Starting with the Basics

What is the social media system and why does it matter to you?

Media is now a part of a network where stories are shared socially. This changes the game.

Remember when people created websites and thought everyone would start on the home page?  That didn’t last long.

Fast-forward to 2011 and it’s not only search technology that’s making direct clicking on specific websites less common, it’s social media. The combination of mobile-friendly tools and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite with crowd-sourced, almost real-time news means that for many people, sites they want to visit and stories they might want to read (or comment on) are links and little snippets of text happening in 140-character bits or less, all over the Internet—and specifically on social media sites.

What does this mean for news sites and news practitioners?

News and other data want to be spread as bits, not necessarily as whole stories. Rethink your delivery of news.

For one thing, you don’t want your data locked up on just one site—you want snippets of it freely circulating across the social web so it is easily available to readers everywhere.

In addition, you don’t want only “social media experts” or search engines to be the main tools to make your information discoverable by your audience.

Search engines are going to be the greatest source of referral traffic for most news stories. For many sites, however, social media referrals are among the top three or four referring sources. The high incidence of referral traffic today from social media sites suggests that although you do want your stories circulating across the web via search, the firehose of attention is best served by developing a presence on the social media services most people interact with daily.

More than 11 million people viewed the video of Susan Boyle’s audition in London for the British version of American Idol during the first three days it was posted to YouTube in 2009.  Much of that traffic was achieved through people sharing the clip using social media.  By the end of 2009, more than 120 million people worldwide had seen the clip—and over 5,500 had posted comments about it.

That is a great example of how social media today functions as the tribal drumbeat of our time. From a journalist’s point of view, it demonstrates how peer recommendations and referrals are playing a greater role than traditional centralized arbiters in determining where people put their attention.

A 2010 British study reported that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were catching up to major news websites as sources for breaking news. We’d argue, in some cases, that social media is actually eclipsing them.

Few would disagree that crowd-sourcing, viral networks, and peer recommendation and referral were the critical tools for government changes in 2011 in Egypt. 

In fact, Google staffer Wael Ghonim, 30, was one of the activists who effectively used social media to get the word out and foment change.

Similarly, who can forget the Twitter photos of the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River in 2009?

Or the citizen journalism shots—first posted via Flickr—of the Haiti earthquakes in January 2010?

The shift in how news is disseminated and how people absorb and interact with information is one of the main reasons media professionals must have a strong grasp of social media. 

Social media tools can help journalists be better listeners and information-gatherers. That, in turn, helps them create deeper and more responsive conversations with their audience.  Ideally, these tools can improve a journalist’s work and deliver it to a broader, more engaged audience. 

Should you set goals for using social media?

If you don’t know how to measure your social media impact, you’re not ready to use it for news professionally.

Because the web is so data-driven, it’s a perfect medium for people who are time and resource constrained.  Projects can be structured with clear, measurable goals.  That helps everyone understand what’s working and what isn’t. 

Here is some great news for people who have avoided social media because they think it will require a lot of time:  It’s all about time-boxing—scheduling intervals to engage with a river of conversation.

Social media strategies can include periods of intense activity—say for a specific campaign, story series or media launch—and then die down to something more like maintenance mode.  Taking a phrase from Anne Truitt Zelenka’s book Connect, we like to call this “bursty” work.