This weekend, I was fortunate to be invited to speak to the Kiplinger Fellowship program at Ohio State University. Twenty-four working journalists are learning new skills and strategies on social media, new media tools and community engagement.
My presentation, featured after the jump, is aimed at reporters to help them better connect with audiences, brand themselves and work more efficiently in the social sphere. I hope others may find it helpful/interesting.
In preparing for my exit from TBD (more on that later), I’ve been training those who will be taking over my duties in communicating as the brand. I thought it might be useful to those who are learning this at their own news organizations to include my training documentation and thoughts on the blog over the next few days.
Note: I’m no social media guru or anything (they don’t exist anyway), but I have quite a bit of experience at setting social media strategy, establishing a brand identity and communicating as a news brand from my time at the Cincinnati Enquirer and TBD.
Most of the individuals I’ve been training for this are fairly experienced Twitter and Facebook users, but they have no experience in using social media as entities other than themselves. It makes quite a difference. When communicating as The Voice of the Organization (cue dramatic music), one has to essentially channel the persona of the brand and speak in its voice.
While it really isn’t possible to keep the exact same voice when several people are communicating as the brand, a steady brand persona can be maintained if you have a plan in place. So let’s get into all that first.
The key to communicating as a news brand – especially when many people are behind the curtain – is to have a set persona in mind. If the brand were a person, who would they be? What are their interests? How would they talk? What would their priorities be?
For TBD, for instance, the brand persona is that of a conversational, young, urban-dweller who is in the know but isn’t a know-it-all. The tone is casual, straight-forward, occasionally snarky or sarcastic, but only in the context of funny or feature news. He/she is sort of geeky, curious and enthusiastic to receive and share info.
Some brand managers will establish full identities for the brand, specifying how old he/she would be, where they’d live, economic status, etc. In the case of Colonel Tribune, for instance, a whole identity and background was set up to serve as the account persona. While you don’t have to go into nearly as much detail, it’s good to have answers in mind for the following:
There’s nothing worse that following the Twitter feed of a news organization without a strategy. It’s plainly obvious to anyone thats following (especially if they happen to be the competition) if you’re flying blind: Tweeting local news on a national account, sending out misleading links to stories that are out of your area (or off your website), re-tweeting whoever and whatever strikes your fancy, etc.
A strategy for communicating as the brand can be as detailed or simple as you need it to be, but consider these questions when laying it all out:
Once you’ve stablished the kind of news and reader the account is for, set a strategy for what you’ll send out and stick to it.
Other brand managers, what would you suggest to help set a tone or strategy?
More info: Tips for Tweeting/Facebooking as the Brand, Guidelines for Audience Interaction as the Brand
Here’s the transcript of my journalism jobs chat on Poynter.org Tuesday. There were a lot of great questions about what I do as a social media editor, the workflow, metrics, handling criticism and managing corrections.
We had more than 200 participants and more questions that I could get to in one sitting. If anyone has a question that didn’t get addressed, I’ll be happy to answer it in the comments.
Pew released a new study on Twitter demographics today that found only 8 percent of Americans on the web use Twitter. Of that 8 percent, only 2 percent use Twitter on a typical day. Keep in mind that about 74 percent of American adults are internet users, meaning that the Twitter users make up about 6 percent of the entire adult population.
This news shouldn’t be surprising, but maybe it is to those who live in the Twitter echo chamber.
When all of your friends, your coworkers, your spouse and the media you consume are on Twitter, it may seem logical to believe a great deal of America is as well. This is a dangerous assumption for journalists and media organizations to make – and I know I’ve been guilty of it from time to time.
While I still think it is very important for journalists to use Twitter, the following facts must be emblazoned on the brains of media Twitterati:
Now, the study. The Pew study did find some interesting demographic tidbits that should be making us rethink how we approach the tool.
When Storify appeared on the collective journalism screen a few weeks back at TechCrunch Disrupt, it inspired a lot of oohs, ahhs and speculation as to how it would work for journalists.
There are similar curation tools out there, like KeepStream and Curated.by, though they focus primarily on collecting tweets (Correction: KeepStream also allows for Facebook integration). Storify, on the other hand, allows a user to organize various media (text, documents, video, images) and social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into an orderly, linear presentation. The story pieces retain all of their original links and functionality – and the full presentations are embeddable on any site. It has a very easy-to-use search for social media keywords and works using a drag-and-drop functionality. In other words – it’s easy multimedia for even the most technologically challenged journalist.
It has a couple of downfalls, the biggest of which, to me, is the lack of hard timestamps on content from Twitter (though that’s largely Twitter’s fault).
