Imagine you are an advertiser and you know you should be using tools like Twitter and Facebook but whenever you go to either site to set it up, you get overwhelmed and bewildered and you talk yourself out of it. You’re busy. You don’t have time to invest in this. You’re doing just fine without it.
Along comes your ad rep from your local newspaper and he/she has something new to offer you outside of the usual banner ads and 3X5 print ads and corner peels and interstitials (inter-huh?). This time they mention something about helping you get on tools like Twitter and Facebook. And after they do that, they tell you that for a nominal monthly fee, your business will be in prime real estate, beachfront property on their very heavily-trafficked website (Yay, AP says I can type ‘website’ now! Oh wait, I’ve been doing that for years.)
Well hell, what a deal! Sign me up!
Okay, now imagine you are me. You’re @stephromanski (I’m testing the WP plugin for @anywhere there, sorry) and you’ve begun getting these businesses set up on Twitter and Facebook. Once they’re good to go, the business person will be in charge of their own destiny there and they can tweet and/or post status updates as much as they want.
But here is your minor dilemma: You know they’ll mainly be using one of those tools, either Facebook or Twitter. So if they choose to use Facebook for all their updating, you have to feed those updates to their Twitter account so that those tweets will populate your advertiser Twitter List widget that sits on the prime beachfront property. BUT if they predominantly use Twitter to update, you have to rely on a dodgy Facebook app that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t for feeding tweets to their Facebook fanpage.
Which is the better option for the businessperson who is usually too busy and may not fully “get” how to use the tools? Which way would be easier for them?
The argument for having them use Facebook is that they are already likely to have a personal Facebook page and perhaps they sort of know their way around it whereas Twitter is completely foreign to them. I know @ev addressed Twitter’s usability at their Chirp conference and I found myself nodding furiously at that whole section of his speech.
On the other hand, if the advertiser is not on either tool, which is the best way to guide them? Fanpages are kind of a bitch to work with, IMO. It seems like it would be harder to teach them (oh yes, in addition to setting them up, you must then spend an hour or so with them and teach them how to use it) to get to and update the fanpage then it would be to teach them to open up Tweetdeck where they can handle everything.
Is it six of one, half dozen of the other? Do you tackle each advertiser individually, gauge their needs and guide them accordingly? Do you set up a system of ‘This is how you’re going to do it’ to save time?
These are the questions flying around my head right now. Any input in the comments would be greatly appreciated
For all the fuss we’ve made over commenting in the past year (and by ‘we’ I mean my newspaper), the funny thing is that since we’ve turned it back on a little over a month ago with strict moderation, we’ve had a grand total of 13 comments.
We said we would only turn them on for certain stories. Our biggest fear this whole time has been whether yours truly will be able to manage the moderating duties along with my other duties. I often pictured myself buried under an avalanche of PENDING COMMENT emails and did everything I could to push for the use of excellent self-moderating systems like IntenseDebate or Disqus. Instead, we use the quaint Town News commenting system and so far have not shut off commenting for any story – because we’re not really getting many. We actually get excited when we see the PENDING COMMENT email. But I think for right now, we’re going to just opt out of allowing commenting on certain stories when or if commenting picks up and just leave them open on everything at the moment.
Of the 13 comments we’ve received, 9 of them are in response to an editorial or letter to the editor – 3 of those from the same person. The other four are reactionary to local stories.
I find myself surprised. Did we turn it off for too long? Are we too strict? Are the readers put off by the rules? Are we just not writing stories that are comment-worthy? (I say ‘no’ to that one, we’ve definitely written stories that we thought would have oodles of comments.) Do people just not realize they can comment again? We do place the commenting on a separate tab within the story. Maybe that’s a roadblock. Have we done a poor job of promoting the fact that commenting is back? Maybe readers are just mad at us for taking it away in the first place.
We’ll continue to futz with the process and make adjustments as needed. Perhaps we’ll work on a small marketing plan to promote commenting. Perhaps the comments will pick back up and I’m just being impatient. I guess months of fear-mongering over them made me expect too much right out of the gate.
On my way to Norfolk, Nebraska where I was going to be talking to folks in the Nebraska Tourism industry about Social Media, I had to pass through Clarks, Nebraska. I’m trying to find a way to write this post without coming across as a cheesy loser, but here goes.
As many might know, the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is from Clarks, Nebraska – population: 361 give or take.
I’ve been a sort of casual “fan” of Evan’s since I began using Blogger when it was still a part of Pyra Labs and I learned the founder was from Nebby. I say “fan” with quotes because I didn’t, you know, follow his every business move, but I loved Blogger and I love Twitter and I think it’s neat that Evan’s involved in both and I think it’s even neater that he’s from Nebraska (in fact, it’s one of the ‘hooks’ I use to try and interest my newsroom into using Twitter).
As I passed through Clarks, it really struck me that someone could come from this tiny tiny place and be innovative and successful. Oh sure, there are many well-known people who have come from small towns to make it big and I applaud them all, but Clarks is close to home. It sounds cheesy as hell, I know, but I had a little moment of inspiration driving through this small farm town.
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