No Awards For @BBCBreaking BAFTA Coverage

It's the time of the year that those iconic red carpets are rolled out in the name of honouring the stars of the big screen. Whilst the biggest and best awards show, The Oscars, is yet to come, last night saw the stars turn out for the British version of The Oscars, The BAFTAs, which are often cited as one of the early indicators of who could be in with a chance of taking home the gold shiny men over in tinseltown.

Upon checking my twitter feed yesterday evening, I could see quite a few irate friends tweeting at the usually very useful @BBCBreaking Twitter account. This is a great feed to follow as they'll keep you nicely up-to-date with important breaking news events as and when they happen.  So, what were they doing to cause such ire to be directed at them?

Given that The BAFTAs were being televised live on a Sunday evening, it was a very appealing choice for many people to settle down in front of the box and leisurely take in the live coverage of the ceremony courtesy of the Beeb.  As we live in a 'dual device' world, lots of  viewers were also likely to be pottering away on smartphones and iPads during the ceremony (other tablet devices are available).  And what did they find?  That @BBCBreaking, usually a source of key news developments around the world, was live tweeting the results of the BAFTAs from the ceremony. While this sounds straight forward, the first point of contention for many, and the cause of the many negative tweets and unfollows was the fact that unlike big, important developments being covered by @BBCBreaking their newsfeed was being diluted by the regular updates of the awards ceremony:

Further to this, the main annoyance for many centered around the fact that the BBC were live tweeting the winners of the awards in real time, whereas their own TV coverage was being transmitted 'as live' albeit with a small delay (probably due to production or scheduling reasons), meaning that the @BBCBreaking service was basically providing spoilers to its very own programming:

As with any mistakes, let's look at what the key lessons to be learned from this are:

1) Make sure that the right hand is talking to the left hand:  In our industry we often have distributed responsibility across media, so it's crucial that a fluid line of communication is open and an overall strategy is in place to ensure the only impacts between channels are positive.

2) Target your content: whether it's search or social media, it's crucial that whatever your message might be, that it's targeted to the correct users in a meaningful way.  In this case it's about expectations: this twitter feed is followed by millions of users as it is a brilliant way to keep up to date with important current affairs around the globe – by adding in something that was out of context it provoked a negative reaction, the BBC was severely risking compromising its credibility.

Did you watch the BAFTAs last night? What did you think of the Beeb's Twitter faux pas? Contact us and let us know.