For about 2 years we geeks in Digital Media have had a big LCD television mounted on the wall showing statistics about the website. Whenever a client or colleague wandered down to the Digital Media end of the 1st floor they would be transfixed by the live river of items that would flow onto the screen. It’s something that if you weren’t careful you could loose hours of your life just staring gormlessly as our VIPs replied to blogs, shouted at each other, became friends, and so on.

Now we have these big screens in reception our main studio and studio H (soon to be everywhere in the building) , showing information that the Presenters and other non-techie people will find useful. Things like how many people are listening live online right now, a ticker showing what our VIPs are doing and an area to leave important messages for the Presenters (to name a few).

It’s been brilliant to see the Presenters pull out information on the screens live on air (apparently Christian and the team were mesmerised when the screen was installed in Studio A). The impact of having these screens in the studio has been two-fold:

The Presenters have a better understanding of what’s going on online right now – Before the big screen in the studio they would have had to actively participate in the community in order to understand what the most popular blogs were. This has had an impact on the number of on air mentions of VIPs and naturally they love it.

It’s one of the reasons they sign up as a VIP.

…this then has had a knock-on impact on general mentions of the website – It seems obvious to say this, but the more mentions of the website the DJs do, the more traffic we get. A nice example is the 80s quiz which is the most successful quiz we’ve ever done on the site. It has given us 1 million page impressions in 17 days and 325 pages per visit (the previous best was 1 million in 45 days and 85 pages per visit). This obviously can’t be solely attributed to the big screens, although it was had an impact on making DJs mentioning it on air.

So that’s the current state of the big screens, however I’m well aware that there is much more data out there that would be useful to have on these screens. Anyone got any thoughts on how we can improve them?

John