My Crazy 24 Hours On Reddit

First of all: A big ‘thank you’ to reddit users. It’s thrilling to see this kind of response and I’m sure this will only result in more outreach from public media.

And note: I am a consultant for PBS (and former employee) but do not speak for the organization in an official capacity on this blog.

A quick, focused social media campaign netted awesome results for PBS on reddit over the last 24 hours. More than anything, it was a response to the flood of good will from the community to a PBS tech quickly addressing a user’s issue. Without revealing anything proprietary, the campaign generated over 30,000 clicks to the PBS donation URL, over 22,000 ‘upvotes’, and over 1200 comments. Oh, and reddit users gifted me 3 months of reddit ‘gold’, the membership status for reddit.com. Nice.

Moderating this floor of traffic was insane – and extremely gratifying. Users posted so many great stories, requests, questions, “donated!” notes that it was a scramble just to keep up with “thank you’s!”

It’s a great example of what can occur when you meet a community where they are. Trying to engage reddit on PBS’s terms – or at a typical corporate speed – would almost certainly have killed the organic momentum. Going forward, this will hopefully be an instructive example for public media more broadly about the type of good will that exists in untapped and under-engaged communities. If you doubt me, just check out the UGC at the bottom of this post.

Chronology:

• 4/27: Edgar on the tech team knocked a video support request out of the park and got some serious recognition in the form of a reddit post.
• 4/28: Feeling some serious PBS love in the comments, another reddit user suggested that reddit make a donation in the form of a large novelty check.
• 4/28 at 3PM: Knowing that a novelty check wouldn’t be the best way to help reddit support member stations, PBS put together a tidy little campaign to send some love back in reddit’s direction and direct some  that energy toward stations. Here’s the post we put up:

Reddit: PBS loves you back!

Thanks for all the love the last couple days. We noticed, and it’s made us even more excited about building awesome products for the American public. We work really hard to bring you great programming and want to remind you that your local station really makes everything you see on PBS – and everything we do – possible. We rely on your support, so thanks again and send some of this love to your local station here:http://to.pbs.org/heyreddit

TL;DR We love you. You help us when you make a donation (any amount) to your local station here:http://to.pbs.org/heyreddit Post a comment if you donate!

And the awesome accompanying photo, which was organized by Melanie:

The Artefacts: