Continuing with our links posts in the lead up to news:rewired – noise to signal, here is a collection of resources for session 2B, which will look at social media strategy – how news organisations and journalists are using social media platforms to report and engage with online communities.
Speakers on the panel will include Jack Riley, head of digital audience and content development, the Independent; Robin Hamman, director of digital, Edelman and Mark Jones, global communities editor, Reuters News.
In session 1B we’ll already have looked at how journalists can use social media to source news, and the filtering tools to bring this information into a news organisation, but what should they be putting out on these channels and how can they measure the impact of their online reputation?
Topical blog posts:
- Over on the Guardian Data Blog an analysis of more than 82,000 tweets by journalists and UK media sources, carried out by Tweetminster, offers up a great visualisation showing exactly how the UK media used Twitter to report on different stories and topics in February. You can also access the raw data in the post.
- Similarly in this follow up infographic Tony Hirst uses the Tweetminster API to gather lists of UK political and current affairs journalists, found out who they follow on Twitter and then used free graphic design software Gephi to visualise how they link together – raising important questions about social media networks.
- At the end of this comment article by Jeff Reifman, founder of NewsCloud, he offers some tips on what news organisations can be doing better to “prepare for the future”, including through the use of social media such as by hosting community space on the web for reader interaction around content.
- Back on the Guardian, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger outlines 15 things which he feels Twitter does “rather effectively and which should be of the deepest interest to anyone involved in the media at any level”.
- This post on the Wall Blog speaks to news:rewired speaker Jack Riley about how the Independent managed to boost referrals from Facebook by 680 per cent from January to December 2010, and 250 per cent from Twitter.
Other resources/guides:
- Poynter has a useful post looking at how newsrooms may want to develop social networking policies for journalists – an interesting side of the debate when looking at individual journalists reporting on social media platforms
- It’s time for journalists to promote a better ‘Twitter style’ – the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles looks at how journalists using Twitter (for example) to report could work to promote a certain format for different forms of reporting, such as the use of tags to denote an eye-witness account
- Media Helping Media has used Scoop.it to curate a social media kitbag, offering plenty of tools which may be of interest to journalists working on social media platforms, or looking to bring communities together around content
- Paul Bradshaw outlines on his Online Journalism Blog how to create a Facebook news feed, which could be used by news organisations to promote the work of an individual journalist (with their permission)
- On its developers blog Facebook itself outlines the different ways news organisations have been using the social media site effectively to report on stories and engage with readers, such as through implementation of the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins, or Live Stream for event coverage.
Issues to debate:
- Should a news organisation’s social media strategy differ from an individual journalist’s – and if so, how? And how can both parties work to develop what they do?
- Where do you start in developing a strategy? What should the main goals be and what are the ‘winning’ formulas for getting there?
- Beyond setting up a Twitter or Facebook account, what other functionalities of these well-known platforms should a news organisation be exploiting? And what other platforms are out there to report on in innovative ways?
- What role should a news organisation take in training/drawing up ethical guidelines, for the use of social media by its newsroom?
- And one key question for debate – how can you measure the success, and ultimately the impact, of a news organisation’s social media strategy and its online reputation?
Buy tickets for news:rewired – noise to signal at this link.