News21 Social Networking

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.


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

Comments Sign on with FB Personalize

• CNN Money • GirlsGuideTo • Digg.com

• Hufﬁngton Post • GovIt • Frenzied Waters

• TechCrunch • CitySearch • NewsMixer


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.


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 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/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.

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.


TWITTER
New 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”


Web 2.0 Summit: Content
& search get social

Play Conference: Gaming
is getting social

Social Networking is #1 growth
area in marketing, eMarketing

News21 Social Networking

More Related Content

What's hot

Similar to News21 Social Networking

More from kdmcBerkeley at UC Berkeley

Recently uploaded

News21 Social Networking