CBS’ plans for Last.fm
Cory Bergman October 8th, 2007
CBS bought the UK-based social networking site Last.fm in March, and now network prez Les Moonves is offering up some details of how they plan to utilize the site. “It’s our first venture in to social networking. It’s social networking about content - we’re a content company. They have great technology. If there’s social networking around music, there should be about sports shows, about news shows,” he said, as quoted by PaidContent. While this is just a quote — not a strategy, per se — it seems a little too TV-focused for me. If the plan is to expand Last.fm beyond music to sports or news, it shouldn’t revolve around TV shows, but sports teams and news stories, for example. CBS should be careful to empower Last.fm to continue to thrive on the web without derailing its focus to promote TV.
1 Comment Add your own
1. Rick | October 9th, 2007 at 9:46 am
I don’t know that the CBS approach is TV focused as it is corporate focused. Moonves seems to see social networking as a way to build communities around Viacom properties, to the exclusion of its competitors.
Granted, Viacom’s approach isn’t any different than NBCU or News Corp, but the challenge all these big media companies have is that TV, sports, movie and music fans aren’t naturally segmented in the way that, for instance Windows and Mac fans separate.
My hunch is that when it comes to social networking around a TV show or sport, people either want hyper-targeted “All About CSI,” or very macro “All About TV.”
Creating a world that is “All About CBS” just doesn’t seem to be the answer.
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