1. SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACH
Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education
Saturday, November 7, 2009
2. How Journalists Can
Use Social Networking
• Content distribution.
• Social Linking.
• Crowdsourcing.
• Finding sources.
•A central hub for facilitating discussion on a topic.
• Connecting with a community.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
3. Content Distribution
• Sending your content out
through as many places as
possible.
• Keep it topical, specific, and
sporadic. (don’t turn it into an
RSS feed)
• Content is king.
• Don’t automate, be a filter.
Use good news judgement.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
4. Social linking
• You can include these links on the
bottom of each story, however
generally the stuff that gets picked is
usually the best content.
• Use these sites to understand how
they work, what rises to the top.
• The demographics vary from site to
site. Figure out the community and
what they respond to.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
5. Crowdsourcing
• Works best if you build a
large audience/following.
Utilize student base.
• Think about the audience
you are asking.
• Questions open to opinion,
ideas tend to work best.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
6. Finding Sources (research)
• Use the natural filter of social
networks to help you find
links to your questions.
• People usually weed through
the crud, and only the best
content reaches the top.
• Searches looking for the “best
of ” usually work.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
7. Finding sources
• Identify the demographics for
each social network (MySpace
vs Facebook vs Twitter, etc.)
• Build cachet with groups early.
• Join groups and networks
related to the topic. Seek out
sites and communities related
to the issue.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
8. Create a central hub for discussion
• Create a Facebook page,
Flickr group, Ning group,
Yahoo group or even a blog
around a topic.
• Link out to other similar sites/
groups. Become a part of the
community.
• Maintain and update often.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
9. Connecting with a community
• Join existing groups (Yahoo
groups, Facebook groups,
subscribe to YouTube
channels, Web sites.
• Be transparent with your
reporting.
• Add to the conversation, so
you become a contributor/
member of the community.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
10. “It’s easier to join a conversation
online than to start one”
Saturday, November 7, 2009
12. Facebook Connect
• Access to users Facebook data when they are logged into
Facebook.
• Give users the opportunity to publish a story, invite their
friends, or send an event from your site. Their friends click
back to your site.
• Allows people to update their FB status from your site.
• Use Facebook login so they don’t have to register for your site.
• Pull data from a person’s Facebook page to your site.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
13. Huffington Post
• Traffic doubled last year, to 9.4 million
unique visitors, surpassing Washington
Post’s 9.2 million and catching up to
NYT’s 21.5 million uniques.
• Facebook referrals accounted for 3.5
million of those visits.
• Now 15% of comments on the site
are through Facebook Connect.
• “As some large newspapers have lost
readers, the fact that HuffPo was able
to grow — especially in a non-election
year — seems at least partly
attributable to Connect.”
- InsideFacebook
Saturday, November 7, 2009
15. Examples
Comments Sign on with FB Personalize
• CNN Money • GirlsGuideTo • Digg.com
• Huffington Post • GovIt • Frenzied Waters
• TechCrunch • CitySearch • NewsMixer
Saturday, November 7, 2009
16. Facebook API
http://developers.facebook.com/
• Get simple widgets for your
site or blog.
• Use Facebook Connect for
integrating features from
Facebook into your own site.
• Build mobile applications or
applications that run within
Facebook.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
17. Facebook Fan Page
• Really easy to create.
• People won’t automatically
find it. Have to leverage
other networks to get
people to become fans.
• People will see when
someone becomes a fan,
likes a piece, etc.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
18. FLICKR API
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
Saturday, November 7, 2009
19. Flickr services
• Create Flickr pools so that people can add their own photos
to your group.
• Search keywords and find photos related to topics of interest.
Aggregate those photos on your site.
• Photo storage/linking. The photos automatically have metadata
added by Flickr when you upload.
• Utilize GeoRSS features with Flickr.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
20. Flickr API
• API allows you to pull photos
from a search string.
• Pull photos from groups/sets/
galleries/users, etc.
• Best of all... photos are geo-
coded, tagged, organized.
• Just add &georss=true to the end
of an RSS feed.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
21. Flickr Widgets
• Click on the Flickr Slideshow and
it will give you embed code.
• Use RSS feeds to build your own
widgets using other sites (like
widgetbox.com)
• Post group photos on your own
site.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
23. News Near You
• YouTube launched service that
geocodes the location of the
youTube uploader, and shows
content near your location.
• 100-mile radius, uses Google
News to identify users.
• Find people who are using
YouTube, also help engage the
community.
http://www.youtube.com/news
Saturday, November 7, 2009
24. Other uses of videos
• YouTube Reporters’ Center
has tutorials on how to do
journalism. (online j-school)
• YouTube partnered with CNN
during the presidential
primaries to crowdsource
questions to the candidates.
• YouTube has a video response
mechanism built-in. Like
comments, but video.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
25. YouTube Tricks:
View high quality videos
• Just append &fmt=18 to the end of the URL for high quality
standard definition.
• Append &fmt=22 for HD high quality version.
• Append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the URL of the embed
code for high quality standard definition.
• Append &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the URL for HD quality.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
26. YouTube Tricks:
Embedding parts of a video
• Append &start=30 to the end of the URL to skip to the first
30 seconds of video.
• Or add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY
seconds) to embed that specific time of the video.
• Need to download YouTube? Change “youtube” to
“kickyoutube” in the URL.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
27. TWITTER
New features on the horizon
Saturday, November 7, 2009
28. “Lists” feature just launched
• Aggregate a list of people
who tweet into a single feed.
• Find new followers around a
central topic, or create a list
around a topic of interest.
• Display tweets from a group
on your site.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
31. Geocoding individual tweets
• Twitter has plans to add
geocoding to individual tweets.
Right now it’s by account and
can change often.
• Identify where people posted
tweets from.
• Collect data, use map
visualizations.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
32. Twitter Search
• http://search.twitter.com However, it only goes back about a
week.
• http://www.bing.com/twitter Tries to find topics and links
within Tweets.
• http://www.google.com Search “[query] site:twitter.com”
Saturday, November 7, 2009
33. Web 2.0 Summit: Content
& search get social
Play Conference: Gaming
is getting social
Social Networking is #1 growth
area in marketing, eMarketing
Saturday, November 7, 2009