Archive for the ‘ Musing ’ Category

1
2
Oct

Just embrace it.

We are about to embark on a whole new road at my paper. A road I’m very excited about.

Not only are things going pretty well with our Twitter accounts, and fan page and all of that basic stuff, but we’ve got our first Beat Blogger, and we’re about to enter the realm of monetizing this Social Media stuff.

We may try out slipping an ad into our twitter stream like the awesome Austin Statesman has done. I rather like this unobtrusive tweet done two or three times per day that actually offers something of value to the local area.

We’re also going to begin offering interested advertisers the option to have our in-house Social Media person (me) manage their online presence – for a price.

When I was thinking about ways to bring services like Twitter and Facebook to our advertisers, my first thought was to show them how to use it. Well that’s just stupid. There aren’t many local businesses here that have the time or inclination to jump into the social media fray.

But some of them know they should and that’s where we’ll come in.

We’re hard at work trying to define this potential revenue source and figure out the best ways to approach it. I’ll write more about it once we put move forward, but I’m so excited about it that I wanted to mention it.

In other news, later this month I’ll be part of a Social Media panel for Nebraska Travel & Tourism’s annual conference. It’s the first time I’ve done something like this and I’m nervous as hell, but thrilled to be a participant.

6
23
Jul

Commenting revisted – Facebook Connect?

My newspaper removed commenting altogether. I want to bring it back but I’m facing several hurdles.

First, I will happily admit that my line of thought in the previous post about this was wrong. Offering the ‘Tweet this’ (which evolved into ‘Share this), link to our daily chat, link to letters to the editor submissions, and our forums was a failure. I took the line ‘If you’re not doing comments right at your paper, you shouldn’t be doing them at all’ to heart because we were not doing them right. We had limitations. Everything from crappy software to corporate restrictions and requirements.

I love commenting. I believed then and I still believe that allowing readers to comment on stories is valuable both for fostering the community we all so desperately want, and for generating traffic and pageviews. But I have grown wary of allowing anyone and everyone to comment anonymously. The years I have spent moderating and dealing with trolls, and getting phone calls from disgruntled people who know *my* real name, the threats, the damage done to my property – frankly it puts me off. And I no longer care about getting tons of comments. I care more about intelligent discourse. Quality over quantity.

To that end, I’ve heard again and again that the only way that will truly happen is by requiring users to register with their real names. But I’ve never found a commenting system that did that. Or one that wasn’t easy to crack and enter false info.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to think of using Facebook Connect.

This is what I’ve been mulling over all day today. I’ve been trying to look at it from all angles. Requiring readers to comment using their Facebook login, which (one would hope) is their real name, would ease my biggest problem: Trolls.  It might also appease my corporate folks who aren’t letting me put comments back unless I sit here and read/approve every single comment before making it live on the site (this is one of our holdups with returning commenting). Maybe they’d be agreeable to the Real Name aspect and let me just rely on spotchecking/report abuse flags as before.

I know one of the arguments for real name commenting is that anonymity does empower folks to say what they are really thinking (not necessarily anything troll-like) about a topic – it might give them confidence to point out something we hadn’t thought about. I don’t have a comeback for that. I think maybe one thing like this can be sacrificed if it means the level of discourse over all comments is raised.

What about folks who aren’t on Facebook? They are left out. Well, so are people who don’t have computers. Those folks can write a letter to the editor. To me, the Facebook option is a sort of weeding out process. And anyone who makes the considerable effort to create a fake FB account just to troll a smalltown newspaper website can be found and quashed pretty quickly.

Should Facebook Connect be the only option to log in and comment? What about allowing Twitter or Google Account logins? Possibly, but again, it runs the risk of the anonymity issue I’m trying to avoid.

What about the reader’s own Facebook security? Does logging into our site with it leave their Facebook page open to access by us? I don’t believe so, unless their profile is open to the public anyway. From what I’ve learned, Facebook Connect respects a user’s privacy settings.

Does this lead any of our traffic away from our site to allow comments and links to be carried on Facebook walls? I’m not sure. I’m still researching this whole thing so I’m not quite sure how it works yet. Even if it did though, is that a bad thing? People are talking about your stuff. Exposing our links to a reader’s entire friends list on Facebook only drives that much more traffic to our site as the come to check out the link.

