SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACH
Carnegie-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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

“It’s easier to join a conversation
online than to start one”
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Facebook Connect
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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
Saturday, November 7, 2009

NewsMixer
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Examples
Comments Sign on with FB Personalize
• CNN Money • GirlsGuideTo • Digg.com
• Huffington Post • GovIt • Frenzied Waters
• TechCrunch • CitySearch • NewsMixer
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Facebook API
http://developers.facebook.com/
• 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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

FLICKR API
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

YOUTUBE
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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/news
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

TWITTER
New features on the horizon
Saturday, November 7, 2009

“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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Twitter Lists Examples
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Foot Hood Shooting
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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.
Saturday, November 7, 2009

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”
Saturday, November 7, 2009

Web 2.0 Summit: Content
& search get social
Play Conference: Gaming
is getting social
Social Networking is #1 growth
area in marketing, eMarketing
Saturday, November 7, 2009