Social Media Editor

Erstmals in Deutschland: Fortbildung zum Social-Media-Redakteur & Fachkongress

gruener — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:01:07 +0000

__+ sieben Monate berufsbegleitend
__+ für alle Journalisten mit Berufserfahrung
__+ für Zeitungen, Zeitschriften, Radio und Fernsehen

__+ praxisnah und intensiv

___+ mit europäischem Fachkongress “Roundtable Social Media managen”

Unterstützt von der Online News Association ONA (www.journalists.org)

Begrenzte Teilnehmerzahl (kleine Gruppe), jetzt informieren und anmelden bei der ARDZDFmedienakademie.

Read on for information in english language:

the event

The average age of ARD and ZDF (German public broadcasters) is rising all the time. Newspapers find it increasingly harder to establish lasting customer retention, in particular with a young readership.
Social Media such as Twitter, Facebook and StudiVZ (a German student network site) are being used extensively by the young. Does using Social Media therefore present an opportunity for the established media?

We want to probe the opportunities at a round table and find answers to the following questions:
́ WhatimportdoSocialMediahaveforthe self-image and practice of journalists?
́ Whatarethesuccessfulexamplesof employing Social Media in Germany and Europe?
́ Whatarethetargetgroupsofthefutureand how do Social Media reach them?

target group

Print and broadcast media staff who are responsible for Social Media projects or those currently working with Social Media or inten- ding to do so.
In attendance will also be the participants of the continued training course “Managing Social Media” beginning on September 16, 2010.

Cost
980.00€ for the round table, including food. For participants of the continued training course “Managing Social Media” the cost of this event is included in the total package

the setting
“Round table: Managing Social media” marks the beginning of the first course of continued training in Social Media offered in Germany. The course as such can only be booked as a package, not by particular events (BKZ 27 020).
There will be a simultaneous translation German – english

Read The English Version of the Flyer “Roundtable: Managing Social Media” here (PDF).

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Why Facebook friends are worth keeping

gruener — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:44:36 +0000

Could the benefits of social networking be too good to miss out on?

link: Why Facebook friends are worth keeping – 07 July 2010 – New Scientist

The explosion of weak ties could have profound consequences for our social structures too, says Judith Donath of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, who studies the various ways we communicate using social media. One thing that limited the size of traditional social groups was the time it took to form reliable and trustworthy ties, she says. Online tools have changed that, helping each of us to build a social “supernet”: a network of easily accessible contacts that is bigger than any we have ever been able to manage. “It would be impossible to maintain 500 or 5000 ties without it,” she says. “We’re already seeing changes.” For example, many people now turn to their social networks ahead of sources such as newspapers or television, because their acquaintances provide them with more trusted and relevant news, information or recommendations. However, Donath believes more should be done to maintain privacy and trust in the networking tools.

But are these huge networks really that relevant to us on a personal level? Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote the book How Many Friends Does One Person Need?. In it, he argues that our primate brains place a cap on the number of genuine social relationships we can actually maintain: roughly 150. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity or time for any more, he says.

Online social networking appears to be “very good for servicing relationships, but not for building them de novo,” says Dunbar. He argues that our evolutionary roots mean we still depend heavily on physical and face-to-face contact to be able to develop ties. Nonetheless, there is evidence that online networking can transform our daily interactions. Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, decided to test what effect sharing personal information online has on your chances of being liked. He asked participants in an experiment to try to encourage other members of the trial to like them via an instant-messaging conversation. Beforehand, some participants were allowed to view the Facebook profiles of the person they were trying to win over. He found that those with Facebook access asked questions to which they already knew the answers or raised things they had in common, and as a result were much more successful at winning people over. He concluded that people who use these sites to keep updated on the lives of their acquaintances are more likely to be liked in subsequent social interactions (Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, p 413).

