Brand and the BBC = DDoS by Mail on Sunday

I’ve been keeping an eye on the story surrounding Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross and the radio show they recently did.  The timeline of events from the BBC is here:

Timeline: Russell Brand Prank Calls

Now, I want to get one thing clear here – I don’t agree that what they did was good or fair or reasonable or funny. In fact, it showed an extraordinary lack of judgment on both their parts, and the producers of the show to even consider that it should be broadcast. There – ’nuff said.

It’s not funny! However…

Consume what you enjoy – Niche audiences

Broadcast media is viewed by niche audiences. In this case, a late radio show with a controversial figure is bound to produce content that is appropriate for that niche audience. If it produces content and the listeners drop, then the show is changed or canned.

Russell Brand was employed by the BBC to do a radio show. He’s a creative and interesting personality, and often very rude.  He’s also sometimes very funny.  But if the show he creates loses it’s audience, the BBC will replace it.  The BBC obviously recognised that he has a talent and was using it though.

The market decides what is good and bad, or at least, that’s the theory.  The interesting thing to note is that the number of complaints from listeners was very few. The number of regular listeners is 400,000.

Mob Rule

4 days after broadcast (yes that’s 4 days) the Mail on Sunday rings the agent of the Andrew Sachs (the person on the end of the obscene phone call) for a comment. This then spirals into newspaper headlines, comments on blogs, emails to newspapers and huge numbers of complaints from the “general public”.

At 6:30pm on Wednesday 29th October, 9 days after broadcast, and 11 days after the prank, there are 27,000 complaints to the BBC on this matter.

Russell Brand has now quit his show, and both he and Jonathon Ross have been suspended pending a BBC investigation.

THIS IS SO WRONG

The show was not created for the general public. It was created for the 400,000 people that choose to listen to it.  I will re-iterate, what they did was wrong… BUT this is a time when the general population has got it wrong.  Not that they shouldn’t complain, but that the complaints were dealt with badly by the BBC.

Simple Comment = Mass hysteria

Social interaction over the web allows for everyone to comment very easily.  This is a situation that has arisen by an organisation, in this case, the Mail on Sunday, taking on a cause and provoking a reaction.  But does the demographic of the Mail on Sunday listen to Russell Brand? No. Hence there were only a few complaints.

The BBC should have recognised this and recognised that while the content was unacceptable, the complaints and provocation that caused the complaints was a side of the same coin. There is stuff broadcast every single day that I don’t think is appropriate, but I choose not to watch it.

Responsible Social Media

The world is changing and broadcast media is changing. Not only is the internet becoming more important, but the audiences are fragmenting. It’s much easier to view any content you choose with on-demand players, online video streaming, and other (often illegal) downloads or streams of broadcast content available whenever you want.

People will choose what they consume. In the past people had much less choice than now, but take a look at the younger demographic and they consume in a very different way to the Mail on Sunday crowd.

Social Media is changing the way we consume, but it’s also changing the way we comment and complain. This is very good, but it has to be managed correctly.  In some ways, the number of complaints was justified by the content, but if the Mail on Sunday hadn’t alerted the agent, then would this have happened? Probably not.

Managing Comments and Complaints

This is a fantastic case study in the managing of complaints.  It’s vital that what is recognised is that the complaints procedure was almost too open. The BBC I believe has not understood that there can sometimes be false negatives and positives with content. In some ways, this kind of commenting could be attributed to spamming or possibly a viral attack.

DDos

Was this a Social Media Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the BBC from the Mail on Sunday? Very probably yes. The upshot is that the service that is Brand’s show and Ross’s show have been suspended. It’s not too far different from a bunch of techie fanatics trying to shut down the website of something they don’t agree with via technology.

Two questions arise

1. Who is the arbiter of good content?
2. How should complaints of this nature be dealt with?

Mashed 08

Just arrived at Mashed 08 (Mashed 08 Backnetwork) and am starting to listen to a talk on how to “chapterise” an MP3 using ID3 tags from the BBC.  Audio visualisation looks good to, where it changes colours dependent on whether it’s music or speech.

Cool!