Better To End The Hour With Twitter

Thought for the day - leave mission creep tasks, like e-mail and social, to the end of the hour...

Time management is one of the topics I always cover when I'm encouraging staff to get started on Twitter.

As a rule to get people engaged in social media I suggest they have to check in frequently, but also that they must be disciplined about getting out before too long.

My worry is that staff will get into Twitter, drop into its endless world of intirguing links, and then not reappear back at their daily routine for hours. I warn them "don't go down a rabbit hole!" By which I mean don't get lost in Twitter and suddenly find you've missed all your deadlines for the day.

How many times have you heard people complain that Twitter takes too much time and they're giving up? That's an outcome to be conscientiously avoided.

So I suggest they check Twitter every two hours, and work on it for ten minutes. I suggest they set their stopwatch when they start and be disciplined about getting out after ten minutes.

But a better solution, and one that I'm going to start suggesting is using negative time.  That is, using the spare time created by finishing one task early and before starting your next appointment.

For example, I schedule appointments at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.  I finish my 9 a.m. appointment at 9.45 and use the remaining 15 minutes for social media updates and e-mail.

Result: less mission creep, shorter meetings, greater incentive to get stuff finished early, and more social media engagement for the station.

Making Most Popular Even More Popular

Each week I look at the most popular stories WBUR has produced in the week.  This week I wondered if I could use Storify to make them even more popular.

Here's what I did:

a) I went through the top stories of the week for all the shows produced at the station.  I collected the top ten.

b) I then went and found the most interesting tweets I could find about those stories.  It was a great experience to go through the tweets about the shows.  Some I'd seen during the week, some I hadn't.  Some were very funny, some were poignant; all were interesting to review.

(This step wasn't as easy as it might have been.  Some of the tweets were beyond the reach of the week of tweets in Twitter's search, and by extension Storify's search too.  As a quick work around for this I used Google to search for terms and I narrowed the search with site:twitter.com.  This got me what I wanted, but there must be a better way to do this.  Please comment below if you have a better idea.)

c) I built a Storify page of links to the most popular shows and the tweets about them.

d) To complete the circle I tweeted thanks to the Tweeple whose tweets I'd put in the Storify.

In review I'd say this was a fun experiment to carry out.  I could have done a better job of putting the Storify page together.  Perhaps stacking the links at the top, or writing a clearer explanation of what the page is about.

I'd be a very grateful for any thoughts you might have on this.  How do you think I could have done a better job?

Twitter Stats From Twitter

Mashable reports that Twitter will soon release its stats package to all of us who are so self-obsessed that we not only tweet, we also want to know what happened when we tweeted.

Apparently a few people are already testing the product, so hopefully the rest of us will soon be able to see graphs of our tweets, mentions, our follows and unfollows, and the success of individual tweets over time.

Facebook Lists

Whenever I mention Facebook lists people look at me with that what-is-he-talking-about? frown.  Some suggest I mean Twitter lists.  I don't.  I mean Facebook lists.  Facebook lists are a powerful tool, but they are apparently little used.

This is important because the ability to send comments to a limited list is what separates
Facebook from Twitter.  It means Twitter is about broadcasting and Facebook is about narrowcasting.

Social 2009

One of the questions all media people are going to be considering in 2009 is how social media will support newsrooms.

Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch reviews the Top Top Social Media Sites of 2008, with Blogger in the lead and Facebook coming in a close second place. Whatever you make of these numbers social media spaces are clearly places that news organizations can look for an audience.

Meanwhile, over on Mashable Leslie Poston looks at HOW TO: Give Back With Social MicroFunding in 2009.

Social networking in not going to bring in money the way that selling newspapers did. But it might make a growing source of revenue if social networkers can find something they value from newsrooms in their social networks. Like NPR's listening application in Facebook, or newsfeeds that are specifically focused on group topics.

Thinking about spot.us, the Bay Area social news network that allows users to fund reporting, it's hard not to imagine the spot.us idea would do well in a social networking environment.

Spot.us is aiming to gather groups of interested people around a story to fund it. Social networks have already created groups of people who are interested in the same topic. Would a Spot.us application in Facebook find revenue for stories in groups that are interested in those stories?

Obviously we won't know until someone tries it. But perhaps 2009 is the year for news organizations to look into social networks for new revenue streams.

Early Flight

What's more astonishing: Twitter's extraordinary capabilities for distributing information, or news managers' reluctance to recognize its power?

When describing a digital media phenomenon to old media staff it's useful to look for an old media analogy. I describe Twitter, as being like an old AP news printer, sitting in the corner of the newsroom, spitting out news all day long. Except it's written by the people you choose to follow.

And there's more. Unlike the news printer which only delivered you information, if you want to you can follow stories back to your sources and see who they were talking to about whatever it is that interests you.

