The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

JD Lasica [email protected]

Doing Good 2.0 The Next-Generation Internet’s impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

mailto:[email protected]


Relax!

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/nmlab(all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval)

Flickr photo “relaxation, the maldivian way” by notsogoodphotography

Presentation at http://slideshare.net/jdlasicaTuesday, November 24, 2009

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/seize


http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/newsu_sw

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/newsu_sw



Today’s hashtag

Tweet this talk! Hashtag: #nmlab

Creative Commons photo on Flickrby Prakhar




Glossary for new terms

http://socialbrite.org/glossary

“Social media:Any online technology or practice that lets us share

(content, opinions, insights, experiences, media)

and have a conversation about the ideas we care about.

”Tuesday, November 24, 2009



What we’ll cover todayOverview: The landscape

• Forces driving next-gen Net

• Rise of social media

New roles• Entrepreneur & strategists

• Conversation facilitator

• Social marketer

• Practical futurist

• Metrics & research

• Journalist & storyteller

Tools & resources


World Internet users by region

Asia: 650 million

Europe: 390 million

North America: 246 million

Latin America/Caribbean: 166 million

Africa: 54 million

Middle East: 45 million

Australia/Oceana: 20 million

1.57 billion users worldwide

Source: Internet World Stats, February 2009http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Reality check


http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

http://internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Digitization

Network effect

Power of participation

3 accelerating trends:

Forces driving next-gen Internet


Mobile Planet

Apple has sold nearly 50 million iPhones & iPod Touch mobile devices; 100,000+ apps in iTunes Store

Just beginning to see impact of Mobile Generation on culture

4.1 billion mobile device subscriptions worldwide; roughly 4 billion people use or have access to cell phones

Took 12 years to connect 1st billion mobile users; 2.5 years for 2nd billion; 22 months for 3rd & 4th billion


Online meets offline

Wikitude AR Travel Guide for Android G1 is an augmented reality application that, using a Webcam and GPS functionality, overlays information from Wikipedia, letting you search for 350,000 points of interest.


Blogs

Social networks

Microblogs (Twitter)

Podcasts

Social bookmarking

Wikis

Online video (YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler)

Widgets

Photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, etc.)

Virtual worlds

Forums

Presentation sharing

Social media: Explosive uptake


Social media by the numbers25-40 million active blogs; almost 1 million blog posts per day; over 346 million people globally read blogs

6 of top 10 websites in US are social sites (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, MySpace, Blogger, Craigslist)

Facebook: 300 million members

Twitter: 19% of U.S. adults use Twitter; 5.8 billion tweets sent out

Flickr: 3 billion-plus photos

YouTube: 1 billion-plus videos served per day; people upload equivalent of 86,000 full-length Hollywood films every week

Whenever someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for social reasons


Tweets in real timepopacular.com/gigatweet


Social media in 60 secondspersonalizemedia.com


Overview: Who’s participating?

More than half of online U.S. women report doing a “social media” activity at least once a week. Of those, more than half do so on a daily basis.

Survey of 2,821 women conducted by Compass Partners, March 2009. www.blogher.com/press

Women active in social media


http://www.flickr.com/groups/newwest

http://www.flickr.com/groups/newwest

Participation is widespread

42 million U.S. women participate in some form of social media at least once a week.

Activities include:

• social networks• reading blogs• posting to blogs• message boards & forums• status updates on Twitter, etc.

Source: 2009 Women and Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners

42 million women do it


Shifting time to social mediaShift by women away from traditional media continues to increase

Source: Compass Partners


Megatrends in social media

The Web is the platform.

Rise of real-time Web.

We’re moving to the cloud.

Social media and Sharing Economy are disrupting traditional business models.

Internet and social media have changed balance of power between people and institutions.

Flattening of hierarchies is leading to a rethinking of organizational structures: more autonomy, collaboration.


More of our online experiences will be happening through portable devices.

Destination sites giving way to presence on multiple social sites.

Command-and-control styles of PR/marketing are on way out.

Rise of interesting new fundraising models online.

Megatrends in social media


Cultural norms of social media

Premium on sharing

Transparency

Conversation expected

Mistrust of traditional authority figures & marketers

Instead: trust in peers, people like ourselves — even strangers

It’s not about the technology, it’s about connecting people.

Trust is easily gained and easily lost.

