Here’s a social media tool that’s not just for bloggers.
There was a time not long ago that we used Twitter to send out constant, short bursts during ongoing news events.
Photo by Trekkyandy / Flickr
But while Twitter remains useful for many things, The Palm Beach Post is trying to avoiding using it to bombard people with endless updates on the same topic in a short time period.
Instead, we’re leaning more toward CoveritLive, a free web-based chat application.
Among the reasons:
- Live tweeting can be very annoying to Twitter followers.
- Twitter can crash or be slow and unreliable.
- We don’t get pageviews if we send readers to Twitter. With CoveritLive, we embed the chat on our site, and we get the pageviews.
- Our readers don’t get context, navigation or related links if we send them to Twitter. They do if we keep them on our site.
CoveritLive has been around for a while, but it may be new to some, so here’s a brief overview.
PalmBeachPost.com has used CoverItLive for chats and live-blogging on topics ranging from cash-for-clunker appliances and school board meetings to the Miami Heat and Dancing With The Stars.
Most recently, last Thursday, Post real estate reporter Kim Miller ran a one-hour chat to answer readers’ foreclosure questions. The chat lasted only an hour, but there were so many questions and comments it probably could have gone for three.
Perhaps our most ambitious and successful use of CoveritLive was our live Election Day chat with Post journalists.
The chat ran continuously for more than 17 hours, from 7 a.m. until past midnight. It got hundreds of comments and questions and thousands of pageviews, with peaks at lunchtime and at the 7 p.m. hour, though hundreds of viewers remained on the chat throughout the late night. View and replay the chat here.
Day Editor Eric Weiss and web producer Amanda Leth manned the chat during the day, with reference librarian Niels Heimeriks providing research support. At night, Digital Manager Clay Clifton and web producer Melissa Patterson took over, along with Joel Engelhardt, plus Charles Elmore pitching in on research.
They answered readers’ voting questions and posted links to endorsements, voting guides, candidates’ questionnaires, the PostonPolitics blog and more.
CoveritLive allows you to:
- Choose which reader comments and questions to publish. It’s technically a curated chat, rather than a live-streaming chat (though you can allow certain users’ comments to appear automatically). Thanks to this curation feature, for the election chat the team was able to filter out a bunch of bordering-on-racist comments about Spanish speakers.
- Post photos. For the elections chat, polling place photos from around Palm Beach County were sprinkled throughout the chat.
- Create polls. One during the elections chat asked where readers would get their final results (the majority said PalmBeachPost.com
).
- Embed a box on your blog or web page that allows readers to enter their emails and get reminders of the chat (though apparently not on WordPress.com, sigh).
- Run the chat from your iPhone.
- Publish your own live videos or embed YouTube videos into the chat box.
- Use the chat window as a Twitter widget, with tweets being either automatic or moderated. Example here.
Coming up: Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons, polls, Storify.
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