But even after my analogies, my bubbling enthusiasm for Twitter, and my "see, I can see what people who do my job are saying all over the country," I'm still often met with those "whatever makes you happy" smiles.

Which leads me to another analogy. Perhaps the Twitterati, and other news people experimenting with digital media tools are a little like the early aviators.

In the years before the First World War there were very few of them. They were flying planes, building new planes, talking about planes and constantly trying new ideas. I've no doubt they were totally obsessed with flight. Are two engines better than one? Will monoplanes fly faster than biplanes? How about using metal for the wings?

But for everyone else, planes probably seemed fun, but dangerous and of no real interest to them. How would planes ever impact their lives? Besides everyone else had better things to do on carts and trains. And those crazy aviators; well, good luck to them.

Times have changed. No one thinks twice about flying today. No one thinks about whether the plane will have enough fuel or what makes it stay up. Flying is just a part of life, in spite of the fact that the general idea of a flying machine has really changed very little in a hundred years. It still has two wings, a body and a tail. It's just more refined and developed.

One day soon we'll be in Twitter's age of commercial flight. Everyone will take micro-blogging for granted, and wonder what life must have been like buying newspapers for news, or looking at one of those old televisions. "Remember those," we'll say, with a smile.

Viral Loops and Networks

In May Adam L. Penenberg wrote an article in Fastcompany about viral loops and networks. He focused on Marc Andreeessen and Gina Bianchini's company Ning.

I'm a member of a few Ning networks and like any network they work well if there's a reason to be there that's compelling enough to make you check yet another network. That reason is the sum of the sweat equity that the members of the group are prepared to put in, multiplied by how much you care about the other members of the network and what they say.

A friend just started a Ning group to share family discussion with his cousins, who are a tight knit group in the real world. It struck me as perfect use for Ning.

But it reminds me of the misundersanding that a log of media executives still carry around. At some level old media people think that if you just put stuff on the Web it will magically be successful. It is the thought that the technology is the solution. Of course it's not. The technology is just a way to make things happen. A way to make good ideas real.

Without good ideas and a lot of work, technology can do nothing. Buying a fast car isn't going to get you to work. Knowing the best route is going to get you to work. The car helps.

Penenberg quotes Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson saying "nothing can be truly viral unless it is good." In the article Wilson adds "you can create a crappy application, build viral hooks in it, but if it's bad, then nobody will follow the viral channel."

That's the challenge for news radio stations. To spend as much editorial time creating something that is as good for their Web site as their current productions are for their air.

Search and Connect

I was struck recently by the idea that you could boil all Web activity down to two things: searching and connecting.

Search: We search in many ways on the Web. We use search engines, favorite sites, shared links, directories, and so on. But the underlying concept is that we're always searching, always looking for something new, always linking down corridors that we didn't know existed.

Connect: Remember the days when email was the killer app? Of course it wasn't email itself, it was the idea of connecting. Being in touch with people. We communicate, by email, instant message, voip, video conference, virtual worlds or any other of the plethora of ways to connect with other people through the Internet.

A lot of the time we combine the two. We search for something, find it, or something else interesting that we weren't even looking for, and immediately communicate it through Twitter, Delicious or email.

Or we're connected with someone in Google talk and we're searching for the answers to questions that arise in our conversation as we talk.

Search and connect. Connect and search. All the time.

But of these the dominant partner is connect. We're still human after all.

So what does this mean for the future of news? The most obvious answer would be, your stories have to be where people search and connect. That primarily people will not find you at your site; they will find you in search engines and networks.

News sites are aware of this and are working on it. Trying to improve their standing in search engines and increase their presence in social media sites. But if you're not the New York Times very few people are going to make your site a regular part of their day. So I suspect there is a mental shift that needs to be made away from the home page. The home page is probably the third step for many visitors. (e.g. Step 1. Link in search engine. Step 2. Inside page. Step 3. Home page, to find out what site the user has landed on.)

So the headline to concentrate on is the one that appears on someone else's site.

@newsorgs - Twitter Works

Twitter and Twitter-like applications are going to have a growing impact in news.

It's been suggested that news consumers who have abandoned newspapers and no longer bump into news stories by reading the daily fish wrap, can replace that serendipitous experience by watching their Twitter feeds.

Depending on whom they are following, of course.

Amy Gahran, at Poynter, has written a very complete post in her E-Media Tidbits blog about Twitter successes and way to use this sort of microblogging. It includes all sorts of useful hints and links for news organizations who are starting to tweet.

If you're thinking about using Twitter, it's a worthwhile read.

Swim with the Fish

It's not enough for and old media organization, a newspaper or a radio station, to be blogging. If you want to be a part of a community you need to be posting comments equally vigorously in other people's blogs.

This is a collegial community. Being a shark in this environment earns you little attention. You need to swim with the fish if you want any respect from them. And you swim with the fish by commenting on their blogs.

