BBC To Use IMImobile To Merge Mobile & Social Audience Engagement

The BBC recently awarded a contract to IMImobile – specifically the company’s newly developed DaVinci Social platform – to merge the media conglomerate’s social and mobile audience cross-channel engagement into a single platform, The Drum reports.

The DaVinci Social platform will enable the BBC to streamline audience engagement from across a number of different devices, from radio and TV, as well as live-broadcast shows and events. The service will allow the company to keep track and manage inbound and outbound audience interactions from a number of different mediums, including SMS, MMS, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and e-mail.

Citizen journalism – where members of the public act as journalists for corporations – is actively encouraged by the BBC, and the new platform will help producers listen to the masses and garner insights into what they want and any criticisms they have. It will allow BBC employees to respond to individuals or the public at large, as well as collect, analyse and republish images, videos and comments.

The commercial director of IMImobile, Steve Godman, noted that at the BBC “content comes in fast and needs to be placed somewhere” – which is where DaVinci Social comes in; the platform also allows BBC executives to contextualise the inbound content. With audience engagement of “paramount” importance to the BBC, being able to offer “this kind of communication on any platform they want” is key, he concluded.

This is not the first time IMImobile has dealt with the BBC, as the company previously provided an SMS engagement proposition to the corporation. The tool will be made available to a number of BBC producers, who will be able to use the tool across a number of different programmes simultaneously.