Using Twit­ter to engage the com­mu­nity from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Should news orga­ni­za­tions be wary of social media? Or embrace it? I’ve been argu­ing the lat­ter for years, and now there are begin­ning to be lots of exam­ples of jour­nal­ists using Twit­ter and other social media tools in smart ways to engage their local communities.

In this 9-minute inter­view I hur­riedly con­ducted at South by South­west Inter­ac­tive in March 2009 min­utes before catch­ing a flight, two of the top social media strate­gists in the news­pa­per busi­ness shared their thoughts about the value Twit­ter brings to con­nect­ing news peo­ple with their com­mu­ni­ties. Daniel Honig­man, social media and edi­to­r­ial engage­ment strate­gist for Tri­bune Inter­ac­tive, and Robert Quigley, Inter­net edi­tor of the Austin Amer­i­can States­man, chat­ted a few min­utes after their ses­sion, “Old Media Finds New Voice Through Twitter.”

Some top-level takeaways:

“You cre­ate cus­tomer loy­alty” by being part of the online com­mu­ni­ties that users iden­tify with, Honig­man said. “Social media is a way to build your own brand and build your own audience.”

Honig­man pointed to solid met­rics to sup­port the use of social media: more page views, more site vis­its, and a richer set of com­mu­nity resources, includ­ing an ample sup­ply of beta testers, new sources of events and ideas for new prod­ucts and projects.

The change comes harder in the broad­cast news world, said Honig­man, who works with the staffs at WGN in Chicago and KTLA in Los Ange­les (and I found this par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing). “It’s absolutely dif­fer­ent for broad­cast­ers. … The golden rule of broad­cast­ing is that you never men­tion the com­pe­ti­tion, and in the social space it’s real-time aggre­ga­tion.” If you let the com­mu­nity help you aggre­gate the best-of-breed resources avail­able — regard­less of who cre­ated it — “you can spend your time doing other things.”

In Austin, ‘increased relevance’

Quigley, who runs the online depart­ment, says 40 jour­nal­ists use Twit­ter in a news­room of under 200 peo­ple. He described Twit­ter this way: “It’s a tool that lets you con­nect to your audi­ence in a way that pre­vi­ously was very dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble. It gives you the abil­ity to get to where they care about you, and you care about them. We all care about our com­mu­nity. Why not show that instead of being a walled-off ‘we’re giv­ing you the news and we don’t care what you have to say’ kind of organization?”

Not all reporters take to Twit­ter. Some get it right away while oth­ers don’t or don’t want to. But staffers are using Twit­ter for news tips, sources and event announce­ments as well as using it to human­ize them­selves. The bot­tom line is: tak­ing part increases your rel­e­vance in the medi­a­s­phere. “If we’re not where peo­ple are dis­cussing the news, then we have a chance of becom­ing irrelevant.”

Quigley ended on a per­sonal note: “Twit­ter is such a per­sonal medium. Peo­ple feel that they know you, that they’re friends with you, and that can be reward­ing, when peo­ple say that they love what you do. You just don’t hear that when you work for the news­pa­per for the most part.”

Apolo­gies for the sub­par light­ing: The inter­view was con­ducted on the fly at the last moment.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo
Watch or down­load the video in H.264 Quick­Time on Ourmedia

Related:
• NPR’s exper­i­ments with social media
• Using Twit­ter at the Chicago Tri­bune
• How to use social media in the news­room
• Using social media to build an audience

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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