Social networking may also have tangible effects on our well-being. In two studies of college students, Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University in East Lansing and colleagues found that the frequency of Facebook use correlates with greater self-esteem. Support and affirmation from the weak ties could be the explanation, says Ellison. “Asking your friends for help or advice is nothing new, but we are seeing a lowering of barriers” among acquaintances, she says. People are readily sharing personal feelings and experiences to a wider group of people than they might once have done (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 12, p 1143).

Another way that social networking appears to be changing our social structures is through power and influence. In behaviour experiments in the laboratory, Michael Kearns at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia found hints that being better connected can give an individual apparently disproportionate influence. In one experiment with 30 volunteers, he asked people to quickly reach consensus in an online game over a choice between two colours. The participants’ only means of communication was the ability to see the colour chosen by some of the other participants. They had a minute to reach consensus, and failure to agree on a common colour meant losing a prize. The twist was that he offered different financial incentives to each participant so that they would try to persuade the group to pick one or the other colour. But some had an extra advantage: the ability to see more of the participants’ chosen colours than others.

a study by Stephanie Tom Tong of Michigan State University, and colleagues, who found that online popularity is related to your number of online friends. They asked Facebook users to rate the “social attractiveness” of the profiles of others, which differed only in the number of visible friends. The researchers found that people with about 300 friends were rated as the most appealing, any more than that and their social attractiveness began to drop off (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 13, p 531). The average number of Facebook friends is 130, according to the website’s owners, which is not too far from Dunbar’s hypothesised 150.

link: Why Facebook friends are worth keeping – 07 July 2010 – New Scientist

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Reducing Social Media Stress

gruener — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:15:42 +0000

Zwei bemerkenswerte Aspekte zum Thema “Wie kriege ich die Fülle in den Griff”: Soren Gordhamer empfiehlt: Learn to Surf. Nun ja, hilfreicher sind da die Tools bei mashable.com: Why Feedback and Filters are Necessary in Social Media

Why Feedback and Filters are Necessary in Social Media
von Howard Greenstein (Original-Text bei mashable.com)

We’ve all experienced that person who’s talking on his cell phone in public, in a voice that’s way too loud — on the train, in a restaurant, or walking down the street, screaming into the mobile, oblivious to the effect he’s having on the crowd nearby.

We rarely experience this with a land line phone. That’s because when we talk on a land line phone, “There’s a small percentage of our voice that’s fed back to us. It’s called “sidetone,” according to former Bell Labs scientist Dr. Steve Crandall. About 18 decibels of sound (the loudness of a whisper) comes back to us to give us an indication that our voice is being heard on the other side of the connection. When we have that feedback, we are less apt to make a spectacle of ourselves.
On social networks like Facebook and Twitter , as on cell phones, people often have no measurable feedback on the amount of shouting, over-talking, and noise they’re creating on the web.
“Our brains don’t adapt as quickly as the technology works,” said Pamela B. Rutledge, Ph.D., MBA, and director of the
Media Psychology Research Center. “Humans have limited capacity to process information at any given time.”
Thus, individuals and businesses can miss out on the real value of these networks because the bare bones web interfaces don’t allow them to effectively filter, categorize, or otherwise make sense of the information. Like cell phone loud-talkers, we make noise and don’t realize it –- and we end up consuming useless noise from others instead of tapping into the real potential.
Clients have consistently asked, “How would I use Twitter? It’s just a bunch of people talking about esoteric and self-centered things, with no order or reason.”
However, given the right tools to filter conversations, such as hashtag trackers or column interfaces, they can soon figure out who’s talking, what is relevant, and get feedback on how their communication affects others.

The Problem of Inadvertent Noise Sharing

Popular social Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars were examples of unintentional noise sharing before Facebook stepped in to quiet them down. The keys to their widespread adoption were the auto-generated status messages that announced the success of players to their friends.
At first, most people didn’t realize that their exploits were being shouted from the virtual rooftops, annoying their friends. Many articles have been written informing people how to shut off the gaming broadcasts.
These problems have been mitigated by a slew of Facebook interface changes over the years, including news feed control options, friend lists, and application blocking. Yet they did not solve the root of the problem through feedback — that is, notifying the people who are generating the noise in the first place.
Rutledge told me that “For the amount of information Facebook is trying to coral, they have a very ineffective interface. They should be careful about assuming people are going to continue to be loyal to them. … [P]eople are not in love with Facebook. They’re in love with the contacts they’re able to maintain with other people via Facebook.”
When social media noise interferes with those connections, it could mean trouble for both users and the network alike.

