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Earlier this week, I had the chance to join a group of bloggers for lunch at the studios of NBC 17. They were kind enough to invite us out, feed us and provide a tour, in exchange for our thoughts and feedback on blogging and consumer generated media.
They’re still trying to figure out how consumer media could help them strengthen their #3 position in the local market (they’re behind the local CBS and ABC news affiliate), and so were open to all suggestions.
Of course, it’s hard to make recommendations, when the station itself is not sure of their end goal, but here are a few things I suggested:
- They asked how they could encourage more bloggers to link to their content. I suggested being one of the few local affiliate web sites to implement trackbacks on their stories. If a blogger has a choice of where to link to a story, they’re more apt to link to a page that might send trackback traffic.
- Tagging their news stories for news themes, categories and local areas. For example, every time they mentioned the Duke Lacrosse case, they could tag the item and let those interested subscribe to a feed on that topic. Likewise, someone interested in news for specific town in the Raleigh viewing area, could subscribe to news for just that area.
- I suggested, as did some others, providing longer versions of stories as streamed videos, which could be embedded on blogs. Often, NBC 17 might record more than ten minutes for an interview, but only a few seconds appear during the newscast. They could offer that extra content to online viewers.
- Not suggested at the time, but get rid of the pop-ups!
So, I thought I’d open it up to you. What ideas do you think they could experiment with? What would you like to see a network affiliate include on their site? What is your local affiliate doing well?
Leave your ideas in the comments and we’ll send them over to the station. I’ll also pick the best idea and place it on this post, with a link back to your site. 