In the weeks since the Nieman Lab actually used Storify to explain Storify, many journalists and bloggers have taken the opportunity to experiment with the tool – with incredibly varied results. Here’s a few interpretations of just how Storify has been and can be used in journalism.
1. Organizing reaction in social media. The Washington Post gathered reaction from Twitter and Facebook to the resignation of Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee last week. While there are a lot of tools once could use to do this (Quote URL, Twitter search, Cover it Live), the Storify approach looks very clean and was likely very fast to put together. It’s a great tool for on-the-fly curation from various social media sources.
2. Giving back-story using past content. PBS NewsHour had a different take on Rhee’s resignation. Going beyond the basic topic archive page, their piece created a summary of Rhee’s past challenges with DCPS, weaving in stories, videos and scripts from their archives with some curated social media reactions. It is similar to a traditional story in its scope, giving the full background on Rhee’s tenure with reaction quotes via social media.
3. Curating topical content. NYU Studio 20’s East Village used Storify and a very sharp web presentation to create SocialDiningNYC, a site that has collect and curated information on NYC restaurants. Each venue has it’s own Storify line collecting reviews, reactions, media and info – and each file is linked from a primary hub site. The key to making this look nice was the consistency with which each Storify file was built and worded.
4. Displaying a non-linear social media discussion or chat. Penn Professor and Wired blogger Tim Carmody used Storify to illustrate an amusing Twitter quest he took on to get a few key social media contacts to follow him. He pulled together the entire back-and-forth between him, the people he was trying to engage and his current followers. It looks a lot better than TweetSpat (and involves more characters) and it makes the conversation seem more linear than it likely did in real time. This is a fun idea – and it could be great for archiving Twitter chats into some modicum of sense.
5. Creating a multimedia/social media narrative. Last Friday, I used Storify at TBD to make sense of an ever-changing series of events involving a death outside popular Washington D.C. nightclub DC9. In the course of one day, the story took a lot of twists and turns, illustrated in the narrative by tweets (from both news orgs and those reacting), photos, video and documents. Reading down the story, you can get a feel for how the events developed and evolved in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to more traditional narrative stories. I talked a little bit more about the story behind this piece to the Nieman Storyboard, if you want to know more.
6. Organize your live tweets into a story: Michael Margolis of GetStoried used Storify to tell the story of his time spent at the National Storytelling Festival. He weaves in quotes and experiences from the scene as tweets from throughout the day. I could see this as being very useful for reporters who live tweet press conferences, government meetings and events. Using this method, those reporters could focus on Twitter in real-time, then build a story from those tweets (and others’) when the event is over.
7. Collaborate on a topic with readers. Seamus Condron of ReadWriteWeb tested out Storify with RWW’s Twitter followers. He posed the question “My day would be a lot easier if Twitter…”. The story builds out from there with responses to the prompt from followers, @RWW replies and contextual info from other media in response to reader contributions.
These are likely just the beginning of what’s been done or could be done using Storify. I have dreamed up a few more ideas if you’d like to think about using this tool on your site.
8. Create a timeline of events. I know from experience that it can be a big pain to build an attractive online timeline without the aid of a designer. I think Storify’s interface would be a quick way to pull in text and other content into a timeline format that could look nice without any fancy HTML.
9. Display audience content from across platforms. Say you’re asking your readers to give you photos, videos and reactions based around an event or topic. You put out this call on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and on your site. Instead of gathering all of this content and re-publishing it on-site, you can organize all of those updates, comments, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitpics and emailed-in multimedia into one Storify file without any CMS nonsense.
10. Live curate live tweets from the stream. If you have multiple reporters or sources live-tweeting a news event, pull them together quickly and in an order that makes sense in Storify. Sure, you could pull all of their tweets or use a hashtag using other means, but this way you could choose to select only some tweets – and it wouldn’t matter who used a hashtag or not, as you can search for tweets via keyword.
On October 15, I used Storify at TBD to make sense of an ever-changing series of events involving a death outside popular Washington D.C. nightclub DC9.
In the course of one day, the story took a lot of twists and turns, illustrated in the narrative by tweets (from both news orgs and those reacting), photos, video and documents. Reading down the story, you can get a feel for how the events developed and evolved in a way that’s not entirely dissimilar to more traditional narrative stories.
I talked a little bit more about the story behind this piece to the Nieman Storyboard, if you want to know more. Here’s the Storify:
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As part of their 35th anniversary, Poynter is crowdsourcing a list of the 35 most influential people in social media. They ask people to write Facebook notes or tweets recommending people for the list, with votes to come via re-tweets and likes.
