The Social Media MBA Blog by Karl Long

Jun 6, 2005

BBC backstage encourages customer innovation and creativity

The BBC has decided to open up it’s content so customers can take it and do what they want with it, the tag line says it all really “take our stuff to build your stuff”.

The bbc backstage initiative is another example of an organization taking advantage of its customers, in a good way, taking advantage of their customers creativity, innovation and intellectual capital. For the majority of organizations there are a lot of customers out there who are just waiting to be creative and make your organization more valuable if you just put the tools/framework out there for them.

It may have originally been put in place for the uber-geek or developer, but look at this language on the backstage homepage:

Can’t code, won’t code? Well, you can share your ideas on new ways to use BBC content. This is your BBC. We want to help you play.

And what has the BBC got out of this so far, well here are some useful projects that remix BBC content with google maps:

Here’s some interesting work from a company called Headshift that has done a social tagging prototype:
From Headshift - BBC Backstage prototype: social tagging