by | June 3, 2011

New features aim to engage PalmBeachPost.com readers

Created with the philosophy that social media are more than just tools such as Twitter and Facebook, our website is launching a new section called Community Post, which focuses on our readers and their neighborhoods and allows people to share and comment on local issues.

I’ve been building Community Post behind the scenes for a few weeks, inspired by several different threads of thoughts I’ve had for a while.

Palm Beach Post reporters and editors, like those in any newsroom, receive hundreds of emails every week from readers. Many of the emails are personal grievances or spam, but many others are valid and interesting story ideas and other nuggets of information. And just because we may not always have the space we want in print to cover everything, that doesn’t mean feedback from readers has to go into a black hole.

I created Community Post as a way to capitalize on user-generated content and give readers a voice and all of those other clichés. :) Community Post isn’t a new idea, it’s just my version of it for The Palm Beach Post.

Community Post lets PalmBeachPost.com users: Continue reading →

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by | May 25, 2011

An experimental approach is key to social media success, Cox Media Group President Doug Franklin advises

During Cox Media Group President Doug Franklin’s visit today to The Palm Beach Post, among the focus areas he mentioned for strengthening the company’s digital future was social media.

Franklin said Cox properties should experiment with social media and not be afraid to try new things.

As an example, Franklin praised traffic reporter Jenni Hogan from Cox station KIRO-TV in Seattle. Hogan (@jennihogan) is thought to have the most Twitter followers in local TV news, with 30,000+ and counting.

Franklin said Hogan – a self-described fashionista who favors the color purple – started building her Twitter fan base in part by posting photos of her outfits and inviting followers to comment on them.

Hogan recently leveraged her huge following by asking people to donate items for underprivileged babies. She then hosted a “mobile tweetup” and joined a team that drove around for several hours one day to collect the donations.

Does this mean every media organization should copy this formula? Should newspaper reporters post photos of their outfits? Should teams of web producers rove the neighborhood picking up diapers? Continue reading →

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by | May 24, 2011

Twitter tips: bit.ly’s Chrome extension, real-time collaboration with Beluga, finding followers

Quick Twitter posting

Could this be better than TweetDeck for posting? I know I’m late to this party, but I recently started using Chrome and discovered the browser’s bit.ly extension.

It makes tweeting a bit.ly-shortened link even faster and easier than TweetDeck. Basically, when I’m on a URL I want to tweet, all I have to do is click the little bit.ly fish icon on the upper right and I get a pop-up window with:

  • the URL shortened via my bit.ly account of choice
  • the tweet filled out with the story’s headline, which I can edit

and then tweet right from my browser.

This short video shows you how:

Real-time social media collaboration

As an experiment, I rounded up a team across different departments last month at The Palm Beach Post to use real-time social media collaboration via group text message for coverage of SunFest, West Palm Beach’s big annual music and arts festival.

To keep our new @SunFestPulse Twitter account hopping throughout the five-day festival, eight of us used the group-chat app Beluga on our cellphones to pitch in and post more than 200 updates, retweets and interactions with festival-goers.

With the dedicated Twitter account, we picked up 175 followers along the way, had some nice back-and-forth with people and helped bring more awareness to our entertainment site, pbpulse.com.

I’m glad we did this test run in a way we could plan and control, because the knowledge and practice we picked up along the way will undoubtedly help when we want to consider using this tool in the future for a breaking-news event.

Find tweeps to follow

I often say you don’t have to tweet in order to get something out of Twitter; the microblogging service is very useful as a news feed for whatever topics interest you, professionally or personally. Now, Twitter has made it easier to find content relevant to you on its new (ish) Who to Follow page.

Related articles

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by | April 15, 2011

Quick hits from SXSW

I wrote a bit more extensively about SXSW panels in “Are your customers a crowd or a community?“, “The future of social photography” and “Gaming the news: Do ‘game mechanics’ have a place on news organizations’ websites?“, but here are some quick hits: Summaries of a few panels of interest that I attended.

The Why & How of Decentralized Web Identity

The panelists discussed the evolution of online identity as another step in the progression of numbers, such as telephone numbers, being assigned to humans. Today, more and more, the numbers are hidden and are linked behind the scenes to a real name, such as a Facebook profile. The relatively new “Log in with Facebook” tool, popular on websites run by non-technical folks, was called a “gateway drug” because of its ease of use. As a result, more and more web apps are being built on the Facebook platform, making it the “last monolithic social network” we’ll see, the panelists claimed.

