this is simply a slightly more polished video player, but with plans to share the iPlayer further abroad the social aspects of the player are suddenly much more apparent.

My view on the old player was simply that it wasn’t social enough. There wasn’t much, if any, sharing functionality, it didn’t profile me or my interests and I found it hard to get recommendations. The new iPlayer is much more social. Although I have to log-in via a BBC iD rather than the seemingly standard Facebook Connect, the connection allows me to post what I am watching through my status update on Facebook and Twitter… effectively meaning that BBC is allowing users to show they are “checking-in” to programming, something that GetGlue have been trying to kick-off in the UK recently.

Fast Company have done a really good piece on this:

“The watchwords for the new site are convenience and personalization. Hence, the BBC has arranged the user landing page for so that it’s easier to find TV shows one wants to see. The player module can now be launched in a stand-alone window, meaning you can continue to watch a show while you do other things on the site, or elsewhere on the Web, much more easily. It’s also a neat way to power your TV directly with iPlayer content, if you’re one of those connected souls who’s TV is hooked up as a second monitor for your PC. Meanwhile, integrating the iPlayer profile with Facebook and Twitter accounts is now simpler, to facilitate sharing info about your shows with your friends or followers.

But this social net interactivity isn’t fast enough for the BBC, so soon the network will be building in Windows Messenger powers to the system, enabling real-time chats during program viewings. The Beeb is obviously envisaging TV show catch-up parties, with excited folks IM-nattering about this week’s goings-on by Doctor Who or whatnot … though the jury is still out over whether this is actually a good idea (check out Fox’s disastrous attempts at the same thing). In a move something akin to Facebook’s “like” button or Amazon’s “wish lists,” you can also now build lists of your favorite shows to share with people.

The revamped system is also cleverly rigged up so you can download TV show content before it’s had its first terrestrial broadcast, and although you can’t watch it during this period, it means you can do so instantly upon its TV airing. In some sense, this is the BBC enabling a Tivo-like “live TV pause” power into its service.”

The reason I find this interesting as a benchmark is that the iPlayer has made some really simple changes to a product which was already fundamentally very strong. What they have done by adding sharing functionality is to create multiple advocates, linchpins, or collaborators for every single bit of content that is screened on the iPlayer. This is something that all business should be thinking about socially… how do I turn every consumer touchpoint I have into an opportunity to create advocacy for my brand?.

As with every network my handle is: mattbambow

I would give this a 5 out of 5 rating as I love Seth’s style of writing, the cracking ideas and also the thought that anyone can become a linchpin..its just whether you want to or not.

I believe this is even more apparent when companies want to become more social. The rise of social media and the clamour to talk about its size always ignores the fact that numbers are irrelevant if what is being said isn’t powerful. Simply put, social media allow people to become the centrifugal force, the linchpin, the advocate, the shining light for their business. Therefore, if companies want to become social businesses they need to learn how to cultivate Linchpins, people who are willing to go that extra mile for the business, people that are willing to say “I’ll talk about that” or “I’ll run that.”

Seth’s rallying call is pretty motivational, become a Linchpin or just do your job (it is all about the Lizard Brain you see…). Socially, businesses need these people that want to go the distance. All you need to do is look at Zappos and their 400+ members who engage with consumers everyday through Twitter, Facebook, etc. Or take a look at IBM who, out of 400,000 employees, have 17,000 blogs. These are linchpins who are happy to use their company name, knowing that they have the support and trust of the company behind them.

These are the three ways a business can cultivate Linchpins:

1) Freedom of Information drives freedom of speech.

Enabling your colleagues to become linchpins is about equipping them in the right way through t0ols, technology, training and information. Without the right information they will make the wrong, potentially ill-informed decision, start the wrong conversation, engage with the wrong people.

2) Nurture in the beginning, nature in the long run.

By nurturing the initial conversations and forays into social media, the business has an element of control over tone, behaviour, and conversation. However, this should only act as guiding principles until trust is established, nature should then take its course and the linchpin will be on the journey required to be a key member of the business. Just as there may be times when your child is growing up that you live in fear of something happening, you learn to push this fear aside through trust, education and responsibility. It should be the same for your linchpins.

3) Collaborate with Linchpins and get Linchpins to collaborate.

Collaboration is a driver for momentum in social businesses. Having linchpins collaborate around the company and around the world, enables fast-paced changes and increased momentum for the business. Simply put, if your linchpins aren’t collaborating then there is a real need to make that happen so that all other parts of the business feel there is a collective forward movement.

A business can not become social unless the internal co-ordination is right and the business is already operating socially itself. Internal, therefore, drives external. Although the external technologies are an influencer for the way we should now behave, we can only determine the way the company acts by looking at who or what makes the company integral to the community. Think about, if I as a marketeer go off and engage in social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, yet internally we aren’t sharing, propogating or acting socially, there will be an obvious disconnect between how the customer interacts with marketing and how the customer interacts with the rest of the company.

Anyway, David’s model is below and a really good starting point. Keep an eye out for my model this time next week. It certainly takes cues from David’s model but is utterly unique to me. I hope.

laters.

I have been talking about Social Media for awhile. Put simply, I don’t think the use of social media channels or the choice of technology, is the best way of understanding how to become more social. My preference and desire has always been to work with great brands from the inside, helping them to think more openly about how they interact with consumers, their customers and of course some of the most important people in the building..their co-workers.

It seems to me that we are at the second stage of a revolution in thinking. One that is a pretty good step away from the first stage thinking of “you need to become more transparent”. This is much more about how do we use our greatest assets, our people, to create a realistic, relevant and responsive change to the new social marketplace.

Don’t get me wrong, the social media channels we adopt and use are of course massively important. However, for the meantime I’m going to talk about the real passion that drives me forward, social business strategy…. working from the inside out. I hope you find the writing interesting, the thoughts provoking, and of course the content worth sharing or spreading.

A new dawn. It is quite exciting really.

Matt

http://www.nike78.co.uk/

The reason I believe this is important is that Twitter is a place of links away from its site, people use desktop clients to access it, they use mobile apps, most of which aren’t owned or managed by Twitter. Therefore, infact over time does Twitter become a non-entity, simple a technology that is used to communicate rather than a destination for conversation and content. Potentially, the route out of this is to make Twitter its own content platform where users can embed content – videos, images etc and then use 140 characters to describe what it is that is being seen.

Effectively, this would work like a traditional Facebook status update allowing users to embed the content relevant to their fans and followers, so that they can view it in-situ rather than having to click away. It seems a smart move to me. The idea was something I thought of a while ago, but seems to be supported by this chart from Dan Zarella, which shows that users don’t tend to share videos as much on Twitter as they do on Facebook.

This is not an encouragement to Pirate from Digigen, merely just pointing out an interesting infographic about it.