This kind of voting system makes it very likely that we’ll see the 35 usual suspects on the list when it’s all said and done: Vadim Lavrusik, Robert Quigley, Andy Carvin, Craig Kanalley and my boss, Steve Buttry, I’m sure, will be shoo-ins. It’s with this in mind I want to recognize people many voters in this group probably won’t know, but who’ve influenced my approach to social media more than just about anyone else.
#1 & #2 (tie): Kevin Dugan & Daniel Lally
I put these two guys together because their influence is interconnected in so many ways. I got into social media as we know it in mid-to-late 2007. In January of 2008, I joined the budding Cincinnati chapter of the Social Media Breakfast, founded by Kevin Dugan & Dan Lally – it expanded my world.
It’s a rare occasion for a journalist to admit to learning from the world of marketing and PR, but at that time, that’s who dominated Twitter and Facebook – and these two were pros. Not only did they personally teach me so much about how to engage audiences with measurable (and immeasurable) results thanks to their experiences in brand marketing, but through Cincy SMB, they introduced me to many others who were experimenting with social media as well. I know for a fact I would have never grown past tweeting about my lunch if not for these two and the learning experiences I had through Cincinnati Social Media.
Paul’s Online Journalism Blog is probably linked more than any other from this site – and for good reason. He’s always talking about issues in new media that reflect not only his experiences as a journalist in the UK (which is fascinating in and of itself), but also what’s affecting new media across the world. OJB’s explanatory posts on social media projects, tool how-tos, new policies and those who seek to shut such things down have been a constant source of ideas and inspiration for me. Also, in 2009, Paul founded Help Me Investigate, a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. Hard to top that.
#4: Jack Greiner
Jack’s not a journalist, a marketer or even a social media acolyte – he’s a media lawyer for Graydon Head & Ritchey in Cincinnati, OH. He’d frequently hold sessions for the Cincinnati Enquirer staff on potential legal issues in regards to social media. Unlike other presentations I’d seen on the subject, he didn’t seek to scare journos away from social media altogether (no matter how much they would have rather he did). He made us think about what we were doing as being no different than any other facet of journalism – and in doing so, he inspired me to pursue more research in the area. He gets a bonus vote for always being kind enough to take my incessant questions on points of case law.
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Also, I have to give a shout out to Sarah Fidelibus, who named ME, of all people, as one of her picks for most influential people in social media. She said some nice things about ZJ, which is great to hear. I hope it’s been a helpful/interesting/funny read for the rest of you, too.
Every election since I started my professional career has led the news organization I was working for at the time to say, “We really should have a map of election problems.” Then we’d build some UGC map held together by virtual duct tape. Sound familiar?
User-populated maps have come a long way in the past few years thanks to lots of free technology available on the web. Google Maps, for instance, was a early precursor that still has a lot of utility today. See my [very impressive] map for free donuts as a good (and yes, silly) example of a quick Google collaborative map.
In 2008, Ushahidi (which is Swahili for “testimony” – the more you know) made its debut in mapping post-eletion violence in Kenya . The mapping tool allowed for user to add reports to the map using SMS, email and on-site forms. They’ve since added support for reports via Twitter hashtag.
While they’ve had great success in mapping international crises (like the Haiti Rescue Efforts) and domestic trends (like the Atlanta Crime Map), the main problem with Ushahidi is that it isn’t altogether quick or easy to get a map set up. The software is free and open source, but you need to have a server and programming know-how to get it going.
Thankfully, Ushahidi recently launched a stripped-down, hosted version of it’s mapping tool called Crowdmap. In about 10 minutes, you can have a user-contributed map up and running with no programming know-how and no server.
WMATA Problem Map
Reports submitted on-site flow in to a back-end queue that’s easy to publish as verified or unverified reports. Messages sent via email or Twitter can be converted to full map reports by an admin in a matter of a couple of minutes. All reports have an option to add photos, videos or news links to more info. You can schedule reports to publish and certain times, plus designate specific submitters (like your staff) to have their reports be auto-approved.
Crowdmap does have a couple of downsides. For one, it isn’t embeddable on your site. It has to be used on Crowdmap, though you can use a Google analytics tracking code to track traffic. It also isn’t particularly customizable, so you can’t brand it or add significant new features as you can with Ushahidi. Still, though, it’s a heckuva lot better than some of the cobbled-together maps I’ve had to put together before.
I recently built a couple of these maps for TBD.com, one for mapping Washington-area transit issues and another for monitoring polling problems on the day of D.C.’s primary elections. Neither took much time to set up and both had/have decent participation, given that we promote it on our site. We got far more Twitter reports than anything else, which is likely because we put the most effort into promoting it there. At some point, I’d like to expand our reports to include SMS contributions.