Volume and Relevance

Sharing every whim, utterance and update indiscriminately risks a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. If all of your previous messages have been irrelevant or useless, the one you really want people to see will be ignored.
It can be even worse when networks are linked. A person whose every “Lol, Thx” tweet is echoed on his or her Facebook profile can end up with angry friends.
Matt Wallaert, lead scientist at Churnless, studies decision making and works to figure out how people relate to information. He created the interface for the much touted personal finance website Thrive.
“As people, we’re designed to make decisions a certain way. We bring in information, and we process it, and then we make a judgment that leads to behavior. We’re efficient at filtering out peripheral information that our brain decides doesn’t matter,” said Wallaert — for instance, our ability to hear one person talking to us in a crowded room. “Often in social media, all the information we get is given the same weighting or value. For example, on Twitter, all followers are treated with the same weight. You could easily miss the ‘friend’s husband died’ message because the ‘I just brushed my teeth’ messages’ overwhelm the truly relevant ones.
While the major social networks themselves can’t do much to push the most relevant information forward, developers are hot on the trail.

Prioritizing Your Updates

Imagine a world where we can set up useful, personal filters that enable us to prioritize certain kinds of messages, especially if they come from specific people. Xobni and Rapportive do some analysis based on people you e-mail frequently, and their connections to you in other networks. Gist tries to tie your social graph from LinkedIn , Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail together, and rank the people you communicate with the most.
T.A. McCann, founder and CEO of Gist, told us that “Most of us have an inbox or three that are overwhelming, and the amount of personal communication is difficult to deal with … Most of us, irrespective of what stream we’re looking at, tend to look at it in chronological order. That might not be most effective — we should be looking at who is most important, and center the content around them. Gist is trying to help people prioritize by centering the information you get around the people or businesses you care about.”
These third party tools are very useful, but they’re also limited by the amount of openness and connectivity provided by the networks to which they connect.
Disclosure: Gist is a Mashable sponsor.

Conclusion
In the future we see the possibility of tools that enable us to see our “noise impact” on social media — similar in function to
Klout, and others that show our online influence or sentiment. Social networks may also choose to give us feedback when people “mute” us or “dislike” what we’re posting, perhaps anonymously or in aggregate, similar to the way Facebook’s Insights for Pages show the number of people leaving every week. This feedback, just like the sidetone on the old phones, may be just what we need to bring the volume down and allow us to make more sense of the social web.

Und Gordhamer schließt seinen Text bei mashable.com “4 Steps for Managing Social Media Attention”:
“The challenge of our time is to live connected and use all the great social media available to us, while at the same time harness and direct

our attention where it is most needed at any given time. After all,
where we decide to put our attention is, essentially, how we choose to
spend our life.”

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Mess-Instrumente

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:37:10 +0000

Eine kleine Liste von kostenlosen und zu bezahlenden Web-Services:

Kostenlos

Social Mention: Real-time social media search and analysis. Like Google Alerts but for social media. Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.

Seitwert.de (Basisinfos kostenlos, sond kostenpflichtig): unabhängige Bewertung deutschsprachiger Webseiten

TweetVolume:

TweetReach: The idea behind TweetReach is to calculate how many people have seen something you’ve shared on Twitter.

Kostenpflichtig

Scoutlabs, u.a. Real-time Analytics: Sentiment, trendspotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves

Trackur, u.a. Comprehensive social media monitoring, Monitor brands, execs, employees, competitors, Receive alerts via RSS or E-mail, Bookmark and save discovered items, Fine-tune results with custom filters, Track sentiment and trends

Social Media Monitoring Radian6: gives you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.