Bloggers vs. Journalists: It’s a Psychological Thing

Lincoln Steffens, American muckraking journalist

Lincoln Steffens, classic muckracking journalist (Wikipedia)

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen based his panel on his 2005 blog post, Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. He says the battle between bloggers and journalists persists because of fears of traditional media’s demise.

Rosen’s panel consisted mostly of a PowerPoint of snarky quotes by journalists, such as:

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

- Bill Keller, New York Times (March 10, 2011)

Rosen says bloggers are actually more similar to journalism’s ancestors, like Lincoln Steffens, than today’s “newsroom superegos” who unnaturally pretend to have no personality or point of view. “”No one ever went into journalism because they said, ‘I’m kind of a detached person and have a passion for being objective,’” Rosen said.

Hacking the News: Applying Computer Science to Journalism

Panelists discussed the currently fashionable model for posting news online, in which the traditional monolithic story is broken down into chunks of information that can be displayed and recombined in various ways. This concept isn’t new; CMGd in Atlanta is building our new web software upon the idea. Working with news as data allows for pages such as Google’s “Living Stories” format, a wiki-like structure that offers multiple points of entry and the possibility of automatically pushing updates to readers who opt in.

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by | April 8, 2011

Are your customers a crowd or a community?

Last month, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, a gathering place to share information and ideas about web-development trends. I’m recapping information and thoughts from SXSW in a series of blog posts.

Social media is such a trendy field that it’s easy to get sucked into “shiny new toys” mania, the belief that the latest, hottest app or tool or website is the key to social media magic.

As people grow more weary of social media “gurus,” there’s growing interest in a more down-to-earth, common-sense approach to connecting with audiences and users. Much of it comes down to good old customer service, says Thomas Knoll, self-described “community architect.”

In his SXSW panel “Are Your Customers a Crowd or a Community?,” he shared his advice on how to provide that customer service.

Sreejith K / flickr

A crowd, he says, is fueled by pride and inspiration, and seeks short-term benefits. A crowd sticks around as long as there’s something in it for them.

Knoll didn’t mention this specifically, but his description of a crowd reminded me of the popularity of contests to increase social media followers.

I see nothing inherently wrong with such promotions, but some media companies and others have learned the hard way that obsessing only about follower count – and ignoring who’s actually following you – can leave you with an unengaged, not very valuable audience.

They came to you because they wanted their free widget, but they may not necessarily be that interested in you.

Meanwhile, Knoll says, people in a community are fueled by purpose, seek to belong, and are influence-powered. They’re more likely to remain loyal, because they’re not in it only for immediate benefits.

These are the kind of social-media followers we want.

To foster a sense of community, Knoll suggests: Continue reading →

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by | April 4, 2011

The science of timing: When to post on Twitter and Facebook

Dan Zarrella, social media scientist

Dan Zarrella, social media scientist

HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist,” recently offered a webinar to summarize his research on the best times to post content to Facebook and Twitter.

Describing a lot of the social-media information out there as vague “unicorns and rainbows” advice like “Engage with your audience,” Zarrella uses real data to analyze what works best for Facebook and Twitter posts.

Zarrella also included advice for the timing of emails and blog posts, though this recap will include only social media.

Much of his social media advice was similar to a webinar he offered last summer. You can replay the latest webinar or view the slides here, but here’s a summary of his main takeaways:

Twitter

  • The most common times for retweeting are between 2 and 5 pm, later in the week. But clickthrough rates tend to be about the same every day of the week, so don’t be afraid to post links on weekends.
  • Clickthrough rates are roughly the same at different times of the day, with slight peaks around 11 a.m. Continue reading →

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by | March 28, 2011

The future of social photography

This month, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, a gathering place to share information and ideas about web-development trends. I’ll recap information from SXSW in a series of blog posts and invite comments and brainstorming for each topic. So please join in!

When is a picture more than just a picture? When it has information embedded in it the way a bar code stores data about merchandise on a store shelf, an image becomes a multidimensional object that can be used various ways across the digital universe.

Today’s cameras, especially the ones that come with our smartphones, already add location to images automatically, a process called geotagging. This latitude and longitude data makes it easy to map images on photo-sharing sites, other social networks and more.

For instance, searching Flickr for geotagged photos for The Post’s ZIP code, 33405, shows us a rainbow of West Palm Beach-y snapshots (click on the image above to view larger). By the way, it also tells us that most Flickr users who upload geotagged images in our neighborhood are zoo visitors. Continue reading →

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