A two-day social media workshop for Bulgarian National Radio with lecturer Mr. Justin Kings took place at BNR’s premises in Sofia on 28-29 May 2012.

Organized with the kind assistance of EBU Training and financed by the EBU's Special Assistance Project, it was a highly-anticipated event which brought together journalists, editors, producers and experts from different programmes and structures of BNR: the news and current affairs channel “Horizont”, the cultural channel “Hristo Botev”, the regional one “Radio Sofia”, the foreign service “Radio Bulgaria”, the advertising and publishing house of BNR, as well as the editorial office of BNR’s internet site.

The workshop was particularly important for the colleagues from “Radio Bulgaria” – the station which has been providing programming in 11 languages for 75 years now. Due to financial reasons it was forced to close its short-wave broadcasts worldwide at the beginning of February this year but its programmes are still available online, and therefore learning how to use the potential of social media is of vital importance to its journalists.
The seminar definitely created a strong awareness in all participants of the necessity for a strategic and systematic use of contemporary communication tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Audioboo. Other, yet more recent and less popular platforms were also introduced. Through real life examples the lecturer demonstrated some of the powerful opportunities given to broadcasters by the social media. Particularly useful was the approach of situating the discussion into the context of the achievement of the general purposes of BNR as a broadcaster and a public institution.

The seminar broadened understanding of modern electronic media, emphasizing at the same time, that high journalistic standards, professionalism and ethical issues are still essential despite new and inventive ways of communicating and broadcasting.

A recurrent reaction among the participants on the seminar’s content was that it “inspired them” and “made them think”. For most of them, it seems, this event was a turning point in their perception of social media not just as part of their personal social networks, but as a professional tool, giving huge opportunities for journalists to find great news stories and communicate them in new and more engaging ways to the audience.

The breakout groups were a true success and resulted in generating a multitude of responses and ideas, and provoked collaboration between the participants.

An additional asset of the event was that it brought together colleagues, working for different structures of BNR and made them communicate actively with each other in an attempt to reach a common understanding of the role that social media should play in BNR’s future. For most of them, devising a strategy for social media is now considered to be a must, and hopefully, this seminar helped BNR make further steps in this direction.