I’ll have a post soon that will walk though setting up a Crowdmap, but for now, check out the site and tinker around. It’s super easy.
It’s the end of our first week on business at TBD and, admittedly, I’m completely exhausted. We all are.
It felt like a good first week for us – we got a lot of reviews, positive and negative, from other media sites and blogs. Despite the bugs and occasional complaints, we did have the opportunity to come out of the gates with a few engagement experiments you might find helpful at your own news orgs.
We had an open Cover it Live chat on the Community Blog from 9-4 on launch day. TBD Community hosts Lisa Rowan, Jeff Sonderman, Daniel Victor and Nathasha Lim took questions, complaints and bug reports from site visitors in an open and honest fashion. They didn’t just address the positive, they also did what they could to assuage the fears of those missing the former websites for WJLA and News Channel 8, now replaced by TBD.com.
On Thursday, the Washington, D.C. area woke up to severe thunderstorms, high winds, flooding streets – and a lot of damage. While our one full-time photographer was able to get a lot of art, we knew we couldn’t be everywhere. The call was sounded for photos on Twitter and on the site – and readers responded with submissions on-site and via Twitpic.
We ended up repeating this process later in the day with a reported electrical fire near the District’s business center. I first saw reports and Twitpics of the fire on a random Twitter search for “Fire near: Washington DC”. We quickly reached out on Twitter for permission to use the photos – and we were off to the races. It was great to get such good response out of the gate.
Working with bloggers on breaking news
Around 1:30 pm Tuesday, I looked over one of my series of Twitter searches and found a tweet reporting an alleged hit-and-run by a Metrobus in Arlington, Va. I contacted the guy, Matt, via reply and asked him if he’d talk to our Arlington reporter, Rebecca Cooper. He agreed.
At 2:12, network partner site Unsuck DC Metro, who the original tweet was directed toward, had a post up with the tip.
Another partner site, ARLNow, had a story with photos and quotes from the man involved in the accident at 3:07. TBD had a story with the tipster’s report and ARLNow’s report up before 4 p.m, approximately four hours before The Washington Post or WTOP (and a hat tip to the Post for promoting the great efforts of ARLNow).
Without the tip provided by Twitter and the hustle by the bloggers in our community network, there’s no way we could have had such a story so fast. Who says bloggers aren’t journalists? Not us.
Questions submitted via Twitter hashtag
On Wednesday, TBD TV’s Newstalk program had the Democratic candidates for D.C. mayor on the program for a debate. In the hours before the 10 a.m. debate, we asked readers to submit their questions for the candidates via hashtag on Twitter. The response was more than we could fit on the program, which was great (see right).
When the debate went live on TV and online, fact-checking reporter Kevin Robillard had a live Cover it Live chat where readers could chime in with comments, ask questions and suggest facts to be checked as the candidates said them on the air.
The debate got a lot of traction on Twitter and on the chat. Kevin had some great material for The Facts Machine, which is a TBD blog dedicated to backing up or refuting questionable facts.
We hope to do a lot more projects like this in the future. Not bad for the third day out.
Once upon a time, Google Wave was the next big thing. I had high hopes for it’s use in news – but it was not to be.
Google announced Wednesday that it will stop development on the Wave project, citing a lack of user adoption. They will leave the site up through the end of the year, but probably not long after.
What went wrong? Simple: Wave started out buggy, slow and difficult to understand – and it never got better. It also never really seemed to find it’s place in the daily rituals of regular people – which was a critical problem.
Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine has a great piece about what went wrong with Wave. In short: It’s one thing for developers to love and use this product – for it to really succeed, it had to be adopted by some regular people.
On a personal level, I used Wave for a couple of months – but I always had to think, “Oh, I think I’ll go check Wave.” It didn’t make it’s way into my routines, it didn’t show up in my Gmail and it didn’t become part of my life. We forgot one another. I imagine this was the case for many people.
Even with Wave’s demise, Google certainly isn’t down or out in the world of social networking – nor should they be. Several tech watchers noted Google’s allusions to Wave-like features showing up in future projects – possibly indicating the development of Google’s rumored social networking site Google Me, which would take on Facebook head-on.
Mashable‘s Pete Cashmore is dubious about Google’s future in the social arena. He notes:
As Facebook builds a user base of more than 500 million people, it also stockpiles the personal information required to provide more comprehensive ad targeting — and a more personalized search engine — than Google could ever hope to engineer through algorithms alone.
Google Me seems to be growing past mere rumor and speculation at this point with the mercy-killing of Wave and several key acquisitions. Social media fans and developers are keeping a close eye on this project – and wondering if this time Google will have the right recipe to take their piece of the social media pie.
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