CrowdScience: Get to know your audience with Crowd Science Demographics Crowd Science Demographics is an online measurement service that builds detailed reports on the demographics of your website audience.

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Facebook für Einsteiger

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:20:51 +0000

Aktuell und schön einfach erklärt vom SWF: Eine Schritt-für-Schritt-Anleitung

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Plädoyer für die Sozialen Medien im Internet

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:18:18 +0000

Suhrkamp-Autor Stefan Münker schreibt bei Spiegel Online: “Das Internet ist das digitale Herz der globalisierten Welt. Aus diesem Netz kommen wir nicht mehr heraus. Selbst wenn wir offline sind, sind wir drinnen – und werden es auch bleiben.”

Der medienhistorische Grund ist ebenso einfach wie tiefgehend: Erst jetzt, und auch nur mit den Web-2.0-Anwendungen, wird die massenhaft verbreitete Nutzung gemeinschaftlich geteilter interaktiver Medien zum ersten Mal Wirklichkeit; die kollaborativen Projekte seiner Sozialen Medien realisieren eine Praxis der partizipatorischen Mediennutzung, die zumeist überraschend effizient und dabei fast immer demokratischer ist, als wir es von früheren Medien gewohnt sind. Das Web 2.0 erscheint dabei zumindest tendenziell als die real gewordene Utopie jener demokratischen Umnutzung der Massenmedien, deren Ideal zuerst wohl Bertolt Brecht in seinem Rundfunkaufsatz aus dem Jahr 1932 entworfen hat. Als Netz gemeinschaftlich produzierender Sender wird das Web 2.0 zu einem medialen Baustein einer neuen Form gesellschaftlicher Öffentlichkeit.

Nun gibt es, und jeder, der das Internet nutzt, weiß das auch, nicht nur erfreuliche Aspekte in der digitalen Sphäre. In den Tiefen des Webs verstecken sich schreckliche Dokumente des Abgründigsten menschlicher Unkultur, und auf seiner Oberfläche glänzt der Tand sinnloser Eitelkeiten. Der eine Kritiker möchte das Netz deswegen stärker regulieren; und dem anderen Kritiker ist die Pluralität seiner Angebote vor allem ein Indiz für eine vermeintliche Fragmentierung unserer sozialen Gemeinschaft. Dem ersten muss man zugestehen: Ja, es stimmt – wir müssen natürlich auch im Internet Straftatbestände ahnden; und wir sind derzeit noch nicht gut genug darin, das geltende Recht im globalen Netz zu exekutieren. Ein anderes Recht aber brauchen wir deswegen noch lange nicht.

Dem zweiten Kritiker aber muss man einerseits entgegnen, dass die Öffentlichkeiten im Internet ja keineswegs schlicht Zeugnisse von sozialer Isolierung oder Zersplitterung sind – sondern dass gerade in den Sozialen Netzen vielmehr Orte von Vergemeinschaftung und intensive soziale Kontakte entstehen; und das, wie aktuelle Studien zeigen, sogar intensiver und enger als dort, wo das Netz nicht genutzt wird.

Andererseits kann man alle, die das Netz für die Fragmentierung der Gesellschaft haftbar machen möchten, nur auffordern, vor der nächsten Zugfahrt einen Bahnhofskiosk zu betreten. Die Vielzahl der Magazine und Zeitschriften konfrontiert jeden Käufer mit einer solch enormen Textmenge, dass für deren Lektüre ein Menschenleben nicht ausreichte – und deren Disparatheit und Heterogenität im Analogieschluss das Bild einer ebenso zersplitterten und uneinigen Gesellschaft widerspiegelt. Wenn man das denn so verstehen will.

Kompletten Beitrag vom November 2009 bei Spiegel Online lesen.

