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Words of the Day
“Be careful. Journalism is more addictive than crack cocaine.” – Dan Rather, former CBS News anchor
News Is Something To Tweet About
Twitter, that revolutionary social media icon and pioneering PR, marketing and branding tool, is now aiming to restore luster to the news media.
Biz Stone, the engaging co-founder of Twitter, is harnessing the media crowd to use Twitter to reach an ever-expanding audience. Stone recently said in an interview: “We provide the information. That’s when we hand off the baton to journalists, to provide context.”
As a result, Twitter has quietly formed a number of partnerships—some legal, some informal—with top news organizations. On the recent Midterm election night, for instance, the company provided a steady stream of seconds-old tweets about the races nationwide to The New York Times, which posted them online. (Sample: “Goodbye Speaker Pelosi. Your power is gone. That’s your karma for not listening to the people! Good riddance!”)
On the same night, The Washington Post became the first news outlet to buy one of Twitter’s “promoted trends,” under the hashtag symbol #election, which linked to a continuous list of stories, headlines, and video.
“It was a great experiment,” says Katharine Zaleski, the paper’s director of digital news products. “We went straight to an audience that is already very engaged and talking to each other, and put our content at the top of the most important conversation of the day. We had tons of stuff we could tweet and were treating Twitter as another home page.”
CNN’s John King used his magic wall to show graphs categorizing 200,000 tweets, dating back to April, in such statewide races as California and Nevada. “It’s as if you could just parachute into diners around the country and listen to what people were saying,” CNN reporter Tom Foreman told viewers. And Twitter plans to ramp up these efforts for the 2012 campaign.
Twitter executive Chloe Sladden says there are “three major areas we discuss and explore with our journalism partners:
- How Twitter impacts how journalists source and shape stories.
- How Twitter has changed how news breaks and how audiences follow breaking stories.
- How papers engage their audience via Twitter.
And Twitter is being rewarded from the media. Recently, Stone and Twitter received the first innovation award from the International Center for Journalists.
With 95 million tweets launched each day, Stone is conscious of what he calls the “noise” of Twitter. He says the company plans to make the rivers of information more navigable, not just by suggesting people to follow, as it does now, but by suggesting relevant tweets you should read—based on some algorithm that assesses your interests.
That, of course, could foster some goodwill beyond journalism’s place as the fourth branch of government, directly Inside the Beltway. In Congress, where nearly every lawmaker has a Twitter account, including Nancy Pelosi (23,000 followers) and John Boehner (72,000). The same goes for Sarah Palin (297,000 followers) and Barack Obama (5.9 million, though he’s acknowledged that “some 20-year-old” does his tweeting). Stone met this year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (43,000 followers) and Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (15,000 followers). Twitter’s founder told them he hasn’t been ignoring Washington but that Twitter was tiny, just 150 people working out of a San Francisco loft (it’s now up to 300).
Not bad PR in the Twitter sphere!
Golden Mic
Each week, Wordsmith will bestow a Golden Mic Award to the person, group or company in the court of public opinion that best exemplifies the tenets of solid PR, marketing and advertising – and those who don’t. Stay tuned … and step-up to the mic!
The WordSmith News Bureau is based at Deane Smith Media Innovations, a full-service PR, marketing and advertising agency. Got PR? Need marketing strategy? Ad consulting? Message Wordsmithing? Creative & online initiatives? Reach the WordSmith atwordsmith@deanesmithmedia.com.