I did something the other day I haven’t done in a long time. I turned on the TV.
Some of you may still be familiar with this ritual, but I can honestly say in the last three years, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve even bothered to find the remote.
It’s not that I’m accessing TV shows through other nefarious time-shifted means, though I’m not denying that I have engaged in such acts, but rather that I find TV quite a solitary experience.
Unless you’re watching football, there’s pretty much an unspoken rule NOT TO SPEAK. And yes, before you all collectively scream at me, I know you don’t talk during the replays. Established that one the hard way.
So just who do you screech at when at Courtney produces sub-par pesto? #masterfchef
Why, Twitter ofcourse.
In fact, Twitter is bringing TV to life in a way that time-shifting will never be able to compete with.
Twitter brings a huge collective audience together to watch TV. If you’re yet to experience the magic of Twitter TV, you can’t go past Eurovision to fully appreciate its value. And you don’t have long to wait. Highlight 25, 27 & 29 May, 2010 in your calendar.
A few Australian programs have cottoned on to the this.
Mark Pesce (@mpesce), who has a healthy Twitter following, was one of the early pioneers of rounding up the troops on Twitter to watch the New Inventors, for which he is a panelist from time to time.
Then there was the infamous #nudierun on Media Watch, where twitterers said they would run around their neighbourhoods naked if Johnathon Holmes said “pwned” on TV. He did and there were some sightings of naked bottoms. Silly? Yes, but quite empowering for the audience all the same (not to mentioned damned funny). I think Holmes even cracked a wry smile.
Sally Jackson, who writes for the Media section for The Australian, tweeted recently that Q&A receives between 5000 and 10000 tweets per episode. That’s a very impressive statistic, which indicates if nothing else, that people enjoy having their say. It’s not even that these tweets need to become part of the show, though that is fantastic where appropriate, but rather that people enjoy being able to watch TV together. Quietly, but not alone.
Which begs the question why TV execs don’t announce a Twitter hashtag at the beginning of every show.
And I don’t think it’s something that can only apply to TV. Every major news article too, should carry a hashtag on it. Same for radio.
It would bring those conversations together in a clever, simple way.
Encouraging conversation is a function of the media. And this is an almost accidental chance for media to do that in a way not entirely possible before.
So, that’s my free advice to media execs.
Show us your hashtags and we’ll come to the party.