ABCNews.com murdered Facebook Connect

Did you watch President Obama’s press conference on abc.com last night with the intention of participating in the Facebook chat? Did you find it an impossible task? Did you find yourself asking whose stupid idea this was? I did. But then I wasn’t surprised. Didn’t they know that the comments screen should be adjacent to the feed. Did anyone think about the fact that its difficult to make comments on something you cannot see. Oh sure, you could hear it but the purpose of watching a feed is to see it. Otherwise you could have turned on the radio. While that was the largest issue I saw there were, of course, others. Like didn’t they think that people might sign in early enough to be prepared and want some entertainment while they waited? They spent money to send commentators to the event. Why not put them up? Could the cost for a few extra minutes of a feed be that much that you risk people turning away, which would defeat the purpose of the whole venture. Hmmm. Don’t think so. And another thing……obviously someone paid for commercial advertising time prior to the feed, but if I’m running late and want to watch, must I still be subjected to that commercial? Well, not really because in the time that the commercial ran, which was a long approximately 2 minutes (or felt like it), I pulled up the CNN feed.

Enough of the technical issues. Let’s talk marketing. Did anyone actually know this was occurring? I guess only if you watch ABC news and even then if you were not aware of Facebook Connect’s capabilities, would you have understood what was going to happen? I will tell you that when I first went to the page to sign in, I noticed that others were already there, which I thought was a good thing. The problem is, and here we go again with the lack of forethought, is that someone had the ‘bright’ idea to make the feed look as if there was a significant amount of activity. In reality there were only a few signed on whose posts were being replicated. Can you say duped? Well, I wasn’t because guess what…. I CAN READ! Therefore; it was easy for me to see that they were trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to pull a flim-flam. Sorry folks, not takers.

So ABCNews.com messed up a golden opportunity and wasted your time. How do you handle that for the next event?  Next time just contact us and lets talk about it.