Social Media Conference Describes Journalism
This article struck me as someone who could be talking about journalism in general, at any point in the last 100 years. I think it’s from a conference on social media, and the article is written by a social media expert. All of the points made can be applied to journalism as opposed to social media concerns.
My general point is: why did this talk happen, and what value does it add?Now read on
“Her three tips for news organisation social media success:
Be strategic.
Be different.
Strive for meaningful interactions. “Don’t be content to skate on [the] social media’s surface.”
Hmmmm….
“In focusing on being distinctive, she said that they had to pick and choose from new platforms.”
That dastardly Marconi and his new wireless transmitter platform! How do we combine all these new “radio” transmissions with telephony? Ahoy hoy?
“A lot of people will focus on traffic, but they were looking more at engagement metrics. She also said the Times asked:
Did we get something out of journalistic value? Were we there first with the story? Did we start an excellent conversation? Did we get our content out there in the global conversation?”
“Did we break a story? Did we have newspapers being sold around the world? I’m Ron Burgundy?”
“The reporter interviewed dozens of people on Facebook and had a sidebar focusing just on the comments on Facebook.”
“The reporter did a vox-pop and wrote down the responses in the article”
“In 2010, she and her team were focused on evangelising, but in 2011, her team was in demand due to events such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests.”
“In 2010 we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, but then shit started going down on twitter so we started RTing it”
“She succinctly summed up the goal of the New York Times with social media as:
Engaging users without wavering from our high journalistic standards.”
The best line is:
“The Times is also evaluating Tumblr and Quora.”
I hope that they evaluate Quora as a question-cum-answer engagement platform and possible future metric. And Tumblr as fundamentally an engagement platform, and secondly an engagement platform.
