As more and more local newsrooms embrace social media as marketing and distribution channels, it becomes increasingly easier to catalog our missteps into the space. Microblogging site Twitter, in particular, has been susceptible to misuses by our industry. Lost Remote pointed out Chron.com’s poor use of Twitter in pushing truncated headlines during Hurricane Gustav, and a Colorado newspaper’s decision to twitter a three-year-old boy’s funeral garnered them a number of slaps on the wrist from even the national press. While there are bound to be some of these missteps, they’re far from unavoidable. To that end, I’ve tried to outline some basic concepts and concrete steps that will help your newsroom better leverage its Twitter presence and, hopefully, without repeating some of the mistakes of our colleagues.
1. Forget about your Twitter ROI (for now)
Your tweets won’t generate revenue. Most likely, you won’t see your site’s page views increase. Circulation most assuredly won’t increase, and there won’t be any spike in viewers during the next book. So why do it? Simply put, Twitter affords us an opportunity to begin a culture shift within our organizations. Being a part of a community or hoping to build a community is hard work, and it’s work many of us don’t know how to even begin undertaking. Twitter, though, has lowered the bar for entry. Our staff members can begin by just answering that one little question. Twitter can serve as a tutor for our newsrooms. It can help us begin to see and begin to be a part of content creation as a community driven effort.
2. Twitter isn’t a broadcast channel
To many, Twitter’s 140 character envelope seems ready made for broadcasting our headlines, breaking news and promotions; however, using Twitter as though it were a one-way medium like our papers or newscasts ignores what has made social media so compelling: It has made content creators and publishers of us all. And that content flows in all directions, not just from our newsrooms. When a group of twitterers, who share the same niche or hyperpersonal connection, twitter to and follow one another’s tweets, the conversation grows beyond the confines of “What are you doing?” Meaning is generated via the discourse of that community, and that’s the key.
3. Climb down off that pedestal
We’ve been the gatekeepers of news and information for so long, it’s easy to think of ourselves as the experts, the professionals in the know. Now, as the gathering and reporting of news becomes an increasingly communitized part of our society, that you’re from the local daily or TV news team doesn’t afford you as much credibility as you might think. In fact, in established communities, you can be seen as a social media carpetbagger. Approach Twitter communities knowing that your value in the conversation has yet to be determined. You need to begin joining those communities and establishing the validity of your contributions therein. Increasingly, its the power of your voice within communities that will be the value you leverage, not your signal strength.
4. Don’t rely upon a single branded Twitter presence
A single unified voice for your newsroom is counterproductive in social media. It’s a space that rewards bringing more voices to the conversation, not solidifying them behind a single, faceless edifice. After all, social media is really all about connecting individuals to other individuals. And you needn’t worry about departing staff splintering your community, because it’s not really your community to begin with. Efforts to fight this, to remain monolithic, to deny individuals within your newsroom their own voice on Twitter or elsewhere, in the long run, will only serve to diminish your newsroom’s value within these communities.
5. Find your twitterers and their niches
If you don’t have a local political reporter or blogger, don’t try to force yourself into the space just because it’s an election year. Instead, start with what you do have. Start with your impassioned reporters covering specific beats or your bloggers writing about a particular niche. Have them tweet about their beat or niche and encourage them to stay on topic. If you have an education reporter who suddenly begins tweeting movie reviews, he’s fracturing his voice and undermining his own value to a community of users who are following him for his education tweets.
6. Help your twitterers take ownership of their efforts
Show your twitterers how they can customize the layout of their Twitter profile pages. Provide them with any brand elements you would like them to include, like logos or photos for backgrounds. Make sure they have a custom avatar and that, especially once they’ve started to gain followers, they don’t change it. That avatar acts a flag in twitter time line that lets users quickly focus on a user’s tweets. But in the end, don’t make them robot-like extensions of your brand, couching tweets within catch phrases from your marketing consultants. Let them craft their own online personae.
7. Make tweeting easy
Make it easy for your twitterers to remain engaged in their Twitter communities. Make sure they can and do twitter from their mobile phones, whether that’s via text message or a dedicated application like TwitterBerry for the Blackberry or Twitterific on the iPhone. Install a Twitter client on their desktops or notebooks, and show them how to use it. An application like Digsby is a great way for your twitterers to tie their Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, and email accounts together into one tool that sits in their system trays. If you’re not on Windows, or you have computers that can’t handle the sometimes resource intensive Digsby, try out Twhirl, an application running on Adobe’s Air platform. It’s a much lighter weight client that can also be set up to run at login. Help them make Twitter a part of their day and it will grow beyond the confines of work hours as they become increasingly involved in their Twitter communities.
8. Gaining followers that count
In an industry that measures success in ratings and subscription numbers, you can easily feel a sense of urgency to grow your followers. You can gain a large number of followers by yourself following as many people as you can, as many still consider it simply polite to follow someone who is following them. The problem is that the more people you follow, the less useful Twitter is. In fact, once you’re following hundreds of other twitterers, the model breaks down. Your community and its conversations quickly become garbled noise. Instead, use search.twitter.com to find others tweeting about the same niche or hyperpersonal connection. Follow their tweets and start posting thoughtful replies. When you tweet, build in a request for replies. Ask your followers what they think. Begin to build your own Twitter conversations, hoping to create meaning via that discourse. Your numbers will grow, but by taking the time to do it via community interaction, the followers you gain will be a higher quality lot.
9. Use a separate account to push headlines
If you must broadcast your headlines, set up a specific Twitter account for just that purpose. Those that follow you will do so knowing that’s exactly what they’re in for. It becomes another means of news consumption for a user, a sort of RSS feed, if you will. But don’t push all of your content through Twitter. Instead, set up a separate feed of selected stories you want to go to Twitter, cherry picking the content most likely to grab your followers’ attention. Too, don’t only rely upon automated tools to bring news into your Twitter stream. Often, the way we craft headlines makes sense within the context of our websites, but can be rethought to be more Twitter friendly and, let’s face it, more compelling.
10. Now what?
Remember that you needn’t always be at the center of the community. How can you use your existing website to foster community building, to help connect people in your demo on Twitter? Twitter moms, for instance, is a site for moms who tweet, but its real appeal doesn’t lie in its ability to simply connect tweeting moms, a niche, but that these moms can use the site to move beyond the niche to find other single mothers or mothers with special needs children, the niches within the niche that engage a consumer’s “I am.” Take the next step by facilitating the expansion of Twitter communities beyond the niche and into the hyperpersonal.
