More Digital blog

When it was announced that BBC 6 Music was to be axed, a resounding cry echoed through the land (or more correctly, ‘through the social media’): ‘How can they do this?’ ‘We are the ones paying, so we should have our say!’ Along with loads of indignation and brouhaha like it.

This is all very well, but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone talk about the station before the closure was announced, except perhaps my geeky brother and brainy co- worker. Let’s remember it was a digital station (only 32.1% of households own a DAB set) with only had an audience of 70,000. So, what was it that made the public get together and start an almighty social media campaign to Save 6 Music (not to mention helpsave6music. and love6music)?

John Morter, the man behind the Rage Against the Machine Christmas Number One campaign, immediately set up a new Facebook campaign on hearing news of the cuts.

Judging by Morter’s previous successful campaign, the BBC brass were probably quaking in their boots at the campaign. Probably more so by this outbreak of online fury, than by the discussion of the matter in parliament.

Anyway, as you have probably heard, it was announced yesterday that BBC 6 Music, would not be closed, but whether this is due to the social media campaigns or other powers we will never know (unless they tell us).

As Guardian blogger Steve Bushfield, pointed out, in the past a few letters would have been sent, which could easily be ignored. Today however 180,00 people joined the Save 6 Music campaigns and millions of tweets were hash-tagged #save6music. There was still a few old fashioned letters, 250 to be precise, but at the same time there were over 25,000 emails.

On the digital space people can react very easily to things they don’t like, they can just retweet things or ‘like’ something with very little effort. They don’t need to sit down and write a letter. Could it be that the support for 6 Music had actually very little to do with the station itself, but more to do with people climbing on board the latest trending topic?

This ties in with the idea that people are more likely to buy something if they see their friends like it, so if they see them tweet about 6 Music, will it make them want to be part of the action as well? Think about the Rage Against The Machine campaign, did all those who bought the single really like them, or was it more to do with getting one up on ‘the man’? And in this case is ‘the man’ the BBC? Even if people haven’t listened to BBC 6 before, many may not like the idea that they have no say over something which they pay money towards. Figures show that twice as many people listen to 6 Music now as did prior to the campaign.

Social media may not have played the whole part in this, but we know from previous campaigns that social media can be successful.

Take the election of Obama aka the ‘First Social Media President’ for example. During his campaign his team posted 1,800 videos to YouTube, which if you think in comparison to Gordon Brown’s campaign is an extraordinary number. He also used Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and various blogs as a way to connect with people and communicate with them.

Then there was the Compare the Meerkat campaign. They took the meerkat from their TV adverts, Aleksandr Orlov, gave him a twitter account with witty tweets, a Facebook fanpage and ‘simples’, you have a phenomenon.

6 Music, in many people’s minds is a very good station, but perhaps it just hadn’t been publicised well enough to get the amount of listeners it needed to look like a money making station to the BBC. After this ‘will they, won’t they axe the show’ hoo haa, it looks like it now has the audience it deserves.

Now what remains to be seen is if the product is as good as the marketing campaign, even if it is a very modern social media marketing campaign.