Broadcasters have the edge. It’s time to leverage it. Part 3: Spotters and viewers

This is an ongoing, bi-weekly blog about Max Velocity from The Weather Company. If you did not read the previous installments, you will find the complete blog series at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, let’s continue with the third update. For this blog, we talk about the use of spotters and viewers in your weathercasts.

Increasing digital revenue/audience is the highest priority for broadcasters but gone are the days when the audience just comes to the broadcast platform. Audience acquisition isn’t a given or easy, it’s a craft. To acquire audience today requires having unique content and putting your audience to work for you.

When you include spotters and viewers into your news and weathercasts, you give your audience a first-hand perspective on regionalized events. As our broadcast industry takes on new media giants measuring revenue in the billions of dollars, you need to “do something that your competitors can’t do–get local” … very local.

Videos and memes are put in front of me throughout each day because they’re “going viral” or have “gone viral”. When you fold viewers and spotters into your news or weathercasts, they become an audience growth engine. They can talk about their interactions with your station to everyone on their social platforms—their friends repost, and friends of their friends repost and voila, you’ve promoted your brand while making your content more compelling. That’s highly shareable content, so why not incorporate spotters and viewers into your storyline to reach audiences at scale and capture new audience demographics? This type of audience inclusiveness creates free “brand ambassadors”.

With this in mind, we built Max Velocity with capabilities that make pulling in “brand ambassadors” easy. It’s a win-win because it makes your stories more interesting by giving them local context and helps build a loyal audience in the process. With mini-control-room features built-in, Max Velocity is your oyster and can change storytelling for the better.

We checked in with Krista McEnany from CBS4Indy to get her perspective on this.

Krista McEnany at CBS4Indy says, “Max Velocity is a great way to quickly incorporate spotters/viewers, along with giving them more of an interactive role in the day’s weather story. Rather than just sharing a few photos of what they are seeing or passing along rain/snow measurements, these spotters can use their own voice to give more details on not just what they are seeing, but also what the experience is (or was) like. This will be particularly useful in an active event and can potentially provide viewers with even more information that will keep them safe and informed.

Max Velocity is going to be a great tool to get engaging information out to our audience quickly while being able to use a lot of different elements simultaneously.”

Read the next blog in this series.