Ryan Martin, breaking news and public safety editor at the Indianapolis Star, provided the next steps so attendees can roll up their sleeves when they get home and dive into implementing strategies learned at the Walter B. Potter Sr. Conference held at the Reynolds Journalism Institute April 14-15, 2016. More information about the event: https://www.rjionline.org/events/potter16

1. Creating the Blueprint to
Start or Grow a Social
Media Presence
Potter Conference, April 16, 2016

2. Ryan Martin
IndyStar
Breaking news + public safety
editor
This presentation is available
here: http://bit.ly/1S2GwWg
www.ryanmartin.me
@ryanmartin
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram

3. My background
● Mizzou 2010
● WashU 2013
● Patch in St. Louis
● The Elkhart Truth
● IndyStar since July

4. Why social is important
● You’re here for a reason
● Driving audience growth
● Competition for time and feeds
● Invites communities to participate in news
● Available anytime and anywhere

5. Case study
● 20,000-circulation daily
newspaper
● Newsroom separate from
digital
● Print-first workflow
● Copied/pasted headlines to social media
● No digital strategy

6. My job
● Three goals:
● Create and launch a digital strategy
● Hire digital-first journalists to execute that
strategy
● Redesign elkharttruth.com to support that
strategy
● The order was important

7. Digital strategy
● Search
● Video
● Community
● Social
● Mobile
And everything linked back to social.

8. Search content
● G+ drives search
● Trending topics, Moments

9. Video // Why it’s important
● Growth in consumption
● Shareable news content
● Reach new audience

10. Video // What we did
● Everyone learned video
● Videographer focused on premium video
● Live streams
● YouTube
○ Connect to Google+
○ Optimize for SEO
● Shareable news content

11. Video // Example reel of shareable content
Sarah Welliver/The Elkhart Truth

12. Community content for social

13. Social
● New content optimized for social audiences
o Ask The Truth
o Localize goofy 'holidays'
● Breaking news / real-time desk
● Prioritized Facebook, then experimented on other
social media

14. Mobile
● Website redesign
● If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work (Brian
Boyer, 9/25/2013)
● Social + mobile + audience growth
○ 80% of social media use is on mobile (Marketing
Land, 4/4/2016)

15. Social audience growth
● Facebook: 160% (8,969 to 23,422 Likes)
● Twitter: 70% (4,000 to 6,800 followers)
● Sports Twitter: 70% (1,800 to 3,200 followers)
● Instagram: 233% (300 followers to 1000)
*December 2013 to December 2014

16. Traffic growth
● Search traffic grew 40%
● Mobile traffic grew 56%
● Social traffic grew 160%
*December 2013 to December 2014

17. Elkharttruth.com launch day

18. My reflections
● Found entrepreneurial employees. Needed that energy,
fire and thinking in the company.
● Knew my personal limits. Led by example, and got out
of the way of talented people.
● Considered barriers in company culture, workflow, org
structure. How could employees be freed up to
overcome those roadblocks? They needed structure to
allow them to experiment, fail, try new things.

19. My reflections
● Failure is okay. We failed a few different ways.
● "For all their bluster and outward crustiness, newspaper
people can be delicate flowers" — David Carr
(10/5/2014)
● Also learned that lasting change is incremental and
requires persistence and patience

20. Now let’s talk about you

21. Before you do anything
● Know your existing audience
● Know who else you want
● Fully embrace how people consume content
● Map out how your audience accesses content
● Then build a blueprint

22. How I create blueprints
● First tier: Smart things we can do immediately
● Second tier: Things we can do with some prep
● Third tier: Things that take more time because of
money, job responsibilities, etc.

23. Write an idea for each tier
● Don’t be afraid of having a bad idea. Bad
ideas lead to good ideas.
● We’ll discuss some of these.

24. First tier: Weather pictures

25. First tier: What should open here?

26. First tier: Finishing sentences

27. First tier: Historical pictures

28. First tier: Talkers

29. First tier
● Polls (that are simple)
● Photo galleries from football games
● Regularly update cover photo (UGC opportunity)
● Your ideas?

30. Second tier
● Spy on a new social platform for a couple
weeks before diving in
● Create a content calendar for social+search
○ Email me if you want an example
● Post videos natively to Facebook
● Your ideas?

31. Third tier
● Pick someone to be truly digital-first
● Live streams
○ Candidate forums
○ Breaking news
● 360-degrees video
● The Drop
● Your ideas?

32. Be a soldier
“Do it now. Don't wait for permission to make something that's
interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don't wait. Find a story
idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who'll
give you notes to make it better.
Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now.
Don't wait for anything. Don't wait till some magical story idea drops into
your lap. That's not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and
it'll show up. Begin now. Be a (bleeping) soldier about it and be tough.”
— Ira Glass (Lifehacker, 7/23/14)

33. Ryan Martin
IndyStar
Breaking news + public safety
editor
This presentation is available
here: http://bit.ly/1S2GwWg
www.ryanmartin.me
@ryanmartin
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram