Australia’s Triple J – doing it right online
Posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 9:32pm. #
Oh, how annoying.
I post a fawning and much too polite blog posting about the ABC completely understanding how Twitter works.
And then, damn, if they don’t go and show off again with Triple J’s Hottest 100 Of All Time. Sigh.
Yes, it’s a top 100 countdown, yada yada, of all time, blah. You could vote for whatever song you liked, blah, and Bohemian Rhapsody would probably end up being number 1, blah blah, or possibly John Lennon’s Imagine. You’ve heard it all before. Particularly Imagine. Or Bohemian Rhapsody. Number ones in these charts are depressingly familiar.
Except Triple J did it better. Much better.
First, they gave music acts (Triple J plays a lot of new Australian music) some tools to ensure that they could promote it. This cannily meant that almost every single Australian act’s website was promoting Triple J’s countdown. Listeners themselves could download the badge, above, to denote that they’d bothered to vote, too – ensuring yet more promotion of the countdown across the web.
A message board (bizarrely unfashionable these days) fuelled the debate as to who should be number one. It wasn’t just enough to vote – Triple J wanted their audience to debate, too: making them closer to the station. The messageboards were full of discussion about music, which for a music station is really rather handy. And George Lamb bizarrely didn’t get a single mention. (One for a UK audience there, oh ho ho).
One of the reasons that BoRap or Imagine always reaches the #1 slot is that people suffer from “search blindness” when they come to vote on “any song over the past fifty years”. Compilers of these kinds of charts (and I’ve been involved in a few) regularly get frustrated when the most amount of votes are either for the obvious songs, or for the year’s biggest hits. So, Triple J did a ton of editorial around their recommended songs, and also republished the last twenty years of the Hottest 100 as well. All great content, and all calculated to make this chart a better listen, with wider choice, than the standard chart. Clearly the number one wouldn’t be the same old same old.
And the audience responded – with over half a million votes. Let’s put that in context – by population, that’s equivalent to 1,500,000 votes here in the UK; and in 2006 a similar music vote promoted on BBC Radio 2, the largest station here, only got 220,741 votes. Triple J produced a phenomenal amount of votes – and I’m assuming TripleJ did it properly and now has over half a million email addresses of potential listeners.
The actual broadcast was really interesting – since it used Facebook and Twitter as well as their own site – suggesting, as is the ABC way, a hashtag to use, #hottest100, which made it as the second most popular hashtag across the globe during the countdown. Wow. The Australian site “Digital Media” discusses exactly how the presenters reacted during the programme to messages they were seeing – read this article, because it really shows how to use tools like Twitter and others. This was, truly, a social media countdown. And the event sounded a really well-produced programme – streams are online on Triple J’s website until roughly midday on Sunday.
Naturally, the chart also got the station considerable press.
There are clearly some very bright people at Triple J doing their online thinking; and I really didn’t want this blog to descend into an ABC love-in. Too late, I suppose.
And lest you think it all went according to plan – it wasn’t totally brilliant. The number one was… Smells like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. Oh well. You can’t have everything.
Badge discovered on SecondLife user Moggs Oceanlane‘s Flickr feed.
Dave
Certainly beats the half a dozen (or was it fewer?) letters we had when attempting a similar exercise on a minor market station in Yorkshire in the early 90s!