Epic launches, Politico goes deeper: Why longform is the new necessity | PandoDaily

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The power of an image

This chart shows the number of social media-generated clicks on a tragic PalmBeachPost.com story this morning out of suburban West Palm Beach: A body was found floating in a canal.

 

 

The clicks from 8:23 to 8:43 a.m. came from our initial tweet.

 

 

We saw the spike in traffic after posting a photo to our Facebook page:

 

 

A customer service success story

Told via a round of Facebook messages.

Palm Beach Post social media star: High school sports writer Jeff Greer

Palm Beach Post high school sports writer Jeff Greer is not only active on Twitter and Facebook, he takes full advantage of a wide spectrum of social media by being heavily involved in blogging, reader feedback and video.

His use of Twitter varies. He tweets recruiting news, announcing reported scholarship offers to high school football and basketball players. He live-tweets sporting events, from the Miami Heat and Florida Marlins to high school softball. I interacts with his followers by asking questions such as, “Name your top five NBA players of all-time.” He’s also been known to post the occasional joke, such as this lighthearted photo.

On The Post’s PBGametime Facebook page, he and his fellow high school sports writer post photos, links to stories that don’t come through the feeds and interact with users. The page has 1,995 fans and counting.

Palm Beach Post social media star: Courts reporter Jane Musgrave

By Breaking News Editor Rick Christie

It’s not often that we get to set a new standard for coverage.

But we did just that with our coverage of John Goodman’s high-profile DUI manslaughter trial.

One day in, it was clear that our initial plan to go with one reporter both for print and online was not going to be enough if we wanted to do it right.

Palm Beach Post social media star: HistoricPalmBeach.com’s Michelle Quigley

Research librarian Michelle Quigley is the driving force behind The Palm Beach Post’s HistoricPalmBeach.com, as well as the blog’s Facebook page and Twitter account.

The niche site has a loyal audience, including 1,600 Facebook fans, folks who post about their own memories of Palm Beach County and in return get relevant and quirky facts from the place we live.

With Facebook’s new Timeline, Michelle posted historic events as Facebook Milestones relevant to Palm Beach County dating to 1696, when Jonathan Dickinson shipwrecked off Jupiter Island.

Michelle’s Timeline takes readers on a trip through local history, tracing such events as:

Palm Beach Post social media highlights for February

• For a daylong live chat on Signing Day 2012, Palm Beach Post college and high school football writers pitched in to take on on numerous topics, interact with readers and answer questions as players made their school choices official. Replay the chat here.

• When health writer Stacey Singer covered Palm Beach County’s first free health care day on a Saturday in February, you might say she just phoned it in. In addition to writing her story for the web and print, Stacey used her iPhone to post live updates on her popular Twitter account throughout the day as she was reporting, including tweeting her iPhone photos of patients she talked with. She covered the event in real time as 12 clinics saw more than 1,100 people for free, capturing the stories, the faces and the pain of Palm Beach County’s ailing and uninsured. See a summary of her live coverage here.

• Education reporter Allison Ross used Facebook to live-blog the Palm Beach County school superintendent choice. By spreading the word, in the three days leading up to her chat, the Education Matters Facebook page she shares with Jason Schultz gained as many new fans as the page normally gains in a month. Allison also took photos of the meeting on her phone and uploaded them into a Facebook gallery on her page. Recap Allison’s Facebook chat here.

Facebook Timeline for Pages: The email I sent our newsroom’s FB Page admins

 

Image via Wikipedia

Hello PBP Facebook page admins:

Every Facebook Page will switch automatically to the new Timeline layout on March 30, so we all need to start preparing NOW. If you like, you can manually switch over before then.

Some of the most important features are:

• You will need a large cover photo (851 x 315 pixels). Start thinking now of what you’d like it to be. (Cover photos cannot include price or purchase information, contact info such as website & email, references to FB actions such as Like, Share, or an arrow pointing to these features, or any call to action such as “Tell your friends.” And this should go without saying, but your cover photo also cannot be someone else’s copyrighted image.)
• Your profile photo remains. A logo continues to work best for this.
• Pinned posts. Lets you keep important posts at the top of your Page. A post can be pinned for only 7 days.
• Starring and hiding stories. Gives you more control over what appears on your Page. Starring makes a story bigger.
• Milestones. Go retroactive by building a history of key moments of your “brand.” Milestones must have photos, and will have a flag icon. Location, exact day, and story are optional.
• You can change dates of posts so that relevant content can appear in the past.
• Pages can now receive private messages from fans.

Here are some resources for more information.

• NYT (showoffs) has already already enabled Timeline:

http://www.facebook.com/nytimes

• Here are a few others from various media companies:

http://on.fb.me/yt0Wkk

• To manage your new “activity log”:

Go to Manage at the top of your admin panel, and use the drop-down menu for each story. Save your best posts as “Allowed on Timeline.”

• Please bookmark these: Facebook’s guides to the new Pages

http://www.facebook.com/about/pages

http://www.facebook.com/help/pages/new-design

Feel free to contact me with any questions you have, or stop by the Learning Lounge for Facebook Fridays resuming 3/9 from 10-noon and 2-4.

Related articles

• Facebook Timeline Coming to Pages Soon: Preview Mine (professorjosh.wordpress.com)
• Timeline for Facebook pages: a complete overview of new features (insidefacebook.com)
• How To Use Facebook Timeline For Brand Pages: New Feature Details (techcrunch.com)

The key to social media (to me): Sharing inspiring stories, listening and connecting

I spend a few hours every week at work updating Community Post, the social-media channel of PalmBeachPost.com that I created last spring. It’s a small part of the website that most people in the newsroom pay little attention to, and it’s been a struggle to get it promoted on our homepage and in print.

But our readers seem to love it, and that’s what keeps me going. Every week I connect with local people who are thrilled to have a place on PalmBeachPost.com to share their stories and read about their neighbors. Every week, I am reminded that people in the community like and respect The Palm Beach Post brand.

And the fact that someone at The Palm Beach Post is listening to them, interacting with them and publishing their stories, I am convinced, makes them feel more connected to their hometown paper.

To me, that’s what social media is all about – much more so than things like being the first to switch to Facebook’s new Timeline. (The modern profession of “social media” is filled with people so obsessed with being seen as the first to be in the know and the first to use the latest tools that they often forget about the audience they’re supposed to be connected with.)

Anyway, part of the Community Post channel is a reader-generated blog, moderated and edited by me. I get several dozen submissions a month, many of which turn into print stories, listings on our entertainment website, or guest blog posts. The latest submission made my day.

Web producers with good social media instincts are newsroom gold

Being social media editor is easy when you have journalists on your team who really get it! I try to use this blog whenever I can to give shout-outs to co-workers doing good things with social media. Palm Beach Post web producer Amanda Leth (who, sadly, is leaving us soon for another opportunity) is one of them.

Here are just a few things she did in the past few days to help out with social media while I was attending the Online News Association conference in Boston.

Talk about the weather

A simple photo post with an engaging cutline got our Facebook fans talking. Click to see all the interaction, among the highest we’ve seen on any one image.