I Million Friends

A line in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald caught my attention. In a harassment court case a Mr Hurst, accused of hounding a woman by sending her a friend invitation in Facebook, suggested Facebook friends are not that same as real world friends.

""[Popular British radio DJ Chris Moyles] has 1 million Facebook friends. Do you think he knows them all intimately?" Mr Hurst said.

Hurst was later cleared of any crime involving Facebook, but advised to leave the woman alone.

The case left a couple of questions unanswered. Does Moyles really have a million Facebook friends? If so, is his Facebook page more important than his Web site?

The first question is easy to answer. BBC 1's Chris Moyles Show page in Facebook currently has 334,860 fans. I imagine the number of unique visitors that cross Moyles' BBC pages each month is higher than that.

But looking at the pages both on Facebook and the BBC's site, it's interesting to note that there's something missing there that I'm sure is critical to the radio show: Chris Moyles.

Both the Facebook and BBC pages have discussion boards for users. But Moyle's personality doesn't shine through the pages. What's he thinking today? Where are his tweets? Where are his posts in the discussions? Did I miss something?

As a radio show I've no doubt that Moyles and the crew are focused on radio. But I can't help thinking 334,860 fans merit a little attention too. They're not just listening to the radio. They want to be seen to be associated with the Moyles show. And they are creating conversation around the show. In addition to the fans' posts on the Moyles Show page, Facebookies have created another 365 Chris Moyles groups.

Radio shows might do well to think about Facebook as a new antenna.

Four Roles for the New Journalist

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests four roles that journalists may find themselves playing in the world of Web journalism, in a post by Alfred Hermida (Reportr.net, Feb. 2008).

They include authenticator, sense-maker, navigator and forum-leader. Journalists have always been authenticators and sense makers. They were navigators and forum leaders too, except that readers were only able to observe where they navigated and have their forums around their dinner tables with their family and friends, and without the presence of the forum leading journalist.

What has changed is the journalist's presence in the lives of his/her audience, and the audience's ability to navigate a good deal of the information the journalists used to keep to themselves, and then talk about it with the journalist.

More:

Project for Excellence in Journalism

And David Pogue writes this about organizations taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies.

Rethinking What We Do

Today's E-media tidbits from Poynter online had some great links to pages and conferences where journalists are trying to rethink what we do.

The New Antenna

I've been convinced that broadcasting companies need to consider Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook and all those other sites that people bookmark, right down to tiny sites like this blog, as the new antenna.

According an article in the Wall Street Jornal, mass media owners are putting their money behind that idea. News Corp. bought MySpace, and now CBS is, according to the WSJ article, is interested in buying Bebo.

The article also cites comScore as saying MySpace had 109 million unique visitors in January, compared to Bebo's 22 million. Big numbers by anyone's account.

Relationships with Groups

The challenge for anyone who has anything and wants to distribute it through social media is, obviously, how to get it into the correct groups. How to build a relationship with a group so that it s members get what they want, which is your stuff.

For example, if I sell refrigerators, I want to have a relationships with all the groups that love and talk about refrigerators. I also want to have a relationship with all the groups that think about the best ways to make refrigerator parts, and the groups that are talking about the future of refrigeration, and the groups that are wondering what to do with old refrigerators, and so on.

But if I'm a news organization, what I'm producing is focused on something different every day. Certainly there are groups around that talk about news in general. But that's not the way networks work. They focus on niches.

So if today I'm talking about tattoos (as WBUR was on this On Point show) I have to find a way to make relationships with groups that talk about tattoos today. But it's going to be a relationship that only lasts a day, because we won't be talking about tattoos tomorrow. And relationships don't work like that. Relationships are more than a day long.

So what's the solution?

Andreessen NY Times Strategy

Fortune's Josh Quittner wrote this article about a conversation with Marc Andreessen.

Andressen said he thought that the New York Times should shut down its paper newspaper immediately and build on its online edition with social networking features.

Andressen also writes about this in his blog.

Disintegration of Discussion

In an article in the New York Times today, Noam Cohen reports that Mike Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, has a "law", which is:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Anyone who has worked with online forums knows this to be true. There seems to be inevitable collapse of any conversation online that goes on for a while. If it's interesting it has to be, in some sense, controversial. And controversy in a vacuum creates flame. That's my law for the day.

The solutions for this over the years have been to make people sign on with a traceable identifying name, to create a service that people pay for (they're less likely to swear in a room they own), or to moderate the conversation.

Be a Part of the Conversation

1. Make sure search engines can find your content. (e.g. Make the titles relevant to the content.)

2. Link a lot

3. Be a part of the "Live Web"
Blogs, forum, comments, feedback

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=WBUR
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80337781@N00/
http://www.wnyc.org/photos/climate.html
http://www.flickr.com/groups/greenapple_climatechange/

4. Social Networking Spaces