When I was the User Generated Content Editor last term I set up a Winchester News Online Facebook group and Twitter page to promote the bulletin and these two mediums have proved very useful also in my role as Managing Editor. Using social networking sites is a very 21st century way of promoting things but also a technique that many advertisers are looking more and more in to.
In reference to ratings our best bulletin was our first ever live bulletin on 18th November last year which had over 500 unique users visiting the site on that bulletin day, however as the term went on the unique visitor sessions showed a decreasing trend. This may be because for the first bulletin everyone on the team was so excited and proud to put it out that they told everyone about and all did their part to promote it. As the bulletins went on they became more and more of a formality and I was the only person promoting the bulletins through the Facebook group, Twitter page and the competitions that I was running. We also lost a lot of viewers on weeks where the bulletin did not go live at 5 because of technical issues. My aim for this term is to beat the record ratings of our first live bulletin, it wont happen straight away but i'm hoping to raise awareness of the bulletin and generate an ever increasing core audience for the bulletin each week.
I started my marketing campaign by securing advertising on a website that I write for - www.dailyinformer.net
This is the advert that I designed for the site, I had designed a logo before (for the Facebook group and Twitter page last term) but this was pretty much a direct rip-off of the BBC logo. I think this advert is fresh and although it does not feature a trademark logo it does present the information that I wanted in the advert in a clear and visually appealing way. I was provided with the dimensions of the advert by the owner of the site and so did not have that much allocated space to work with and in the end chose to only the include our name, website and a quote about us. Instead of the quote i could have written about us but didn't want to give too much away so people would hopefully click on it to find out more. I also did not want to specify the bulletin day because it would be hard to say 'the bulletin is live at 5 every Wednesday but it does then loop for a week' in a 300 x 250 pixel space without over-complicating it or confusing the viewer. I think the simple layout works well and i very happy with it. If anyone else is able to gain advertising on any other websites then at least now there is have an advert to use.As for the actual bulletin, it was a bit of a disaster to be honest. Firstly, we had to re-shoot the bulletin four times which is three more than we would ever get in the real world. Admittedly it was everyone's first time in their new roles but there should be no excuses, everyone should have learned their role accordingly so that the first bulletin of the semester went out without a hitch. I don't think everyone got back into the swing on WINOL right away and this was another problem that let to an unorganised, slightly rushed and weaker bulletin than we had been producing last term. There were many technical faults and black holes, some of which were repaired in post-production but some unfortunately had to be left in like the ver inconsistant sound levels. Obviously we have less people that are all less experienced than the team last term but we have to work through all these problems to make WINOL bigger and better than ever!
On the positive side of things we filmed the headlines before the main bulletin, this was a great idea as we often struggled with the timings of the headlines last term. We also filmed the bulletin at 3pm rather than 4pm to make sure the bulletin would make its 5 o' clock deadline when it goes out 'as live'. One notable error in the transmission of the bulletin was that there was a spelling mistake in a statement from Tesco in one of the stories, it was extremely bad to put this out but at the end of the day comes down to bad organisation because the package wasn't checked carefully enough before being given the go-ahead to go 'live'. There was also a bit of a debate in the studio when, on our first run through, the VT operator ran an OOV that was not scripted in the auto-cue, I suggested that we just add the text into the auto-cue because it was on the other script and the story was very relevant to our audience and very current, it had come out only that day! However the director (who should be in charge in the studio anyway) said that we were over 10 minutes so didn't have time to include it so we had to cut it. Our lecturers said that it was the wrong decision to cut the story but at the same time adding it in that late may have lead to technical problems, not to mention the bulletin exceeding the 10 minute time limit. At the end of the day it comes down to bad organisation because if it was scripted in to the auto-cue in the first place then there would have been no problem. Editorially the bulletin lacked any real angled hard news stories but then again this is Winchester...
Anyway, here is the re-lauch of the Winchester News Online bulletin - 10/02/10
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