Credit/attribution given

CollaborationTuesday, November 24, 2009

Lecture

Passive consumers

One to many

Corporate/autocratic

Centralized

Elite professionals

Exclusive

Remote voice

Heavily filtered

Conversation, participation

Empowered users

Many to many

Democratic, collaborative

Distributed

Grassroots, edges in

Inclusive

Personal voice

Unfiltered/lightly filtered

Media 1.0 Media 2.0


Now, about this project ...


New roles

1. Entrepreneur & strategist

2. Conversation facilitator & stimulator

3. Social marketer

4. Practical futurist

5. Metrics & research nerd

6. Journalist & storyteller

Photograph by Tristram Kenton © The Really Useful Group Ltd.

Combining all 6 roles to become ...


Community builder

here’s an amazing difference between building an audience and building a community. An audience will watch you fall on a

sword. A community will fall on a sword for you.

— Chris BroganAuthor,“Trust Agents”


1.Entrepreneur/strategist

Before you focus on the tools, define the end goals.

Be realistic, but don’t be afraid of blue-sky thinking.

Be passionate but clear-headed about outcomes.

Consider 2-3 strategic partnerships.

Think: Is this a venture I would fund?

Creative Commons BY photo on Flickr by jonrawlinson


1. Define target audiences

2. Define objectives • Launch self-sustaining

project• Also increase members

or followers?• Create broadcast TV

presence?• Increase visibility for

cause? • Public education?• More robust

community outreach?

Goal-setting: a 6-step process


3. Define your strategy• Identify internal champions

& contacts• Set out rules for interaction

with public• Assign responsibilities• Map out project & campaigns• Identify tools & platforms• Establish measurable goals

4. Launch pilot projects or campaigns!

5. Monitor, measure results, track analytics, refine.

6. Be patient. Iterate, adapt, move on.

Goal-setting: a 6-step process


Don’t do all the heavy lifting!

Creative Commons photo on Flickr byJason Means

Tap into the sharing economy


Creativecommons.org

• Rich source of free commercial material.

• Flickr: 26 million+ Attribution & ShareAlike licenses

• Use them for your blog, website, email or print newsletter, presentations, etc.

flickr.com/creativecommons

Free content:

Creative Commons


WordPress & its plug-insOpen Office 3.0Drupal, Joomla & other open source platformsUbuntu Linux OSKaltura for video

Free content! Free resources!

Free software & platforms!

Free photos Free videos (TED Talks, etc.)Free music & audio

Socialbrite.org/sharing-centerCreativecommons.orgMeetup.com

Free expertise!

BarCampPodCampWordCampSocial Media Club

Leverage the ecosystem of free

/StrategistTuesday, November 24, 2009

2. Conversation facilitator

Set up a Monitoring Dashboard

Strategic use of Twitter

Outreach to key influencers

Email to drive conversation

Create Facebook fan pages

Local meetups & tweetups

Contests & discounts

Create widgets to enlist bloggers as evangelists

Tactics to execute strategy:


Create Monitoring Dashboard

Set up a Monitoring Dashboard (listening station) to track what’s being said about the nonprofit/cause.

Best of breed: Google Reader, Feedly (left) & Netvibes supplemented by a Twitter monitoring service.

Let’s set up a project management site to share free tools and best practices.


Best practices for Social WebRemember: Social media is a universe, not a set of tools.

Think of social media as a way to talk with your supporters, key employees and stakeholders.

Build relationships. Good relationships take time.

Be a connector. Reciprocate. Follow back.

It’s not all about you. Offer value. Give more than you take.

Empower supporters & fans, don’t market to consumers.


Best practices for Social Web

Be authentic and transparent about who you are. Disclose your relationship to the nonprofit/services you promote.

Trust each other. Learn as you go. There is no handbook.

Don’t be stupid.

Don’t be defensive — be open to critical feedback.

Successful campaigns engender authentic enthusiasm. Social media still comes down to the product or cause.

Conversations can’t be controlled or “managed.” But they can be engaged, informed and elevated.

Remember: Audience is not the same as community.


Start by listening & observing.

Not a broadcasting medium to distribute press releases or your headlines. Good rule of thumb: 3 conversational tweets for every ‘broadcast’ tweet.

Unlearn the conventions of journalism. Be conversational, not detached.

Use it for outreach, soliciting ideas, customer support, to announce events, to recommend articles, to identify experts.

#1 traffic driver: retweets

Use calls to action; use ‘Please RT’ strategically.

Tweets with a URL are 3x more likely to be retweeted.

nytimes.com: Twitter drives 10% of its traffic.

Make Twitter work for you


Grow your Twitter following

Schmooze with the heavy hitters in your sector. Find the evangelists and influencers and follow them.

Make sure your bio is optimized for searching.

