More on twitter and stations

2008 May 1
tags: , ,
by Todd Mundt

Picking up on today’s earlier post:

Andy Carvin has composed an excellent essay that’s well worth your time, arguing for engagement and authenticity on twitter: more live (or semi-live) conversation, less automated publishing.

WFPL News went live this morning with its twitter feed. The core of our service will include some automation: newsroom stories are getting pumped to twitter as they get published on the site. But when I vetted our plan with Andy this morning, he pointed out the #5 priority on my list (”directly engage the audience on twitter”) and encouraged me to move it up closer to #1 (that automated feed).

Twitter is about conversation. I’ve been in the twitter community since January 2007; it began as a presence app, designed so you could update your status for your friends. But that broadcast model was very quickly challenged, especially once twitter took off. People started talking to each other – not private chats (although those are possible with twitter) but public conversations.

I’ve always compared it to shouting across a crowded bar to a friend: what you’re saying is for your friend, but you don’t mind others hearing it. And perhaps a couple other friends, or total strangers, will chime in. That’s twitter. It’s conversations… or as Marshall Kirkpatrick said (on twitter) last night, “… rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations.”

Alright, so using twitter is all about conversation and engagement. If you need more convincing, read Carvin’s post again.

It’s also about authenticity, transparency – the most basic concepts that should govern how we engage with our audience on any platform, web, on-air, whatever. And on this subject of authenticity, one of the keys to success here is getting the “voice” right.

Program directors think about this all the time in the context of their on-air sound; it’s part of the core values of our services. Well, if you’re a program director, your job is getting bigger; you are now (or should be) program director of the web, of the podcasts, of the extra streams, of the HD multicast, etc. What are the qualities of heart, mind and craft of your station? How do they translate to every facet of your outreach? And how does each service bearing your brand reflect and build upon those core values?

At Louisville Public Media (as is the case at most public stations), we try to answer every email, letter and phone call we get. We’re gracious when praised; concerned and ready to learn when we get criticism. We tell our audience that every listener is important and we try to live that.

How do we live it on twitter? Map the principles to the new platform. Every user who “follows” us gets followed back. Everyone who sends a direct message to us via twitter will get a response. Everyone who “shouts across the bar to us” will get a response. Since we respect the intelligence of our audience and value their input, we’ll develop ways to encourage input from our twitter audience. And we’ll speak to them in much the same tone we use on the air – an intelligent, thoughtful, sometimes humorous voice.

We have to, not because we’ve swallowed a pill that makes us all sweaty whenever someone brings up branding. It’s much simpler than that: so far, nearly every non-public media person who has followed us is from Louisville. These people aren’t like our listeners. They are our listeners.

We’ll go slow. I expect I’ll engage this little online community in much the same way that I try to engage them when I’m on air or at a public event, and I expect we’ll expand the experiment to include other on-air personalities who want to get in on the fun.

If anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

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  • I agree and disagree with Andy C's take. Twitter can be super valuable in the direct engagement Andy discusses - anything that deepens and makes more informal our relationship with the audience is a good thing. And anything that encourages us to listen to our audience is even a better thing. But Twitter can be a very personal and intimate medium (which, perhaps, is why us radio geeks find it so familiar and great) After reading Todd's first post, I checked out the WBUR tweets mentioned. Now, I don't know Ken, but it feels a little odd to me his personal correspondence with other users is happening under the moniker of WBUR. How can a station tweet about its breakfast or a meeting it just had? I think we should encourage our reporters and staff to participate in Twitter and identify themselves as staff in their bios - so when I search WBUR Ken George comes up, as well as all his on air folks, and I can choose to follow him and others from my local station.

    I do agree that station tweets need to be more than just an automated newsfeed (guilty as charged - I need to manually get in our tweets more often), but with a station name on the account, I think it should take on a station voice. Now a station voice can have personality... just not breakfast.

    Now that I've said that, I am going to rush off and put WBEZ in my twitter bio so I come up on a search and don't look silly after this post. I also like the idea of a station following all of its followers.
  • Very good points, Josh. In fact, my plan was to make similar comments when I wrote about having a station account be multiple staffers, but got sidetracked.

    There's definitely a fine line between Transparency and Too Much Information, and most folks probably don't care about updates from an official station account with messages like "debating cornflakes vs. wheaties for breakfast." For new users of Twitter, it might even be a turnoff. I think that's perfectly fine for personal twitter accounts - color me guilty - but it's not something I would do, say, on the nprnewsblog account.

    Having said that, occasional personal tweets like that have added character to the bpp account. I just wouldn't have it become a regular feature of it. Tweets like "cleaning up the breakfast I spilled all over the soundboard" are much more illuminating than ones just focusing on breakfast. :-)
  • I think the line between personal and professional in terms of using something like Twitter is a moving target -- from person to person, station to station, service to service. Andy's right in pointing out the "Wheaties" example -- okay for one kind of Twitter account, not okay for another. Context is, again, king.

