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How to Preach to the Converted and still get tremendous Applause…

Moderator Mark Jones was always going to have his work cut out on the Social Media Tips for Journos panel – most journos in the audience at Sydney Media140 were of the opinion that they already knew everything there is to know about Social Media. It was moreover the final panel of the event and the last before lunch on Day Two after 36 hours of intense debate and discussion. Remarkably, Mark and the five panellists not only held our attention but had the auditorium participating enthusiastically, with frequent laughter and a final burst of sustained applause.

Here, three of our industrious guest bloggers, Kate Walton, Michelle Fielding and Bohdana Szydlik elucidate a few highlights of the presentations – for which huge thanks, ladies!

Wolf Cocklin of ABC Digital was still being ribbed, both on the back channel and from the hall, about the flattering mention of his work on the previous day in the initial keynote presentation by his boss, ABC Managing Director Mark Scott. Below, Bohdana explains how Wolf rose above this affectionate abuse to give an illuminating explanation of how he uses Social Media tools to best effect.

It was Wolf who came up with the initial concept for a desktop application to aggregate ABC content – including news headlines, podcasts, vodcasts and video streams and even weather forecast information.

The concept was further developed and released as ‘ABC Now’ and has reached over 100,000 downloads to date. For the past year, Wolf has been establishing a framework for the ABC to use and interact with its audience via Twitter.

Wolf was able to demonstrate the significance of the Twitter channel during the Victorian Bushfire Emergency earlier this year when the ABC’s @774Melbourne twitter account came to form an integral part of the broadcaster’s service.

Wolf collected huge amounts of information via radio, SES services, television and tweets and went on to single-handedly tweet the Victorian bushfires for 774 Melbourne. Nevertheless, he insists on describing himself as neither a capital J journalist or small j journalist.

Wolf shared his own top five social media tips and tools for journalists:

Watch your followers: See what your followers are talking about; check which hashtags are being used; if appropriate, spread the use of these hashtags yourself.

Utilise Tools: You cannot merely look at the Twitter website and use that and that alone. Use twittersearch, use geodata, use twitterfall and the many other applications now available.

Be Open: Share what you know, engage in conversation.

Use Back Channels: Use search tools and monitor back channels.

Share & Give Credit: Retweet items which appeal to you; give credit where credit is due; normal Twitter practice is to provide references with everything you tweet or retweet.

Following Wolf and Renai Lemay, News Editor of ZDNet, who stressed the importance of injecting personality into your Twitter account, Latika Bourke, Radio 2UE Political Reporter set herself a three-minute challenge to provide us some tips. Kate Walton explains:

Latika offered four main tips:
The first was: Understand your medium – Twitter. If you “get” Twitter intuitively, use it. If not, it maybe better to stay away?

Her second point was, as a journalist, you probably need to be providing some added value – not just a link to your regular reports. If you are able, you need to supplement the basic information.

Twitter allows Latika to post reports that for whatever reason cannot or just do not make it on air via the radio channel. She stressed that it also helped her to give her audience a sense of the process which goes into all the stories she reports on.

Thirdly – a point stressed by almost every speaker at the event – Be yourself. People are not one-dimensional and your Twitter account shouldn’t be one-dimensional either. Being personable and open on Twitter allows people to trust you. Don’t say anything online that you would not be prepared to say, either on air or in print.

Latika’s final point was a reminder to exercise caution and fact check. She concluded with a wise warning to keep an eye out for the significant amounts of spin to which social media can be subjected and begged us not to fall for it.

Maintaining involvement in the online community whatever your interest, is the most important thing to remember, were key words of wisdom from Channel 7 Brisbane Online News Editor, Dave Earley. Michelle Fielding was listening to them.

Earley saw no difference between social media tools and the tools you should apply to traditional forms of media. Even though you may find an idea for a story from a ‘tweet’ online, you still have to do the leg work such as finding a telephone number and calling the person directly.

Many speakers across the two day conference touched on the idea that there is not much difference between a ‘Journalist’ and a ‘citizen journalist’. However, Earley made the important point that, to fully utilize online communities and the stories that they have to tell, you still have to have the skills to be able to tell it.

As a current student of journalism only a few exams away from graduating, Earley’s message rings true with a key principle I have learned over my university career. Anyone can be a journalist using the tools of the internet, but it still takes a certain set of skills and knowledge to be able to know what best to do with all the information that is now out there.