I’m still a ways off from getting corporate approval to turn commenting back on, but I wanted to kick this idea around a bit. I want to thank @ernmander @bbelew @AnthonyMay @gmarkham @mathewi for their input this morning.

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3
22
Jun

The value of social media for newspapers

This may seem like an old topic, but it came up today at work and I wanted to talk a little about how I feel social media adds value for newspapers, even the smallest ones.

The question was basically this:

“Doesn’t adding video and photos on sites that aren’t your newspaper (ie. Twitpic, Twitvid, Facebook) put up a wall between your website/advertisers rather than draw them in?”

I suppose if you’re looking it from the dollar perspective, it does. But if you view it from the broader perspective of building reader loyalty, it does not.

The value of social media to promote our newspaper is something we really cannot afford to ignore anymore. One of the main points of social media is creating a brand with the folks who actually choose to follow us, which is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to ensure that my newspaper is everywhere our readers are, and more and more of them are on Facebook and Twitter and Friendfeed and the various apps associated with those. Doing this puts us in our readers minds as the place to come for news. I do mention our website at every opportunity on all of these places and I send them there whenever possible.

But keeping us “enclosed” and restricted to just our main website is a mistake in the Social Media arena. People share videos and photos on Twitter and Facebook using sites like Twitpic and Twitvid – especially things of a timely nature. It takes time for us to produce a 3 or 4 minute video with commentary, b-roll and captions/titles. Which is great for features or if we have notice to create it with an upcoming story etc.

But the nature of news is not always stuff you know about ahead of time. In the case of breaking news, the ability to quickly upload the videos and photos to get the actual news out to our readers who have come to expect immediacy – it should not be an issue of where we put it. We need to be able to get them the news as quickly as possible so that they come to think of us as the reliable source of info in this community. We can produce longer, better news videos once the breaking part of it has passed, and include much of the footage shot on things like Flip cams in with it. Those can be hosted on our site and enable us to put together beautiful packages people may return for time and again, or even pay for a DVD of afterward.

My videos that I have done and will do in future are of the brief, mostly raw footage, and in the case of recent tornado footage last week, my Flip videos were online for the Indy almost directly after they happened. The day after the storms, our videographer was then able to incorporate some of my own footage in a bigger video package he created for our all-encompassing coverage of the storms.

I do know that “how does it make us money” is the Big Question. But when we only focus on that, we lose sight of other benefits like reader loyalty. We need to generate as much reader loyalty online as we have for print.

The value, simply put, is loyalty and reader branding. If we can cultivate it and be everywhere the readers are, we will benefit greatly – maybe not right away, but over time. They want a richer experience online, and if you can give it to them in the manner of their choosing, they’ll be more likely to visit your main site and check out what else you’ve got to offer.

Another question I got was “If I’m a reader of your website, and I think you might have video of the recent storm, shouldn’t I just go to your website, then click on videos, and watch it?”

This is a valid question, but it misses the point of the realtime benefits of the web, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etcetera.

During the storms mentioned above, my paper and people around the state were using Twitter to post updates of the storm using the #nestorms hashtag. Twitter users were following that tag for reports, links, photos and video. They weren’t refreshing theindependent.com looking for that until the next day when we put together all of that coverage, reporter coverage, damage video etc. Twitter is realtime and that is the value. I think the #IranElection hashtag has helped more people see the value of realtime communicating and it feels like we need to be moving ni this direction.

Non-twitter users could also follow our realtime coverage on Twitter by visiting the page I set up here: http://ginewsroom.com/twitter/#nestorms which I promoted heavily when we learned storms were coming. Being able to get our news, coverage, videos and photos up fast is a value the readers appreciate. They remember that their local newspaper does this stuff and it makes them more inclined to start checking our website, seeing our ads, and trusting us to provide their local news. It fosters community spirit, involvement and loyalty.

So, there is definite value in putting the video online in other places than our website. it’s like a tease. We get you your breaking news coverage, now come to our website and see what else we can do for you.