Follow the people on the lists they follow.

Talk about your agenda one-third of time.

Promote other folks’ agenda two-thirds of time.

Use Twitterfeed and Tweetlater strategically.

Become a “one-person StumbleUpon” of useful information.

Be interesting. Be diverse in what you talk about.

Link your Twitter profile everywhere — even on your business card.

Join in on Twitter events expressed as #hashtags.


Grow your Facebook followingMake sure your Page name is optimized for Facebook searches.

Pair your nonprofit’s logo with a photo.

Add relevant pages as favorites to your Page.

Create a custom landing page for new visitors.

Entice potential fans with goodies if they become fans.

Make sure fans can freely post all media types on your wall.

When messaging fans, make it about them.

End messages with a specific request to share your message.

Make your Page known as a source of valuable content.

Use targeted Facebook Ads to promote your Page.

Include Facebook in the overall marketing mix.


Identify & engage influencers

Scope out Twitter or Facebook users in your sector with large # of followers. Engage them, don’t sell them.

Ask followers to add you to their Twitter Lists where appropriate.

Learn about how people in your sector use social media.

Connect with social media influencers on other platforms.


At left, widget found at: http://journchat.info

Find relevant hashtags through hashtags.org or Twitter Search.

Join (but don’t spam) conversation threads.

Start your own hashtag, especially for events.

Hashtags to check out: #nonprofit #4change #nptech #charitytuesday #CSR #socialgood #fundraising

Use hashtags to join conversations


http://journchat.info




The power of widgets

Events & newsLeft: Indy.com staffers pick the best local events to highlight on the site’s front page. Below: NY Times world news widget.

Think of how you can create widgets for specific sections of Scholastic’s website. Two benefits:

• slick packaging of content• enlist users to

distribute content on their own blogs


Tap into real-time conversations

Turn conversationsinto communities

Tap into the conversations that are already taking place in your sector: Widgets let you post tailored discussions — by topic or geographic location.

Create widgets for different sections of your site.

Services: Widgetbox, Netvibes, Yahoo Widgets.

/Conversation facilitator


3. Social marketer

Use tactics to spur people to connect with each other around a sharable object you’ve created.

The ‘object’ can be anything: a story, photo, game, blog post, cause campaign, event, product, iPhone app, etc.

The most effective sharable objects are portable and transmutable, evoke emotion and can be easily copied and reproduced in many channels and formats.

Use conversation, not a marketing sell, to share your object.


Social news tools

Facebook Connect: Each story shared on Facebook is seen on average by 40+ friends. Use it to authenticate comments.

Google Friend Connect: Same potential for large network effect. Already 8 million communities.

Digg: 39 million monthly visitors; 80 million outbound links per month; home page story on Digg will send 20,000 to 200,000+ clicks


Spur engagement through video

Can you leverage video created by your supporters?

Video has much more impact than straight text.

One estimate: 90% of Web content will be video by 2012.

Twitcam combines simplicity of Twitter with ability to stream.

Cisco: cost per video view: 2-4 cents.

You can use partners & bloggers as content distributors.

Live streaming video tools include Kyte.com, Qik.com, Ustream.tv, Livestream.com & Youcaster.com.

Video: Live or recorded

Freespeech.tv


http://www.flickr.com/map/


































American Cancer Society, Web 2.0morebirthdays.com


Social cause success storiescharity: water’s September birthday campaign. They make it about you.

LiveStrong, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, has a strong community outreach program.

America’s Giving Challenge enables users to vote for daily, overall causes you want to support.

Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre of Rainforest program — for every 10 gifts you send, you’ll save 1 square foot of Rainforest.

Invisible Children’s Visible Children Scholarship Program.


charity: waterAug.-Oct. 2008:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone launched a campaign asking those with September birthdays to accept online donations to charity: water in lieu of gifts.

Partly as a result, the nonprofit raised $393,000 for 33 villages.


Multiple campaigns

In less than 2 years, charity: water has raised over $3 million and funded over 600 water projects by actively using Facebook Causes & MySpace and interactive media in building awareness of its mission.

Creatively brought the issue of water to life using conversation-inspiring profiles, video and images. On YouTube, its channel includes an imaginative video with the tagline: “Imagine if New York City’s taps went dry. What would we do?” The video’s received over 650,000 views in less than 3 months.

On Socialvibe, charity:water allows anyone to deploy a sponsored ad to their social network profile or blog; supporters have raised $57,000.

