Frustration level: High

19 Oct 2009 8 Comments

by Stephin Musing, Tools of the trade, Working on the Newsroom Tags: ,

“Who cares what I had for breakfast?”

I swear, if I see that line in one more article about the positives and/or negatives of Twitter, I will scream. It’s a classic example of what makes Twitter so hard to “sell” in my newsroom and my small community.

I attended a meeting recently with several community businessmen and women where I was there to give a ‘Twitter 101′ talk. The first thing they said when I finished touting the real-time benefits, powerful search bonus and the variety of ways it could benefit small businesses, was the oft-quoted cliché above. They couldn’t get beyond it and it almost makes me angry.

Here I am trying to convince my coworkers and folks in the community that Twitter is a good thing, that it will help them in so many unexpected ways. But the only thing many of them come back with is the fact that they believe it is useless and frivolous. No, useless and frivolous is playing Mafia Wars on Facebook on company time. To be fair, several of the journalists in my newsroom have come around and are doing fantastically well with Twitter. But some… aren’t (also, none of them are playing Mafia Wars on company time ;) ).

If you’re a journalist, you can learn a metric ton of information from the hundreds of other journalists using the service. You can crowdsource on a breaking story and provide complete coverage quickly. You can enjoy the benefits of having your community guide you to new stories, resources, tips and ideas.

If you’re a businessperson, the benefits to be explored for you are plentiful. You can find out what your customers are saying about you. You can direct specials and ads at them without the blowback you might get from shoving a banner ad in their face because they *choose* to follow you and see what you have to say. You can publicize events quickly – so many good things.

Have pity on those of us in the trenches trying to get people on board with this new direction. I think we can all agree Twitter isn’t really about what you had for breakfast anymore. Twitter is what you make of it. So can we stop using that tired old cliché now? Pretty please?

Playing with Google Wave

08 Oct 2009 1 Comment

by Stephin Tools of the trade Tags:

I logged into Google Wave for the first time tonight. Right now, I’m playing with bots and stuff. Hopefully, if you have an account and are signed into the Wave, you’ll see the embedded Wave below. Well, I see it anyway.

I have been having fun playing with the Wave. Initial, total noob thoughts are “Omgomgomgomg this is so cool!” followed by “Woah, do NOT look at the public waves without a stiff drink handy.”

I had to do some Googling to try and figure out how certain things worked (like the blog bot) and whether or not I’m able to invite people (I’m not, btw. I was a nominee, not one of the original 100k.) I decided not to dip my toes in the public waves until I’ve read up on proper Wave etiquette (ie. do NOT add a bot to a public Wave or risk the wrath, man.) But until I get up the nerve to play in public, I’m enjoying what I can do all by my lonesome. I plan to spend the weekend learning all I can, and when I go back to work next week, I’m going to blow my newsroom away.

On with the embedded Wave! Again, I’m afraid right now you must be logged in to Google Wave to see the one I embedded below. Hopefully that will change once things are more stable.

Just embrace it.

02 Oct 2009 1 Comment

by Stephin Musing, Social Media

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.

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