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A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:12:55 +0000

Steve Buttry beschreibt “a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general. A vision like this needs lots of detail and I’ll provide plenty of that in related posts. But most important, it needs a simple proposition — how consumers and business customers will see us:”

For consumers, we will be their essential connection to community life — news, information, commerce, social life. Like many Internet users turn first to Google, whatever their need, we want Eastern Iowans to turn first to Gazette Communications, whatever their need. For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money. We will become the Complete Community Connection.

Our company will provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news, information and opportunities on multiple platforms. We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa. We need to change from producing new material for one-day consumption in the print product or half-hour consumption in the broadcast product to producing new content for this growing community network of information and opportunities.

Tim McGuire of Arizona State University, with whom I shared a draft of this blueprint, cautioned me: “Do not underestimate how scary and how big the concept of moving beyond one-day consumption is.” This may be a scary change for our industry, but these are scary times. I can think of nothing more scary for our industry than failure to reach far enough or change thoroughly enough.

News remains essential to our mission and our identity, but cannot limit our vision. We do need to add to our information content storehouse daily with news and other information, some of it perishable but much of it evergreen. We need to be a portal through which you can easily reach any information or activities in the community. We need to provide a conveniently organized, easily searchable treasure chest of information that feeds multiple products that consumers reach in a variety of ways:

Through community portals that direct them to useful information.
Through search.
Through habitual use of individual products using our content.
Through direct access to raw content before it is packaged for various products.
Virally as word spreads about the usefulness of our content, our various products or of the community network we develop.

The details of the Complete Community Connection — C3 — will be determined not by my decree but by the needs of the marketplace and by the creativity and abilities of the staff. In this series of blog posts, I detail my vision to help staff, colleagues, community, company leaders and colleagues in the media to see the possibilities, not to dictate the exact course to follow. I welcome ideas that add to and improve this vision. It will work most effectively when it is our vision, not my vision.

We will reach some people who never read The Gazette or watch KCRG by doing important jobs such as connecting them with people of common interests or helping them find the products and services that help them live their lives. We will serve other people in multiple ways, producing and delivering their morning paper and their evening newscast, providing text news alerts during the day and networking them in the community in a variety of ways.

In many of these categories, our work is to design the digital infrastructure, develop the digital meeting place and promote the product, but the content will be provided by users, businesses and individuals. In other cases, content will be material from our archives or from daily news content that we give evergreen use. We will need to generate considerable new content for some of these products. And where we are relying on content from the community, we will need to invest considerably in curating, editing, monitoring and promoting the content.

In all of these cases, we need to look at mobile opportunities and email opportunities as well as print and web. And we should watch for new opportunities as new technology presents new ways to connect. We should explore every possibility for providing people the news and information they want when they want it, whether that means email, text message, RSS feed, Twitter feed, social media, iPod, game device, GPS device or some other way of interaction. And, of course, print and broadcast will remain key platforms for some of this content for the foreseeable future.

Despite our reduction in staff, this is a vision for a growing media company that eventually will generate new revenue streams to support new jobs.

The C3 will help people form personal connections with our staff and each other similar to the personal connections they feel to Beth Malicki, Bruce Aune and other KCRG anchors. They will feel as if they know people they have never met, ranging from the bloggers they follow to moms or sports fans they connect with through our network. The C3 will form a relationship with its users reminiscent of that possessive feeling readers used to have (and, fortunately, as we’ve seen again and again since the flood, many still have) with “my” newspaper. They tell us with pride or anger that we were “my” paper. Sometimes they would tell us that they didn’t want that kind of content in “my” paper. While that’s an uncomfortable conversation, it’s an ideal business relationship.

In the same way, C3 will be “my” web site, “my” email alert, “my” podcast, “my” text buddy, “my” shopping solution, “my” connection to customers, “my” solution for lots of life’s little and big jobs for individuals and businesses alike. (And yes, still, “my” newspaper.)

This overview introduces a collection of blog posts explaining the Complete Community Connection in detail. Continue reading about the background and concepts of C3:

Then read about the five major categories of C3 content and connection:

Start reading about the development of this blueprint. Or jump right into the details on C3’s approach to community content.

