If TV websites, especially morning show sites, want to be successfull they should focus more on real time conversations then on posting clips after they air on their show.
Tomorrow morning compare these two page:
- Good Morning America's home page - http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/
- GMA Anchor/Correspondents Twitter feeds - http://twitter.com/GMA/anchors-correspondents
The GMA home page is stale and focuses on posting news clips after they air. The Twitter page focuses on what's happening in real time and a quick way for me to get my news, see conversations about the news and engage the GMA folks in that conversations.
If the GMA brand is about getting the mornings news with a little chit chat and entertainment then why not just embed a GMA twitter feed as the main page...especially in the morning.
This became very clear to me this morning...
As I was watching Good Morning America they teased to their website that "To find a list of all the companies that the FDA sent a warning letter to go to ABCNews.com." Well I jumped on their site only to find out that the "Mentioned on Air" page for GMA hadn't been updated in three days.
I did what any good user would do...I sent a tweet to @gma and @sampchampion. Within minutes I had a tweet back from Sam Champion (make that two tweets back) despite the fact that the show was still live and he was jumping between hits. Still no response from the web staff nor is the site updated with the link.
I think GMA and ABC should get over being a traditional news site that just publishes the same stories that are available everywhere and instead do what they do on TV, become part of my morning. Create a twitter feed similar to what you can find on some business website like this one. If you want to create brands or things that are easy to find...create hash tags (e.g. #SeenonGMA, #JustOneThing, or #GMAPolitics).
Anyone know of any web publishers that are doing anything similar?
UPDATE: The stories were posted online about an hour after this was published. GMA was already off the air for the east coast.
