International Law

The online presence of Australian Big Brother, which launched tonight, is embracing user-generated content:

NETWORK Ten is about to take a big leap into the world of social media with the launch of more user-generated content on the official Big Brother 2008 website and a Facebook profile.

The network is developing a series of complementary internet media channels to cater for the core 16 to 24-year-old fans of the reality television show, which begins its eighth series at 7pm tonight.

Ten's head of digital media, Damian Smith, said the network experimented with a Facebook profile for So You Think You Can Dance Australia, which ended its first season last night with about 28,000 Facebook fans.

It also launched a Facebook application -- a "Which Top 20 Member are you most like?" quiz that users could add to their Facebook profile.

The Big Brother Facebook profile will include a news feed and other features.

"Over the next week there'll be interesting things you can get for your Facebook profile," Mr Smith said.

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"We're very happy to work with a range of social networking sites," Mr Smith said.

"We regard them as complementary to the core website," he said. "Everyone's a competitor and potential partner right now."

He said Ten had more freedom in relation to the websites that it could form alliances with, as it did not have a partner offering its own social networking services.

"We're hopefully in a better position than some to exploit (social media)," Mr Smith said. "We are a little more Swiss (in that) we are not linked with a US portal.

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"We've got an audience that loves to interact, express its opinions and create their own video, and that's pretty exciting," Mr Smith said. "There's going to be a lot more blogging on the site (such as) Big Brother's Little Sister, which will be a different-toned blog from the rest of the site. It's from people working for (production company) Endemol Southern Star and taking an interesting perspective on what's going on in the house."

Apart from mobile phone coverage of the show, there will be 3mobile Mouthpiece -- a section for uploading mobile video.

Read more here (from The Australian).  Although this is an interesting strategy by Ten, they could still do more to engage with social media.  One obvious oversight is the lack of an RSS feed for news updates.  This means I'm more likely to get my Big Brother news from the unofficial Behind Big Brother portal (which is also allowing user-generated audience blogging) than I am from the official Big Brother website.