Help Your Audience Find You On Social Media Networks.

As you search out your audience, it’s inevitable that you’ll miss people who might be interested in checking out your facebook and twitter feeds. The best way to capture those people as fans and followers is to help them find you.

Use keywords related to your publication in your posts. If you have an RSS feed to your Facebook or Twitter account, try using these keywords in your headlines so you get picked up in searches.

List yourself on Twellow: It’s like the yellow pages for twitter. You can list yourself by different categories like “Healthcare” or “Fashion.”

Expand your reach Being retweeted increases your twitter visibility. So how can you find people who will retweet you frequently? Twitter search “RT Keyword,” then follow the users who appear most. They’re most likely to start retweeting you.

Continually promote your social media networks from every outlet at your disposal. Promote from your website. Add it to your email signature. Promote Facebook on Twitter and Twitter on Facebook. Join groups pertaining to your topic. Let people know you’re there. The more people you reach, the greater chance there will be that someone else interested in your message will find you.

But don’t forget to find twitter followers—spammers, really--who don’t belong. I’ll talk about that next post. 

Pay-Per-Click Model Spells the End of Newspapers

Ignore that time stamp above. It’s June 25, 2015. Despite previous proliferation of free online content, newspapers, magazines and other media conglomerates have successfully implemented a pay-per-click model for accessing print content on the internet. They’ve successfully won lawsuits to prosecute copyright infringement so blogs can no longer summarize the important point of posted story. Knowledge is no longer free.

So what does the world look like? Is the internet populated with rumors? Are the citizens grossly misinformed? Are the journalists fat, happy, and well-paid? No.

Simply put, newspapers are obslete, the analytical style of the most popular magazines is a thing of the past, and the media conglomerates are wimpering, sniveling little businesses fighting to stay alive.

The people—the bloggers, the Tweeps, the Facebook frienders—are the news source of today. They see, they post, they share. Are there lies and misinformation? Sure. But there’s also a discerning population of internet browsers, made cautious by rampant internet rumors and then educated by the librarians and teachers of the world to weed out the misinformation. These webcrawlers know how to read and verify. They’re not afraid to dispel rumors by posting whip-like comments exposing the lies.

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A lot has been said this week—this week in August 2009—about implementing a pay-per-click model for print content like Apples has with iTunes movies, music and television shows. Rupert Murdoch and others in the newspaper industry have said that a pay-per-click model will revolutionize the newspaper industry, pulling it out of its current economic slump.

Courtesy | Jeremy Kemp via Wikimedia Commons

The missing factor is that which is most obvious: music, movies, and television shows are timeless. When a consumer buys any one of the three, they’re able to enjoy the content for eternity. News is not the same.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Pull out a newspaper from June 1, 2004. How about one from Aug. 5 1982 or from any other date? Do the articles hold your interest in the same way that breaking news does today? Is the front page item a classic, an absolute favorite that you read over and over again? Unless you’re an absolute media junkie, I suspect not.

Looking for a new business model in an economic downturn is wise. But Murdoch and others must realize that when they borrow a business model from a successful enterprise, they must consider all the differing factors between that company’s business and ours. Otherwise, they’re just hammering that final nail in the coffin of print media.

Finding Your Audience on Social Media Networks

Where's your audience? Courtesy | Barb Ver Sluis via Public Domain Pictures.net

On a daily basis, 100 million people view Facebook, 20 million view Twitter, and 12 million view LinkedIn. But if you don’t know which network your audience frequents or if can’t find them there, it doesn’t help.

Here are a few quick tips on how to find your audience on social media networks.

Query “What social networks do you use?” from polls, blogs, e-newsletters, any social media network you’re already on, or anywhere you’re already in contact with your audience so you can find where your efforts will be most productive.

Search keywords related to your publication in Facebook’s search tool and Twitter's advance search. You can friend/follower people whose profiles match these keywords and join groups related to these words so fans/followers can find you.

The paid service TwitterHawk or free Twitter tool Tweetbeep automates some of this work by monitoring your selected keywords and sending you an email summary at regular intervals.  

Friend/Follow Your Competitors’ Followers. If a user is following them, they should be interested in your content as well.

Use Mr. Tweet for Twitter. It’s a free service that finds users who interact with people you follow and may be interested in the same things. A link to their profile lets you quickly log-in and follow them.

Of course, you can’t find everyone on every network. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to help them find you. I’ll write about some cool tips and tricks for helping your audience find you in my next post.

What Can I Do With Social Media?

Courtesy | Mark Coldren via Public Domain Pictures.net

Whether you’re friending, following, or linking to people, it can be a jungle out there when your publication joins a social media site. When you’re asked to jump right in and get to work, the first question that may come to mind may be: What can I do with social media?

Obviously, you can communicate with your readership… but what does that really mean? You can:

Generate Traffic – Add your RSS feed to Twitter or Facebook to link readers back to your website. Or, post teasers that tell readers about current or future content on your website. Get them excited about your content!

Stay Relevant - Find out what is on readers’ mind. On Twitter, the homepage shows the thoughts of everyone you follow. On Facebook, people can write right on your publication's wall. Concentrate on those users who seem keyed in to your community or on the general community chatter. It might give you a lead on a great story.

Research Articles – Query your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to learn more about a subject. My experience with this hasn’t been perfect, but I’ve heard about plenty of successes. In one article, a journalism professor tweeted that she wanted to know what she should tell journalists about twitter.  At least 20 people responded. This same idea applies with groups on LinkedIn and discussion boards on Facebook.

