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Posts Tagged ‘social’

Keeping an eye on different audiences

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

(Originally posted on April 26, 2011)
An article from emarketer.com (Nicole McMullin of Richmond.com pointed it out) points up differences in the reading habits of two audiences: those who find content through searches, and those who find it through links in social media such as Facebook. Links from social media are far outnumbered by search, but social media is much more likely to link to news and entertainment stories, which happen to be an awful lot of what we do.

The issue is that people who come in via links in social media “have fewer page views per session and a higher bounce rate” — they are less engaged than people who come in from a search link.

It seems that the lesson in this simply is to pay attention to both your social media links and what you are doing to optimize your site for search engines to find your content. You can’t drop social media because that’s the forum where people are most likely to want to share what they find interesting, but you can’t ignore SEO because that’s how people who might be the most interested in a particular topic you are covering will find your story.

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Case study: What NOT to do on Facebook

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

(Originally posted on April 11, 2011)
WABC in New York unintentionally served up a great lesson Sunday in the wrong way to use social media in newsgathering, posting a cryptic question seeking anyone who knew someone on a specific flight. There was no mention of what prompted the request, but it doesn’t take a nervous disposition to envision, oh, a plane crash, for instance. When the station’s fans pointed out the needless panic the station was causing, the station didn’t help matters much, posting only “Everyone is safe.” The station took a beating online, and you can bet it will take a while for its fans to get over the sting and for the station to regain whatever level of respect it had in their eyes before this.

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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

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

(Originally posted on Jan. 18, 2011)
It hasn’t worked this way for me, but one of the many branches of the Pew Research Center says that Internet users are far more likely to be active in real-world social groups. And I think most of the groups they’re talking about don’t involve dressing up in medieval garb. So why am I posting this is a news blog? Just as a way of reminding us all that people are active in their social networks, and people talk about things casually among friends, including topics in the news. Besides, I had to update this blog. I’ve had a cold and been away a while.

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7 deadly sins

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

(Originally posted on Dec. 30, 2010)
Gina Chen, who among other things contributes to the Nieman Journalism Lab, has a post on her own blog listing what she calls the seven deadly sins of social media use for journalists. It’s just another way of saying the same things about “do this” and “don’t do that,” but if you are someone who is still looking for guidance and “best practices,” every different way you hear these things is helpful. In summary:

Pride – If you’re proud of yourself for having social-media presence, don’t be. Do you have exchanges with your audience? If there’s not back-and-forth going on, you’re falling short.

Greed – On Twitter, do you like having a lot of followers but don’t follow that many people yourself? If so, you’re greedy.

Envy – If a “competitor” beats you to a legitimate story, link to it. I’ve explained this one just recently.

Wrath – That would be responding to the trolls who bait you in site comments. Gina quotes some advice from the Bible: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.”

Lust – Another term for this would be linkbaiting — posting or tweeting something trashy or vapid that will get a rush of traffic but does nothing for long-term audience engagement.

Gluttony – I think she was stretching on this one, which she defines as having too many overspecialized sites or feeds. I’m not sure that’s a big issue nowadays.

Sloth – Just what it sounds like: Not taking time to try to make social media useful.

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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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Retweeting the competition

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 13, 2010)
Lost Remote posted a survey:

“Last week we posted an entertaining Twitter exchange between competing TV stations in Seattle, and ‘Zhendirez’ left the comment, ‘Heck, I retweet the competition when they have something interesting that I know we won’t.’ So what do you think? When (if ever) should a news organization retweet something from a competing news organization?”

For the record, I’ve always believed in the soundness of the theory that retweeting the competition (all competition, all platforms) tells people you are plugged into the news, no matter where it comes from, and they come to think of you as the premier news source. No one, however, encourages retweeting mere rumors.

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Don’t let this happen to you (sound familiar?)

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

(Originally posted on Oct. 7, 2010)

You know, the first three paragraphs say it better than I could:

“‘Epic battle between cows, bear caught on cam.’

“The headline was a web site manager’s page view dream, and when a Eugene, Oregon TV station posted the story to its site, it took less than 24 hours to be republished by ABC and AP affiliate web sites nationwide.

“The only problem was that the person and the place in the story were both wrong, exposing countless stations to potential liability for copyright infringement. How it happened is a valuable lesson to anyone in the content publication and aggregation business in a new world where social media accelerates viral stories. ”

There’s a whole string of errors. It’s worth sending around to anyone on staff who has authority to pull in user-generated content.

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Technologies that changed journalism

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 28, 2010)

The 10,000 Words blog has a post on key technologies that have aided in the transformation of news (the post’s title actually says they “changed journalism forever”). More accurately, they changed how we report and deliver the news. The oldest “technology” on the list is also the one that arguably is having the biggest effect on the business: Friendster is listed at No. 2 for being the grandaddy of social networking.

Does the list leave anything out?

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A fair definition of engagement

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

(Originally posted on Sept. 22, 2010)

Joy Mayer of the Reynolds Journalism Institute had a conversation with Steve Buttry, director of community engagement at TBD.com, about what engagement means since “engagement” is a word much in use in media circles today and is, after all, the focus of Steve’s job title. Highlights of the answer:

“He says engagement comes down to two-way communication, along with a feeling of affiliation. When a media company is engaged with its community, that’s a meaningful relationship — one that doesn’t involve a ‘we know what’s good for you’ gatekeeper’s attitude. It’s reciprocal, and valued.

“… Communities want to be engaged with each other, Steve says. They want to share a collective experience. TBD is experimenting with what the sharing of a collective experience looks like in the digital world, as a media company.”

When reading that post, some of you may stop cold at the fact that Steve has a staff of six doing all this engaging. Don’t let that stop you — they are trying to engage Washington, D.C., and a network of 167 bloggers. The important takeaway is the two-way communication part.

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