Extending the Listening Experience
Beasley Broadcast Group, Inc. (BBGI) owns and/or operates 53 radio stations in the United States, and delivers a wide variety of content to its more than 7 million on-air listeners. In addition, the Charlotte, NC-based Digital Team delivers the stations’ online experiences, which includes streaming of shows, original articles, third-party content, and social media.
“Our digital properties provide our audience with ways to extend how they listen to and get information from our stations, once they’re no longer listening via the radio,” said Kimberly Sonneborn, BBGI’s VP Digital Product Development.
Shannon Kelly, BBGI’s Director of Digital Content, continued, “While many of the listeners use the digital properties to stream the shows, we also know that providing them with additional, fresh content is the key to keeping them onsite. But with a limited staff, creating and delivering new content on a consistent basis, and more importantly delivering breaking news, can be a real challenge.”
Breaking News with Social Media Curation
In order to address this challenge, BBGI partnered with Crowdynews, a social media curation specialist that helps publishers deliver safe, relevant, integrated, and real-time social content right within their own web sites. The Digital Team saw first-hand the power of this automated curation during the shootings in San Bernardino, CA, in early December 2015.
“As soon as I heard the first reports of the shootings, we knew our listeners would be looking for more information – to understand what was going on right now, to better understand why it was happening,” said Sonneborn. “Crowdynews gave us the ability to quickly aggregate the news as it was being reported on social media channels and publish it out on our sites, giving readers a real-time feed of the story as it unfolded.”
We were delivering news of the event 20-30 minutes before the mainstream news sites were able to report on it.
BBGI created a Crowdynews social stream made up of three different curated topics that was delivered on the front page of most of their stations’ sites. The stream included tweets and posts from people who were present at the scene of the shooting and who were waiting to be evacuated, as well as other general reports and commentary. Advanced filtering made sure the content coming through was relevant, timely, and safe.
The social media content coming from the Crowdynews stream became the news that day.