Contact Freelancers and Assign Articles – Some pubs use LinkedIn to contact freelance writers. If you work for a niche magazine, this could be especially helpful. I’ve also heard that some people work in GoogleDocs so freelancers can review their submissons and make edits. Just be aware: this will not track changes.

Find Advertisers… or let them find you – If a local or niche business discovers your website for the first time through your Facebook or Twitter page, are you prepared to help them? Talk this over with your sales team. Do they have a media kit ready? Is there a number that advertisers can call?

Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in business is something so new there are no hard and fast rules. But if there is one rule, it would be this: Decide what you want to accomplish before you sign up for social media and then make a plan on how to get there.

I’ll come back tomorrow with some thoughts on your first step: finding your audience.

Managing Social Media

We've all heard the jokes about people who join Facebook and spend days feverishly setting up a profile. Their friends and spouse get worried, stage an intervention, and eventually the social media newbies quit Facebook, relieved to have broken the addiction. 

Courtesy | Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures.net

Well, that's in part true. Setting up and maintaining a social media network does take time, especially at the beginning. But it has its advantages--both for business and pleasure.

As a journalist, your time is already at a premium. Over the next couple of posts, I'll tell you my tips for monitoring and engaging your publication's audience on Facebook and Twitter. I'm no expert, but I've learned  a lot by trial and error. 

I'll start next time by writing about the advantages of using social media networks for your publication. 

Money for Page Views: Journalists Turn Into Revenue Lapdogs

Remember last week, when I posted about Michael Hicken’s article in The Faster Times “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are”? Well, it turns out there may be a good reason for his rather inflammatory view.

Courtesy | Anna Cervova via Public Domain Pictures.net

Money.

In an interview last week with Fishbowl NY, The Faster Times founder Sam Apple explained that his journalists are being paid 75 percent of the ad revenue generated by their respective pages on the site.

That means that if any one of the 19 angry readers who commented on Hicken’s article (so far) or any of the countless other journalists who he’s inflamed or ostracized clicked on even one of the ads accompanying his unsatisfying and un-researched prose, they have helped him. Infuriating!

Now, correct me if I’m wrong here, but a scenario in which people are responsible for ad revenue doesn’t sound like journalism, it sounds like sales. And when journalists are forced to behave like salespeople, it runs against all of their journalistic training.

Who would bide their time covering zoning meetings or bridge commission meetings, or getting bored to tears at a meeting about whether the town should invest in new banners for main street or a new stop sign on a side street, when they knew that covering just one rock band concert with an ad for cheap tickets could net them an awesome 75 percent of sales.

As journalists, we vow to inform the public, to remind them of things going on in their very neighborhoods that they simply might not have the time or patience to track down. Turning journalists into another lapdog to revenue is probably the worst possible scenario for journalism.

Can We Trust The Internet? Winnowing Out Misleading, Untrue Sites

“I think it comes down to whether we can trust the internet to winnow good from bad in the blogosphere,” Trina commented on my post Coming Out From Behind the Byline: One Journalist’s Take On New Media.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about this idea of winnowing: weeding out those websites and blogs with URLs that aren’t worth typing. The internet has provided me with countless examples of where good sites can go wrong.

A citizen journalist using just a video camera uncovered reporters censoring former presidential candidate Ron Paul at a gathering of GOP candidates for president on Mackinac Island, MI about 19 months ago, reported columnist Tim Skubick for the Leelanau News. Or that’s what they thought.

Courtesy | Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures.net

“I don’t want these Ron Paul people, but I need shots of audience people eating and crap like that for voice over,” the producer says in the roughly 60 second video, which Mr. Skubick says garnered 65,000 hits in its first week in youtube.com. (The original video seems to be unavailable, but see another posting by searching “Censoring Ron Paul support?” on youtube.com.)

Unfortunately, Skubick reported, the citizen journalist didn’t check the facts. After shooting a ten-minute segment with Ron Paul, “the goal was to get some generic video of what was going on inside. To make sure the video was not slanted to favor one candidate or the other,” the producer asked them to avoid filming more Paul supporters.

But one posting and a flood of vicious emails later, the reporters stand accused of censorship, a cardinal sin in journalism. “No one called; no one suspended his or her judgment to get at the truth,” writes Skubick.

That’s not the only way that new internet sources are straying from the straight and narrow path that journalists follow in reporting the news.

Six minutes before medical examiners pronounced Michael Jackson dead, an IM feed reported the King of Pop’s demise. Events shortly after proved this report true, but internet outlets that passed along this news even an hour afterward were in the wrong.

Old Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC took several hours to confirm and report this historic event. Why, you ask?

“Someone may have been calling the hospital, the family, Tito Jackson, Jesse Jackson, not only for confirmation but for a voucher that the next of kin had all been adequately notified,” said Scott M. Fulton, III, on Betanews, where he blasted these new media sources. “You remember journalism, don't you? Or is that too much ‘old media?’”

Let’s be clear: bloggers, youtube.com posters, and other internet content producers are not all journalists. Some are simply people with a computer, internet, and desire to share their opinion. But the internet gives them the same platform as the rest of us.

So how do we winnow out the good sites from the bad? For now, the truth is that we can only control the content on our own websites. There is no ranking system where we can decry the distributors of false or misleading content.

I’m curious though, about search engine optimization. I won’t pretend to completely understand SEO, a complicated phrase that simply means “how I get my content to the top of a google search,” but I understand that this calculation does depend in part on linking.

By not linking to questionable content providers, can we keep a website low in search results, thereby reducing the number of people who click through to their site?

I’m not naïve enough to believe that one person alone can change a site’s placement in search rankings or even that a collective effort can change the ranking of some of the most popular sites, but maybe together we can begin to winnow out the worst of the worst.