    To me, tweets that are aimed at building, shaping or sustaining an online community as a complement to a streamed media audience and a local physical audience should be personal, much as the BPP folks have shared. But it should be personal within the context of the relationships of that community and station/program/service. The BPP examples are spot on:

    * people tweeting their way to work
    * people picking up bagels for the office on the way in
    * "man it's early and I'm tired but I'm gonna do this show for you anyway"
    * people showing excitement over an interview or a musical act coming to the studios

    These are all contextual tweets -- they involve both the people and the situation of doing the show. They add texture to the experience and humanize the people that bring us this thing we like/love enough to listen to it almost every day. We already had a relationship with these folks, but now it's a deeper one and a more playful one and -- ta da! -- now it's a two-way relationship.

    For the record, this isn't the first new media example like this. Blog posts have been around a lot longer and they can do the same things, albeit in a different way. Twitter reduces the cost, or "friction," of interaction to a much lower level than blogs or forum systems. It's what some call "cheap interaction" (but not in a bad sense of "cheap").

    Let's keep in mind that the "audience" develops, in some cases, a deep attachment to stations and programs that "live" with them every day and share the drive to work, the office, the drive home, weekend errands and so on. We need to respect that affection and recognize it goes deeper than getting news headlines read to them over the air.

    I like this discussion, by the way. This is exactly at the heart of what we're starting to discuss in Anchorage. Some of us recognize that the future will not be found in bigger and bigger Arbitron reports (though those things are important to a degree). The future will be found in the depth of our relationships with a committed community audience, not a mass audience that's marginally engaged.

    Twitter is one tool that allows us to deepen that engagement, if used effectively. And it may indeed mean tweeting that you saw Iron Man this weekend and loved it or hated it. Because in a growing number of cases a tweet from someone I trust in my "community" carries more weight than a Bob Mondello review on ATC.
  • I should clarify... I like Bob Mondello reviews. He's just not a personal friend.
  • So even if you have a few good Twitter friends look at the reach you have - I have taken the Fibonacci numbers - that are also the Magic Numbers for optimal human relationships to the power of 4 here:

    2 - 16

    3 - 82

    5 - 625

    8 - 4,096

    13 - 28,561

    34 - 1,336,336

    55 - 9,150, 625

    89 - 62, 742,241

    144 - 429, 981, 696

    My bet is that the sweet spot is 8 -34 - so as the Twitter net strengthens, it is about a million users now, with 34 friends you can reach the whole group now. With 144 you can reach its potential.

    So if Pub Media developed a Twitter AP with "Member/Stringers" we could cover the whole world easily
  • Let me clarify a couple of things, especially in light of the comments above and this one in particular:

    "Now, I don’t know Ken, but it feels a little odd to me his personal correspondence with other users is happening under the moniker of WBUR."

    Twitter has taken WBUR into uncharted territory and I will be the first to admit that I am largely making this up as I go along. And yes, balancing the personal and professional is a particularly acute challenge in this medium.

    I am a representative of the station and always comport my behavior accordingly. My “Tweets” are about station events, news, programming information. And while I do engage in conversation – typically with various participants in WBUR interactive initiatives – that can veer into the innocuously personal – there are limits to what I will and will not Tweet about. For example, I studiously avoid chronicling my own life outside of work (“Going to the bar now, meeting up with my bro Kevin, hanging out with the gang.”). I log-off once I clock out of the station. And if I do log-on from home, it is to promote what is happening on 90.9. So let’s be clear: This is not, nor is it intended to represent my “personal correspondence.” Personality yes -- I will freely acknowledge my “Tweets” are indelibly stamped with my personality (as is the case with our Listener Photo Project initiative on Flickr) but no, this is not Ken George’s personal Twitter account. When I leave WBUR, I will toss the keys to someone else. Then you will see a new name and face up there.

    Without personality I think this Twitter will eventually be relegated to the dustbin. And besides ,doesn’t the entire public radio system trade in personality? What makes things so different here?
  • That balance between an authentic voice and a feed is an interesting one. After the San Diego fires, we said, "What should we do next with this Twitter account?" and we were very clear that we didn't want it to be a marketing tool or an automated feed: we wanted it to be true to the spirit of the Twitter community. We refuse to spam people with every single KPBS News headline -- just the more important/interesting ones. We try to write them in a more conversational way than a straight headline. But one day a local graduate student asked us, "Well, why don't you put all your headlines on Twitter? I don't even read the news on the web any more. I want to get it all as a text message on my phone." It's all about choice and getting the information in the format you want it, right? So I've thought about having separate automated KPBS News feeds by topic for those who just want alerts about their pet topic (i.e. the environment), with the main one that we created during the fires still being manually curated with key highlights and breaking news. I personally don't want to get a text message every time there's a new story posted.
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