Media must sharpen social skills

BBC Social Media Summit, London: From a failure to engage with readers (rather than simply broadcast links and headlines at them) to a lack of buy-in across the organisation, some media companies have hit a number of hurdles as they attempt to fully integrate social media into newsgathering and community building.

Speaking at the BBC Social Media Summit, Peter Horrocks, head of global news at the BBC, said one wake up call for his own organisation came earlier this year when a joint interview for Christine Amanpour from ABC News and Jeremy Bowen from the BBC, with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, became known as ABC's scoop. This was simply because Amanpour was tweeting about the interview within seconds of it ending (right), while Bowen's involvement became lost in the hiatus between completing the interview and it being broadcast later that day. 

Horrocks said this incident enforced a realisation that "using social media... should no longer be peripheral."

But this requires cultural change, which in some cases comes from a standing start, he said:

"Many people in newsrooms live in the moment. Their great skill is being reactive and responsive to the news and they're not necessarily interested in concepts and visions and thinking ahead about the future of journalism."

Meg Pickard, head of digital engagement at The Guardian, said the right approach to initiating the required cultural change looks a little like "a sandwich" with top-down and bottom-up influence required - and no doubt some meat in the middle:

"In order to get social media to be successful within an organisation you need to have a clear mandate and support from above. You need to have your senior leadership team to say this is important and this is something it is OK to spend time doing. In fact not just OK, this is something you need to spend time doing.

"But you also need the bottom bit. You need to find organic grassroots activity happening throughout the rest of the organisation, nurture it support it, point at it, let peers insipire each other."

One of the most encouraging practical steps being taken by any publisher, announced at the BBC Social Media Summit by Liz Heron, social media editor of the New York Times, is the switching off of the newspaper's autofeed of headlines into its main Twitter account.

"Next week we're going to turn off our autofeed and go hardcore engagement, replying to people from the main account, retweeting people outside the New York Times and asking questions."

That addresses a major stumbling block for many media outlets who have taken an almost deliberately antisocial approach to social media. A number of UK papers would do well to take note.

Related articles:
Journalism: Is it ever 'just a numbers game'?
Newspapers and a changing audience
Which papers tweet most efficiently?

Comments

[Nick Kokolski]

Perhaps the rest of the world will follow this example and hear the wake up call.
As far as the BBC is concerned though, they may have heard the call but how fast will they react?

[Mark King]

For me, the way Christine Amanpour tweeted actually goes against the collaborative, fully transparent way in which companies should be using social media. She talks of "my" interview and "I" interviewed Gaddafi, while completely failing to mention it was a joint interview.
It will make me question the validity of her future tweets.