Whether you’re an individual or an organization, engaging people online is easier if you have a good toolkit. Here’s a very basic guide to how you can integrate some free/cheap popular services to join the public conversation and make sure your voice gets heard…
Recently I helped co-author a new learning module from the Knight Citizen News Network: Likes & Tweets: Leveraging Social Media for News Sites. It’s a pretty detailed resource, intended primarily for online local news startups — but the lessons there could be applied by local news orgs in legacy media, as well as anyone trying to connect with a community online.
I only played a small role in this project — the vast majority of the work was done by Susan Mernit and Kwan Booth – my Oakland Local cofounders and partners in the House of Local media consulting group.
Yesterday, Susan, Kwan & I participated in a one-hour live chat hosted by J-Lab about this learning module. You can replay the complete transcript. We got really great interaction on this. J-Lab told us that this live chat attracted far more readers and participants than its other live chats. It was fun, and I’m glad it was a success!
Form follows function — which is why when traditional journalism tries to shoehorn fast-breaking, multidirectional events that unfold via social media into traditional narrative stories, it often flattens (and sometimes skews) the experience.
This is why I like tools that allow reporters and others to break “story box” by creating real-time collages that combine original reporting and commentary with curated contributions from social media and elsewhere.
The past month, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin has been doing this via Twitter — first for the Tunisia uprising, and now with the Egyptian revolution. Today Berkman Center research Ethan Zuckerman published an excellent interview with Carvin exploring why he’s been posting an average of 400 tweets daily for the last month, and what others can learn from his efforts.
I summarized some highlights from this interview that might especially interest news professionals over at the Knight Digital Media Center site.
See: How NPR’s Andy Carvin is using Twitter to tell Egypt’s story
If your site includes Facebook “like” buttons to encourage people to share your content, be careful about how you use those numbers — or how seriously you take them.
Clint Watson writes in Facebook Like Button Count Inaccuracies:
The Facebook “like” buttons you see embedded on websites incorrectly report the number of “people” who “like” something. Specifically, the button can inflate the displayed count of people. While this is fine when all you want to do is track some general level of “engagement” with a particular item, it was not accurate for the use I needed – counting each “like” as a vote in our BoldBrush Online painting competition.
What I needed is a way to get the number of actual people who “like” something. And there is a way to retreive that information from Facebook, but it is often a different number from what is shown on the “like” button itself.
If you are a geek – here’s the bottom line of this post:
If you’re using the Facebook “Like” Button Social Plugin and you need an accurate count of the actual number of people who have clicked the “like” button, you can’t rely on the number reported by the button itself. You need to retrieve your URL’s “fan count” number via Facebook’s Open Graph API.
Hat tip to Zach Seward for bringing this to my attention.
On the Knight Digital Media Center USC site, I just posted a short item about a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project: Internet breeds engagement, not isolation, says Pew
At the end, I noted:
Given that groups often have considerable reach and influence, it makes sense for news organizations to actively engage local or relevant groups, especially via social media.
The online activities of groups are now a key channel for news, information, communication, and engagement for most Americans. It makes sense to build bridges with these channels in order to reach wider audiences and listen more effectively to community issues and concerns.
Which is yet another reason for the news business to get over its traditional stance of aloofness/separation from the community under the fig leaf of objectivity.
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Amy Gahran's news and musings on how we communicate in the online age.