Since C3 was published in April 2009, I have published three posts on mobile opportunities that I now consider part of the C3 approach:

Kompletten Originalbeitrag vom April 2009 bei Steve Buttry lesen.

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Jeff Jarvis: „Wir müssen im Journalismus radikal Neues probieren”

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:02:33 +0000

Interview in der FAZ mit Jeff Jarvis am Rande der Burda-Digitalkonferenz DLD, u.a:

Journalisten sollen gute Geschichten schreiben, auf Twitter und Facebook selbst für die Verbreitung sorgen, ihre eigenen Untenehmen gründen und am besten auch noch programmieren können. Ist dieses Berufsbild realistisch?

Nun, der technische Fortschritt hilft ihnen dabei. Zum Beispiel hat die Flip-Kamera den Journalisten eine sehr einfache Möglichkeit gegeben, eigene Videos zu drehen. Man kann vieles erlernen.

Wer wird das Filtern übernehmen? Menschen oder Maschinen?

Sie haben andere Menschen, deren Informationen Sie vertrauen, als ich. Es gibt keine Nachrichtenseite mehr, die für alle passt. Marissa Mayer von Google spricht von einem hyper-personalisiertem Nachrichtenstrom, der von Maschinen produziert wird. Ich glaube aber, es wird eine Kombination aus Algorithmen und Menschen geben, die Nachrichten bewerten und individuell zuschneiden.

Wie sollten lokale Zeitungen mit den neuen Nachrichtenorganisationen umgehen?

Sie sollten kooperieren. Die Zeitungen können Leser zu den Blogs leiten, ihre Inhalte dort präsentieren und dann Werbung dort verkaufen. Im Gegenzug bringt das lokale Blog neue, meist junge Leser zur Zeitung.

Komplettes Interview vom Januar 2010 bei der FAZ lesen.

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5 Steps for Successful Social Media Damage Control

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:59:12 +0000

Tipps für die Krisen-PR: Sharlyn Lauby is the president of Internal Talent Management (ITM) which specializes in employee training and human resources consulting. She authors a blog at hrbartender.com.

Minimize the damage

Before we even talk about how to fix what goes wrong, let’s talk about the positives. One of the best ways to minimize social media damage is to proactively create an environment that encourages positive feedback. There are two main things you should do to keep the accolades coming.

1. Foster a positive culture. There are plenty of studies showing that if your employees are happy, they will deliver good service to customers. Not only does this minimize potential damage, but it leverages your brand in a very positive way. Keeping your employees engaged and letting them know how they fit into the corporate culture goes a long way.

Case in point: I recently returned from a conference in New Orleans where Harvard Professor John Kotter showed us an old video of a Roto Rooter employee who had pimped out his van to make his job easier. It had everything from pull down maps (obviously this dated prior to the Garmin) to a makeshift toilet. The point is, this employee created all of these conveniences for himself so he could spend more time servicing customers. How many of your employees are doing that?

2. Train employees on the proper use of social media tools. Your employees represent your organization, and if they have a solid, credible personal brand, it will carry over to the company’s image.

It’s not enough to allow employees to have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Organizations need to show employees the proper way to use them. For example, Zappos employees are not only encouraged to have Twitter accounts, but they receive training during company orientation on how to use the application. Again, if your employees use social media well, it will benefit both those employees and the organization.

Keep in mind, however, that someday the other shoe might drop. Many companies have fallen prey to negative press, so don’t put your head in the sand. It’s not about “if” something will happen; it’s about “when.” In this transparent, authentic and real-time world, expect a hiccup to occur. But be prepared.

In the end, the issue is less about the mistake that was made, but the reaction that came after. So, here are some tips to follow if you find yourself in a damage control mode.

1. Monitor social media sites 24/7

Daniel Ruby, director of marketing at advertising network Chitika, recently had an issue where McAfee flagged one of their ads, thus making their entire network have issues with aggressive McAfee antivirus alerts. Ruby credits Twitter for alerting them to the issue. “We actually found out from one of our publishers who was telling a reader via Twitter as well as the comments box on his site that our ads were why his site was giving McAfee users a red flag,” he said.

