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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Call it beating a dead horse if you must

Posted in Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 28, 2010)

Poynter.org turns a spotlight today on a smallish TV station in Arkansas (it’s in the 180th ranked market) that has managed to gather nearly 20,000 Facebook fans. The news director offers four suggestions for news organizations to improve their social media presence (all of which should by now sound familiar):

1. Get everyone involved. Use the expertise in the room. Almost everyone in the 40-person KAIT newsroom has taken on a role in publishing online or on social media, from the news director himself to part-time studio camera operators. Producers, weather staff and newsroom managers are the most consistent contributors.

2. At a minimum, post items four or five hours before the news begins to push to the newscast, “but if you’re going to do it right you need to be there all the time, especially for breaking news and weather events.” Mid-morning, a poll — often related to local news — goes up on the station’s website and on Facebook, and often gets about 75 comments. The early evening newscasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. include website, Twitter and Facebook comments at least a couple times a week, as does the 10 p.m. newscast.

3. Find an internal social media guru, and let that person lead the charge. Ryan Vaughan, the station’s chief meteorologist, has embraced social media but has also told others in the building to run with it and see what they could figure out. New employees get training in KAIT’s three-screen approach (TV, Web, mobile).

4. Make sure your website is updated often and the stories also get shared on the appropriate social media. “If we think it’s something that’s going to get passed around, it goes to Twitter; if it’s going to get commented on, it goes to Facebook.”

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Link to anyone

Posted in Online media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 1, 2010)
I recently saw a journalist’s Facebook status update expressing reservations about linking to a story on the website of “a competitor” news organization. That journalist wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to say that, but it’s outdated thinking, for two reasons.

Most importantly, online, your ability to provide links to compelling stories, video and other content is what keeps people coming back to you, whether it’s your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, etc. etc. On the Web, no one cares whether you originated the story, but they care whether you are plugged in enough to the rest of the world to make their visit worth their while — and in this case, the “competitor” had simply posted a particularly juicy wire story.

Second, and the reason I put the word competitor in quote marks, is that whoever is that online your competitors are not the same as they are in the world of TV and newspapers. Your competition is everyone, every site that is trying to draw the attention of anyone. People have virtually unlimited options for how to spend their time online. Even if news online only had to compete for audience with other news online, how the public defines news is broader than the traditional media. One example from MG country: A group called Charlottesville Tomorrow covers planning and development issues in that part of Virginia, and the group has a news center set up on a Typepad site. Daily Progress editor McGregor McCance recognized that the group was all over those issues in a way his staff could not be, so he entered a partnership with the group. To varying degrees, there are individuals and groups everywhere who are intensely interested in certain issues, sometimes local, sometimes not. You can’t “compete” with them, and shouldn’t try. Pick your shots where it’s important, and if someone else has something interesting but not important enough for you or your staff to divert time to it, don’t be afraid to link to it.

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Facebook – it’s everywhere you want to be

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Nov. 23, 2010)
On Monday business and marketing strategist Brian Solis posted an analysis of Facebook’s explosive growth, and his thoughts on the larger social implications (plus the implications for Google). It’s indirectly a good argument for the importance of Facebook for a news organization’s audience engagement. Within the piece are some stats that drive home how many sites of all kinds have added Facebook features:

More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform.

150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

According to comScore, Facebook traffic soared by 55.2% in the past year, hitting 151.1 million in October.

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More tips for engaging the audience

Posted in Online media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Nov. 11, 2010)
Poynter.org has a good post today on ways to get people to contribute good content to your site. But I have a beef with the title, because many people are going to look at “content” and think the tips apply to getting people to send in stories, photos, video, etc. They apply to everything, from in-person conversation to interviews to simple comments on stories or Facebook updates all the way up; it’s just trickier online. (Ironically, tip No. 1 is to avoid using the term “user-generated content,” which I’d broaden to avoiding the word “content” as much as possible, though it can’t always be avoided.)

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Some news organizations use Facebook well

Posted in Broadcast media, Print media, Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Oct. 19, 2010)
And then there is The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. I don’t mean to pick on that paper, but the blog Journalistics posted a listing of the number of Facebook fans of the nation’s largest newspapers, and The Star-Ledger had just 372 (although today it’s up to 381, probably people who saw the list). You as an organization have got to be making a serious effort to avoid using Facebook to have numbers that low. For example, the Facebook page of The Weekly Observer in South Carolina shows 1,167 fans. (TBO.com, the site affiliated with both The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, ranks 17th on Journalistics’ list.) Examining these two actually shows a lot about what to do and what not to do.

On the not-to-do side there is just one, but it’s a biggie: The Star-Ledger simply does not post very often. Five times all year, as of the time I’m writing this. The only thing they are doing write is including links.

So what does The Weekly Observer do right? A lot of it is the opposite of The Star-Ledger: frequent posting. From 12:30 p.m. Monday to now, there have been four posts. The paper is a weekly, but this fan page gets daily attention. And everything has a link. As noted yesterday, posts carrying images and links not only get more clicks, they elevate your posts in the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine whether your fans even see what you posted.

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Trust and relevance

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , , , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted July 12, 2010)

An online media consultant makes a powerful case that ews organizations that fail to engage their audience in social networks are shortsighted. First, the relevant behavior:

“Ask someone under 30 what websites they visit first thing in the morning.  They’ll list a number of social networking and aggregation sites.  Most of them don’t actually visit media sites at all.  Rather, they’ve come to know that ‘If the news is important, it will find me.’  And, they’re unlikely to outgrow this behaviour.  That’s why according to Compete, Facebook now beats Google as a referral site to large portals such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN.

“Social media is a media site’s new best friend.  In fact, a recent Hitwise study revealed that over 75% of Facebook referrals will return to print and broadcast media sites in the same week.  Twitter is the fastest growing video referrer and it’s users watch a stream for 63% longer than a Google user.”

Then, the argument:

“Why is social media so powerful?

“Two reasons. Trust: we don’t send our friends crap to read. Relevance: we’re more likely to have common interests with our social network and therefore our links are more likely to be relevant.

“Ah, trust and relevance. Sound familiar?”

By refusing to listen to and engage their audience by ignoring social media, limiting comments and erecting pay walls, she argues, “they are destroying trust and hastening their irrelevance. They are destroying the core, not protecting it.”

Yes, it takes time to pay attention to Facebook and the rest, but don’t let it languish.

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How Web-first publication looks at a small newsroom

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 21, 2010)

After all the cuts every newsroom in the country has made in recent years, “We don’t have enough people to do that” may be the most-used sentence (or thought) in response to any suggested change, especially asking newsrooms to start posting to Facebook and/or Twitter posts and the Web throughout the day. The editor of the 6,000-circulation paper in Middletown, Conn., says she heard it, but she found a way to get her staff started. Her staff, besides her, consists of three copy editors, two people in sports, and an unspecified but obviously small number of reporters, so it’s larger than I would expect most 6,000-circulation papers have, but not by much. Consider her general approach and see if any of it could work for you. Consider especially that when her copy editors said they didn’t have time to do their regular work plus the Web work, she changed everyone’s jobs, including her own — and let the editors themselves work together to figure out how to accomplish the new work.

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Socialize your promos

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted April 21, 2010)

Among the experiments in Media General newsrooms for using social media to promote upcoming content, Sara Diamond of WJHL has started using a webcam to make 1 1/2-minute promos for Facebook saying what stories the station is working on. Many TV stations — and some newspapers — do these kinds of promos for their websites. Posting them to your Facebook fan page as well just makes sure they are in more places and are more likely to be seen by more people.

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