July 20, 2009
Creative carnage: Social media takeaways
At Knight Digital Media Center’s social media conference, light bulbs go off and heads explode!
I’m at KDMC’s conference on “Using Social Media to Build Audience,” and Paul Gillin just cautioned news executives here that if they try to use all the tools we’re learning about all at once our “heads will explode.” I am so there.
Here are just a few of the pops (many from comments and tweets by participants):
Arturo Duran of ImpreMedia online: Five things every Web page should do,: inform; entertain; communicate; transact; and share.
Paul Gillin: Don’t fear failure. Beta. Beta. Beta. The Web is forgiving, especially if you are constantly improving the product based on user feedback. “You don’t need focus groups any more. There is a giant focus group out there online waiting to talk with you.” (Check out http://www.failblog.org.)
Susan Mernit: Get over the idea that it’s all about your site. “The days when anyone is going to go to your site and your site only are gone.”
Dana Chinn: Measure the quality of user experience. “Do people feel that they belong. If they don’t feel they be to your community, they’re not going to come back They’re not going to participate.”
Dana Chinn: Decide on just a few ways to measure traffic and stick with them to see if a project is working. If you don’t have a lot of time for metrics look at three things: The bounce rate off the home page, visits per unique visitor, page views per visit. (See http://www.newsnumbers.com/socialmedia.html)
Paul Gillin: An online link is much more important than a print mention these days because it generates an action.
Amy Gahran: “When news organizations engage communities directly and personally via social media, they’re doing something far greater and ultimately more valuable and important than increasing ad revenue or otherwise selling something; they’re building infrastructure.” (see http://bit.ly/rpNQZ)
Amy Gahran: “Think about what you want to happen because you’re in business. If you only wanted to make money you’d all be out selling crack.”
JD Lasica: News organizations should not look at social media strictly as delivery platforms. “It’s more than that. Think about using networks to communicate in ways that are more more helpfl and constructive.”
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Susan Mernit: Social media, especially Twitter, can drive traffic to your site. “Social media will profoundly change your metrics. You can move those numbers and it’s cheap.”
Paul Gillin: “If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough.”
Dana Chinn: “Time spent on site isn’t a meaningful measure of engagement. Bounce rate is more important.”
JD Lasica: Facebook has changed the game on anonymity in comments. It may be that the way to get rid of offensive comments is to get rid of anonymity.
Paul Gillin: If you try to use all the tools we’re learning about here your head will explode.” Instead, Gillin suggests editors explore one tool a week. “Try a lot of them. See what people are using.”
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By Tuấn, 07/30/09 at 8:42 pm
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