Public Blog

Happy New Year from your friends at Public Interactive!

Looking back, it’s been a very busy year!  We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, and are looking forward to what is coming in 2010. To better serve you, we’re currently hard at work on the next version of our core platform, among other things. This new platform will make it even easier for you to engage with your listeners online.

Some highlights from the past year include:

• Celebrating our 10th anniversary
• Working with more people in the Public Broadcasting industry
• Reporting to SoundExchange on behalf of stations
• Enhancing Composer Pro and launching Composer Basic
• Upgrading Public Arts
• Launching The Economy Section as part of the Economy Project Collaboration
• Providing data integration and support for the PRX Player and NPR News iPhone apps
• Upgrading the Public Events Calendar

Throughout 2007 and 2008, Public Interactive has worked with public broadcasters to better understand how to effectively engage audiences online. We gathered experience directly from dozens of stations and programs such as KQED, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and Car Talk® using our online community engagement tool. One important lesson, particularly for those new to online engagement, is that it takes creativity and persistence to engage individuals and get their participation.

The Center for Social Media, as part of this year’s Beyond Broadcast conference, asked us to put together what we’ve learned to distribute to all conference attendees:

Eight Ways to Help Build Online Participation (PDF).

That thoughtful listeners have many opinions comes as no surprise to Michael Rass, senior online producer for PRI’s “The World.” He’s been using Public Action to invite listeners into online discussions, and he’s watched theworld.org’s community grow. Find out how he is creating a vibrant and dynamic online community around “The World’s” content.

In preparation for this year’s Beyond Broadcast conference taking place on June 17th in Washington, DC, The Center for Social Media featured a nice writeup on our Public Action software. Each year, Beyond Broadcast explores the evolution of participatory digital public media. Won’t you join us?

We’ll also be demoing Public Action at the 2:45 demo/networking session and again during the closing reception at 4:30. Look for the Public Interactive table - and we hope to see you there!

South Dakotans take their high school sports very seriously. Since launching Public Action in November, SDPB’s Web site has attracted hundreds of registrants and tens of thousands of visitors, all diving into discussing the games and the teams. Part of SDPB’s secret to success was understanding that they already had a community at hand, one that was looking for a forum to engage. Read more about their success in an online interview with Director of Online Services, Kent Osborne.

Alexa, the popular Internet traffic service, ranked the Car Talk Community, which runs on Public Action, as their third most popular car repair forum on the Internet. The Car Talk Community is the top all-inclusive forum where advice is supplied entirely by the community. The preceding discussion areas include a professional mechanic advice forum and a Land Rover advice forum.

Alexa simply states “A very good general questions forum for vehicle repair.”

Detailed “how-to” instructions (PDF) are now available for creating, embedding, and customizing two Public Action Widgets.

Widgets are small snippets of HTML that you copy and paste into your existing website. Our widgets automatically pull and display dynamic content directly from Public Action. No programming is required, and you can choose the content to display and customize its styles (CSS).

Question-Comment Display Widget
Use this widget to display the question and live comments from a specific discussion on any page of your website. It’s like taking a live conversation out of Public Action and putting it anywhere you’d like!

Discussion List Widget
Use this widget to display lists of Public Action discussions on your website. As new discussions are created, they automatically appear in this list. Users can link directly from your lists into live discussions.

Download the PDF.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has certainly hit the ground running with Public Action. They’ve been live for about two months, and already have over 1,500 submissions from an active and growing base of registered users. The new talk show “Think Out Loud” has been their focus in deploying Public Action, with discussions tied directly to daily show content. The effort has been spearheaded in part by Online Host David Miller, former Producer for the forward-thinking “blog with a radio program” Radio Open Source.

Kudos to the team for both visual integration as well as clear leadership in putting the discussion content front and center for their audience. They’ve put a lot of effort into compelling topics, leading questions, and top notch presentation. By focusing their audience on only a few key discussions at a time (talk show discussions usually launch day-of), they get lively participation, and by asking their listeners to register with real names, they use accountability to create high quality discussions.

How might media organizations better engage their audiences online?

Over the past year, I teamed up with several public broadcasters to try and answer this question. We collected lessons while rolling out online participation software at NPR’s Car Talk, KQED, Oregon Public Broadcasting, PRI’s The World and a dozen others. We are learning that the future of media engagement goes beyond invitations for listener comments. The leading examples involve much higher expectations from the “audience”; specifically, their partnership in delivering on more collaborative projects.

Take WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, who in late 2007 asked their listeners to share price inequities they found at local grocery stores. The results made national news, and not just for the novel use of crowdsourced journalism (turns out that the state regulates milk prices, and not everyone was playing by the rules). As the demand for richer and more compelling media experiences increase, you’ll likely see less “Come join the discussion” and more “Let’s solve a problem together”.

Early this AM, Public Interactive launched two Public Action enhancements: regional time and an automatic link from the account portal page to the Admin area. Enhancement descriptions below:

Regional Time– all time-based display and logic in the admin, discussion, and widget (no code) interfaces will be updated to reflect localized time. This means that all of your users will now see timestamps relative to the local time affiliated with your station or show (rather than East Coast time, which is the current default). If you are already based in EST, you will see no changes to your system. The update will affect all times for all objects, current and past in your system. This update does take into consideration daylight savings time switchover.

Public Interactive Admin Portal Link – For those stations and shows using the Public Interactive Admin Portal, you will now see the Public Action module listed amongst your other subscribed modules and be able to link straight to the Public Action Administration Interface.