From there, Chitika could respond to concerned users (also via Twitter), and keep users up-to-date on the steps they were taking to fix the problem.

2. Respond quickly with a consistent message

No matter how proactive you are, customers will start to question your organization when they see problems. And, whenever there is an information void, those customers will tend to fill in the gaps with their own thoughts on what the cause may be. That’s why it is important to respond to issues quickly, even if the message is just, “we’re looking into it.”

Ruby elaborated that he “reached out to the publisher via his comments box, letting him know what happened and what Chitika was doing to resolve it.” He also kept him updated via Twitter (apologizing as profusely as one can in 140 characters).

Communication is key here. Make sure each employee knows the same message all the way down the chain of command. And, when that message changes, don’t forget to communicate those changes. This serves two purposes; (1) it gives the public a sense that you have your arms around the issue; and (2) it gives your employees a sense of unity – working together to solve a common problem.

3. Reply to the social media world

These situations are not contained to just a certain type of organization. For example, following a meeting of Ignite Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona that was attended by over 600 people, a number of attendees had their cars towed after parking in a privately owned lot. “The social media response was immediate and spread like wildfire. It went from Twitterverse to mainstream TV in just a day,” said Kris Baxter, the City’s Community Development Marketing Specialist.

The City worked with some of the key organizers of the event to get the matter resolved. This was their first time reacting in real-time/social media environment, so they decided to tweet responses versus waiting for the newspaper.

Baxter explained, “Because we reacted quickly online to solve the problem, our reputation took substantially less of a hit than it might have. People who blogged and tweeted about the experience actually started writing comments such as ‘seems as though Tempe cares and is looking into it.’” Since then, the City has been working with the property owner to sign the lot more clearly and they’re redefining their towing ordinance.

4. Educate employees on proper messaging

In today’s technology age, a company’s brand image belongs to the consumer, so using social media tools to learn, communicate, and evolve makes for a better, more flexible company. “People have an infinite number of ways and places to talk about your brand (or any number of other topics), and if you don’t go where they are, you don’t know what they’re saying,” Ruby told me.

If you make a mistake, own up to it. Recently, for example, European furniture maker Habitat was caught spamming Twitter. Their response was an apology. No skirting the issue. No blaming a computer glitch. So in the end, the old cliché that honesty is the best policy still holds true.

5. Develop a Crisis Strategy

While I’ve spent the majority of this post talking about how to respond when crisis hits, it’s important to realize that sometimes the best response is no response at all. It’s easy to get sucked into the flurry of activity and turn a molehill into a mountain.

These can be tricky waters to navigate. Obviously, if you have a public relations firm, you want to tap into their expertise in creating a response strategy. But let’s say you don’t and something happens… what can you do? Jenni Brand from Bastille Marketing offered up some terrific suggestions:

1. Assemble a team of trusted employees who are willing to work round the clock (it won’t be for long – just a few days at most) to help you evaluate the situation and possibly respond

2. Assess the situation online by harnessing the tools that are publicly available, such as Google Search, Blogs, Technorati, Twitter Search and Who’s Talkin’. Also watch RSS feeds to the online publications of both mainstream and industry media sources.

3. Track these sources constantly to see what and how the situation is developing. Watch the “attacker’s” website or blog as well. They may change their tune or consumers may react negatively and post comments about it on their site.

Then assess the situation:

– Trend the volume of response and the type of consumer reaction over time: Is it growing or waning? Is it supportive or negative? How is this changing over time?

– Identify what your target audience’s reaction is. This will determine your response. Remember: your response could validate that there is an issue and may further perpetuate a negative situation.

I asked Brand how organizations should evaluate the need for response once organizations have all this info. Here’s her take on how to respond (if at all):

– If consumers are silent on the situation, continue to monitor but don’t respond publicly. Assess the need to respond on an ongoing basis – hourly, twice daily, daily, etc.

