news21 social networking

SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACHCarnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education

Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


“It’s easier to join a conversation online than to start one”


Facebook Connect


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.


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


NewsMixer


Examples

• CNN Money

• Huffington Post

• TechCrunch

• GirlsGuideTo

• GovIt

• CitySearch

• Digg.com

• Frenzied Waters

• NewsMixer

Comments Sign on with FB Personalize


http://www.facebook.com/connectnews?v=app_7146470109

http://www.facebook.com/connectnews?v=app_7146470109

http://www.cnnmoney.com/

http://www.cnnmoney.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/

http://girlsguideto.com/

http://girlsguideto.com/

http://www.govit.com/

http://www.govit.com/

http://citysearch.com/

http://citysearch.com/

http://digg.com

http://digg.com

http://dsc.discovery.com/sharks/frenzied-waters/

http://dsc.discovery.com/sharks/frenzied-waters/

http://newsmixer.us/

http://newsmixer.us/

Facebook API

• 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.

http://developers.facebook.com/


http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

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.


FLICKR APIhttp://www.flickr.com/services/api/


http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

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.


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.


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.


YOUTUBE


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/newsSaturday, November 7, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/news

http://www.youtube.com/news

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.


http://www.youtube.com/user/reporterscenter

http://www.youtube.com/user/reporterscenter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVKGUctuoXE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVKGUctuoXE

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.


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.


TWITTERNew features on the horizon


“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.


Twitter Lists Examples


Foot Hood Shooting


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.


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”


http://search.twitter.com

http://search.twitter.com

http://www.bing.com/twitter

http://www.bing.com/twitter

http://www.google.com

http://www.google.com

Web 2.0 Summit: Content & search get social

Play Conference: Gaming is getting social

Social Networking is #1 growth area in marketing, eMarketing


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