OTNB IDEA: Putting Twitter to Work in the Newsroom
Oh Boy, what a mess!
I was asked, “should the newsroom have one twitter account for everyone to use, or should each news person have their own”?
The “perfect world” answer is that all your news people should be developing their own group of followers and their tweets should reflect the interests of that group. Certainly all your news-twitters should subscribe to the station breaking news alert system and Re-Tweet any breaking news or weather. But, I want a health slant from your medical reporter, a sports guy who is keeping me in the loop on “inside baseball” during the day, and weather folks whetting my appetite on the enviro-beat.
That being said, reality may be that to achieve a sustained, consistent, reliable, flow of news tweets, you may have to assign people to keep up a single newsroom account.
Lori Miller, director of marketing at WHNT-Huntsville, says two things can argue against individual accounts. “First, we found that viewers were looking for the station account. And for certain pieces of information, it carried more credibility”, said Miller. (see more from Miller in the comments section below)
So how do you do that?
One way is to sign up for one of the new services designed for that purpose.
Check out tweetfunnel or CoTweet ( https://cotweet.com/ ) With Tweetfunnel or CoTweet you can have multiple people tweeting for one account. You can also assign members of your company people to follow up with on twitter, etc.
Tom Humbarger wrote about the features of another service, HootSuite, on his blog Social Media Musings. He reports,
“I started experimenting with HootSuite last week, and so far I am loving it.
- Managing multiple accounts – you can manage multiple accounts and each account can have multiple administrators (without surrendering the main log-in) – plus, you can also send out the same tweet to multiple accounts at the same time
- Scheduling - you can pre-schedule tweets to make sure that your content is hitting throughout the day
- Search – you can use HootSuite’s search engine to track conversations and it works better than Twitter’s built-in search
- Dashbord – the dashboard provides a great overview of all Twitter activity including sent, @received, direct messages and pending
I almost forgot to share the best news about HootSuite – it’s free!
Check out the HootSuite blog at http://blog.hootsuite.com/ for more features and tips.
What are your thoughts?
I would say, both.
I originally argued for individual accounts for our station because people prefer to talk to other people, or at least know who they are speaking to. It’s a better, stronger connection. The Colonel for Chicago Tribune is a notable exception, but even that account has a distinctive personality.
But two things can argue against individual accounts. First, we found that viewers were looking for the station account. And for certain pieces of information, it carried more credibility.
Second, individual accounts will only work if the people behind them are willing. This cannot be overstated. There’s an obligation to interactivity when a person creates an account, and it’s a liability if that person then ignores the viewers that seek to talk to them there.
So, at our station, we have multiple people who man our station twitter account @whnt, but we also have individuals, ones who like Twitter and are willing to use it. @danwhnt is a great example by our chief met.
Just our experience. And thanks for the services list — very helpful!
LORI
@lorimillerwhnt
Lori Miller
May 12, 2009 at 9:13 am
Hello Griff,
Thank you so much for mentioning TweetFunnel in this post! We think it is a great tool for coordinating a newsroom’s Twitter stream.
I did want to let you know that the link for TweetFunnel seems to be broken. The working link is http://www.tweetfunnel.com.
Best,
Nathalee Ghafouri
http://www.twitter.com/tweetfunnel
Nathalee Ghafouri
May 27, 2009 at 10:05 am