Public Values in the Social?

Ever since the 1980s, public service broadcasters, particularly in Western European countries, have increasingly seen the need to legitimize their existence. An added challenge for these now-called public service media is how to behave on commercially-orientated social media platforms. On the one hand, these commercial platforms can be considered a threat to the public service mission of these public service media, but on the other hand social media platforms have been heralded as providing opportunities to put long-cherished public values into practice, such as reaching demographics that are hard to reach with traditional broadcasting and engaging audiences. This research explores the ways in which people working for the Dutch public broadcaster the NPO create social media content for one or multiple television programs to explore in which ways this is influenced by the fact that they work for a public broadcaster rather than a commercial one. The research question of this research therefore is In which ways do public service broadcasting programs employ social media in light of their adherence to a public service orientation? In order to answer this research question, eleven in-depth interviews with fifteen people creating social media content for the Dutch public broadcaster have been conducted. A thematic analysis on the interview data revealed that generally speaking, specific public values were not at the foreground of the interviewees’ minds when creating social media content and that instead practical considerations such as wanting to be successful with posting content were regarded as more important. However, interviewees all believed that the television program(s) they did social media activities for did adhere to a public service orientation to such an extent, that reaching people and getting them to engage with content related to the television program(s) on social media is so valuable that this outweighs the importance of the fact that social media platforms are commercial in nature. In addition, many interviewees expressed a dissatisfaction regarding the social media strategy of the overarching Dutch public broadcasting organization, hereby revealing that within the same public broadcaster, wide differences can exist regarding attitudes towards how to utilize new digital technologies. This in turn has implications for the way in which strategies for adapting to social media platforms can evolve in the future.