– If consumers are demanding a response, be sure that the initial upswell of outrage has passed and that the issue is, in fact, continuing. The online audience is fickle – if something more interesting breaks in the news, they may abandon your issue to move on to something more “important.”

– When responding, be sure to really listen and determine what consumers want – do they just want an apology/acknowledgment or do they demand change? Be sure to address these things in your response.

– DO NOT RESPOND too quickly, too thoroughly, in too much of a ‘corporate’ tone or via a press release posted on your website (as the sole response mechanism). These tactics are typically not well-received in the social media landscape.

People like Kris Baxter and the City of Tempe are the ones that “get it” where social media is concerned: “Our situation showed that social media is not only a means of getting out your positive, proactive messages but also a means to protect your brand and react to negative situations to resolve them quickly and positively,” said Kris. Well said.

Kompletten Beitrag vom September 2009 bei Mashable lesen.

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Stats confirm social media drives traffic to news websites

gruener — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:56:08 +0000

“Jumping on the social media bandwagon might not be such a bad move as statistics revealed by Huffington Post CEO, Eric Hippeau, show that Facebook referrals to the aggregation website were up 48% since its launch, and has accounted for 3.5 million visits.”, schreibt Jennifer Lush im Editorsweblog.org:

HuffPost was up 26% year-over-year to 9.4 million unique visitors in September, overtaking Washingtonpost.com for the first time, which dropped almost 30% to 9.2 million, according to the figures released by Nielsen Online.

In an interview with Staci D Kramer from paidContent, Hippeau talked about the ways HuffPo has utilized Facebook in particular to boost traffic to the website.
In mid-August HuffPo launched a Social News site with Facebook Connect: “We tell stories about current events in real time, so we’re very fast, we create–we help create instant opinion, so instant news and instant opinion,” he said, citing “a very active, very engaged audience that reacts very quickly to what’s going on in the world”.

Facebook Connect allows users to ‘sign in’ to the HuffPo website using their Facebook login. They can then link directly to Huffington Post articles, comment and ‘show friends’ which article they are currently reading.

The effects were obvious. By September, HuffPost had already received some 6,825,000 unique visitors, according to comScore, thanks to Facebook Connect. Now fifteen per cent of all comments on the website come directly from Facebook.

Kara Swisher suggests that the positive numbers come from a greater general trend toward the socialization of news consumption. Mercedes Bunz writes that: “This shrinks the overloaded news world down to the news that are important to the user and their friends. They are the people who decide what is important to know – perhaps this was meant by the much-quoted saying that that journalists’ reign as “gatekeepers of information” is over. What friends are reading is at least as important as the news displayed on the homepage of a news site.”

The BBC, whose number of unique visitors came in at 7.2 million in the same Neilsen study, is one of many news organisations beginning to recognise this trend, and adapt accordingly. Taking note of the success of publications such as the Huffington Post, it announced last month that it would ‘change the face of the BBC‘ and shift to become more ‘social-media friendly’. The largest broadcaster in the world also recently confirmed that it would appoint a ‘social media editor’ and redesign some of its websites as part of this new consciousness.

The statistics speak for themselves and they are shouting loud and clear of the value social media can have for news organisations, if managed well. Despite the release of social media guidelines by various publications amidst fears over the ‘the integrity of the publication’, the nature and consumption of news is changing. A New York Times article looking into the ways young people consume news, quoted Lauren Wolfe, 25: “There are lots of times where I’ll read an interesting story online and send the U.R.L. to 10 friends,” she said, “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story.”

The task of news organisations has shifted- instead of simply presenting the news, publications now need to seek out their readers. Utilizing tools such as Facebook, as the Huffington Post has done, doesn’t look to be a bad way to go about it.

As another student, part of a focus group said: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Originalbeitrag vom Oktober 2009 bei Editorsweblog.org lesen.

Embracing social media boosts traffic on news sites “The BBC and other websites can learn lessons from Huffington...

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