Twestivals held in 202 cities on Feb. 12, 2009, bringing together the Twitter community for fun and a good cause. Raised $250,000 to build 55 water projects in Ethiopia, Uganda and India, clean water for more than 17,000 people.


Recipe for fundraising successHave a strong, simple message.

Make it for a specific cause, not for nonprofit or general fund.

Tell a compelling story with a strong human interest angle.

Have a clear “ask” or call to action.

Create hard stop date for donations.

Build relationships with key influencers & use social media to spread word.

Collaborate where possible.

Refresh the campaign as you go.

Use contests, drawings, discounts.

Spread your effort across multiple sites.Creative Commons BY photo on Flickr by norwichnuts

/Social marketerTuesday, November 24, 2009

4. Practical futuristGoodGuide.com: Mobile devices enabling ethics

Users can search the app for info on whether a product is healthy, environmentally friendly & socially responsible.

Starting this month, you can scan supermarket barcodes to bring up relevant information.


TV meets the InternetYahoo! Connected TV’s Widget Gallery + Intel Cinematic Internet

Eric B. Kim, senior VP, IntelTuesday, November 24, 2009

TV will be going social

Widget Gallery TV

Xbox

Netflix

TiVo

Boxee

LinkTV

BT (UK)


Grab open data

An API allows two applications to talk to each other. For example, Flickr’s API might allow you to display photos from the site on your blog.

Open APIs allow mashups, like housingmaps.com (above), a rentals site that aggregates data from craigslist and plots it on Google Maps.


Other ahead-of-curve ideas

/Practical futurist

Social Actions: Open API enables organizations & bloggers to volunteer or take action on the causes they support, can tailor it to your cause.

Giiv ("send some joy") is a new service that lets you give gifs (movie tix) via texting. Opportunity for a Causes channel.

Firefox 3.5: Video playback no longer limited to Flash, QT, WMV, DivX. Now can create native video in the browser with many more capabilities.

Foursquare: Location-based service just debuted an open API, the singular piece that launched Twitter into the stratosphere.

The Extraordinaries: Use the power of community for micro-volunteerism in people’s spare time.


5. Metrics/research nerd

http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/

Indianapolis Museum of Art


visit your new micro-site

donate money

evangelize your cause

register for events

share your content

download a new app

sign up for a newsletter

answer a survey

post comments

have a better online experience

You may want people to:

Social media metrics*

Identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

* sometimes called social influence or social marketing metricsTuesday, November 24, 2009

Measuring one campaign

• 15,000 members in first year, rapidly growing; only 9% of corporate online communities have more than 10,000 members.

• Community feedback was used to prioritize updates added to the latest CorelDRAW Graphics service pack

• When searching the term “coreldraw,” the community is #3 on Google and #1 on Yahoo! with no ad spend.

• CorelDRAW.com is a vibrant, self-sustaining community. The forums are self policing and users are providing each other with support. Coming from more than 190 countries, these passionate users are extremely active.

Case study: CorelThe CorelDRAW team created the coreldraw.com micro-site for design pros & graphic hobbyists to share information, build relationships and offer direct feedback about products. Social media results:

Image created in CorelDRAW Graphics Suite by Aleksey

Oglushevich.


Google Keyword Toolhttps://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

6. Journalist/storyteller

Bring journalistic standards and values into this new space: SPJ, NPR, Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Digital storytelling one of the most powerful and underused tools in storyteller’s arsenal.

As much as possible, don’t get in the way of people telling their own stories.

Serve as a guide, curator and aggregator as well as a content creator.

Think: lightweight equipment (Flip or Kodak Zi8) and easy editing tools.

Weave individual stories into a greater narrative that conveys theme of project.


Tell storiesaglimmerofhope.org


Tools & resources

Fundraising: Givezooks!, Twitcause, ChipIn, Givealittle.co.nz, Tweetsforacause.org

Cause sites: Care2, Change.org, Causecast, Razoo, Idealist.org, SmallCanBeBig.org, Donorschoose.org

Resources, tutorials: Socialbrite.org, WeAreMedia.org, Mobilizing Youth, Techsoup, KCNN.org

Translation captioning: dotSUB

Collaboration: Dropbox, Pando

Social bookmarking: Delicious, Magnolia, de.liriou.us

Crowd-funded journalism: Spot.us

Polls: Twtpoll, Zoomerang, Survey Monkey

Project management: Huddle.net, Basecamp, Google Docs


email: [email protected]

twitter: @jdlasica

Thank you! Let’s talk!

http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/nmlab

Presentation at http://slideshare.net/jdlasicaTuesday, November 24, 2009







The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media

Technology

Transcript of The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media