Social Media with television websites is an interesting field when you think about it. Sure, we are all aware that our local television stations have websites. The anchors always direct us there after almost each news story to get more in-depth information on a story. But can TV websites become a hub of social media? My career in Digital Media began at a television news station so I am well versed in what works on TV websites and what doesn't.

TV news websites are literally packed with information. Some of which we don't expect to find on "news" websites. The reason for this is, it has become necessary to use TV websites to generate non-traditional income in order to increase the revenue at stations. The basic idea is to use existing clients and have them "share" their TV buy with the website in order to get more bang for their buck. They have blogs, chats, etc. to draw more viewers in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Are people going to TV news websites to be "social?"

In my current job I am working with an entirely different type of TV website. We don't have news, weather, or sports to draw people in. Our focus is purely entertainment. This job lets me do what I do best, create social media portals. We focus on ways to interact with our viewers using contests, text messaging, blogs (which are very limited at this time for reasons I will go into later), polls, and newsletters. The challenge here is having a CMS (content management system) that can keep up with what we want and need to do. Hence the reason for limited blogs at this time. Our CMS doesn't support interactive blogs right now. And there a lot of other social media challenges but we find ways to work around those challenges.

For instance, with our limited blogs we are limited to what we can do. At this time our "blog person" writes a weekly blog about one of our more popular shows, Gossip Girl. The problem is, viewers can't add their comments into the blog. They have to email the author and then she copies and pastes their responses into her blog. Not ideal but right now it works. Most of our viewers have no idea how blogs are supposed to work so they don't know any better. Once we can take their comments instantly they will be happily surprised. We use text messaging to notify viewers of contests and programming changes such as show premieres. Polls are used to allow viewers to vote on shows like America's Next Top Model and Beauty and the Geek. TV News stations don't do this well because their viewers expect news from them, not a social portal. Our network is all about interacting with the viewers.

Something to keep in mind; if you're going to use a CMS make sure it will do everything you need it to do. Create a social media team to brainstorm what you want out of your site and decide what technology you need to make that happen. We're are struggling a bit now but soon we'll be a power house of social media tools.