'Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience': Managing a community of millions at Serial

Credit: Screenshot from Serial

Serial, the podcast produced by WBEZ and This American Life, has captured the attention of millions of listeners since its 2014 debut unravelled the story of a young woman's murder in Baltimore in 1999.

After this hugely successful first series, the team at Serial started to focus more on audience interaction, having originally shied away from engaging with their audience, not expecting the overwhelming response from listeners around the world who began investigating the story themselves.

Kristen Taylor, community editor of Serial's Season Two, developed and implemented a social strategy from the offset, aiming to connect audiences from around the world as the season progressed.

"You want everyone to feel like they are part of this, and want to keep themselves and each other up to date, so I tied those people and the content together," said Taylor.

Season Two of the podcast tells the story of Bowe Bergdahl a U.S. soldier whose decision to walk off his base in Afghanistan led to five years of captivity with the Taliban.

With new social accounts on Vine, Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat, Taylor began monitoring conversations and interacting with the podcast’s fans, looking for trends across the different platforms in what the audience liked, disliked or wanted to know more about – a difficult task when dealing with an audience that was global, listening to content asynchronously.

"Sometimes, I would take something to the team and say 'there is confusion about this' and then they might go and re-cut part of the episode, take out or add in a sentence, or maybe use more from an interview," she said.

[and hi from me, @kthread, thank you for bringing it online for us this season.]

And now, we’re going to go group hug. Like we do.

— Serial (@serial) March 31, 2016

With the storyline about Bowe Bergdahl unfolding in the news alongside the fortnightly podcast, Taylor explained that it would have been impractical to answer all the queries coming in.

Instead, she looked for repeated themes in the questions that her team could either directly or indirectly address on the social media pages, website or podcast.

"Part of my role was to make sure that the conversation continued to be as productive as possible, because with an audience of that size, you worry more about moderating comments," she said.

"I began by setting out a comment policy so that everyone knew what we were looking for, and then people could feel more free to ask questions and answer each other rather than us answering them, which was nice to see.

You want everyone to feel like they are part of this, and want to keep themselves and each other up to dateKristen Taylor, community editor, Serial (Season 2)

"You also want to help an audience member to answer their own questions. Often I pointed people in the right direction to where they could figure out what they wanted to know. We weren't trying to make anyone's opinion for them."

Difficulties arose when listeners wanted to find out more, or go at a faster pace than the one at which the production team was willing to tell the story.

"The audience knew this was a series of episodes that were related to each other, but many of them wanted to skip ahead.

"There were things that we just weren't ready to put in the episodes until later on and there were reasons for that," she said.

"But by the end of the season, the audience understood. It is important to never underestimate the intelligence of your audience, because when you give people the chance to be smart, they will, more often than not, take it."

Hear Taylor kick off our newsrewired digital journalism conference with the keynote speech on 20 July, where she will be discussing the value of community management in the broader context of the publishing industry. Book your ticket here.

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