Twitter is Growing Incidental Journalists

Ever notice when an event features a speaker, that Twitter and other tools of the statusphere become random quote generators? It happened during the inaugural address, the VMAs and the Emmy’s, it even happened during BlogWorld – the list goes on. And it makes perfect sense – event speakers typically focus on presenting some type of takeaway for attendees. In turn, attendees capture the quote, re-broadcast it (hopefully with attribution) and add some context, like a hashtag.

If you’ve ever live-tweeted or updated a status from an event, you understand the human compulsion for quoting a speaker; they’re an authority for that event. But in my opinion, broadcasting quotes makes you part of a group I heard radio host Hugh Hewitt refer to as “incidental journalists.” You’re interested in sharing the news of what’s happening, but through the words of event authorities. Surprise, that makes you a journalist.

Before I moved to Minneapolis, I worked in Central Maine as a beat reporter at the Bangor Daily News, a family-owned newspaper with about 68,000 circulation (at the time). As you might imagine, quotes were everything. I covered a lot (read: hundreds) of municipal council meetings, and even when they weren’t particularly exciting, council members, residents or business owners would offer up quotes that encapsulated the issue being debated. Those quotes often became the meat of a story because they came from real people.

Now that I work in marketing, I’m fascinated when I attend an event – like a monthly Social Media Breakfast presentation (though I missed yesterday’s event) – and I see people reporting great quotes. On laptops or mobile devices, they type quotes into Twitter, and instantly, they’re publishing to their circulations (follower lists) in the hundreds and thousands. While the traditional news model may be changing, journalism isn’t going anywhere.

“I think pickles are cucumbers that sold out. They sold their soul to the devil, and the devil was dill.” – Mitch Hedberg

Filed under: social media, Uncategorized, bangor daily news, journalism, journalist, quotes, Twitter

Can I Get That With a Side of #FAIL?

So try selling this up the chain to a client: “We’re going to do some social media work for you, we don’t have all the answers, so we’re going to learn as we go, and oh yeah, we’ll probably fail.”

What the…?

About five years ago, a supervisor said to me, “Tony, you’re not going to get promoted until you truly screw something up…and then fix it.” That idea couldn’t be more true when it comes to activating ideas in the social media space. You can’t truly optimize your efforts unless you’re qualifying your failures. In other words, when you screw up, you need to have some direction for moving away from your mistake. The social web provides real-time feedback for brands, so the point is not to have the perfect answer right out of the gates, but to be aware enough to realize when your community is pointing you toward the answer you’re seeking.

During the Unsummit a couple weeks ago, I gave a presentation with Arik Hanson of ACH Communications on the importance of failure. I’ve dropped the presentation below, but the basic takeaway is that in the social media and digital space, failing is often the quickest path to finding success for a brand. The same way that a blogger will try different links, different titles, different images or different call-out tweets, a brand can experiment with how it positions itself and its assets or content.

During my presentation with Arik, we shared a couple of brand failures in this space that either didn’t do it fast enough or cheap enough. Of that group, my favorite was the Slurpee – the sugary frozen drink sold exclusively by 7-11. For decades, the Slurpee has represented a bonding experience at the store, where teenagers would grab giant 48-ounce paper cups of blue raspberry goodness for $1.97 and sit on the store curb drinking the sugary mix until their temples pounded from brain freezes. It’s a very real community that 7-11 didn’t need to fabricate, but instead they worked with a NY agency to create a slick, expensive uber-focused social network – Slurpee Nation – where fans could create a profile JUST to talk about how much they love Slurpees, in addition to posting relevant photos and videos. Slurpee Nation now counts 3,000 members, but a large majority have no content on their profiles and all visit the site at the same time (robots?) This idea = fail.

The bottom line is that there are countless case studies of social media successes, but failing is not as prevalent in the conversation. If we’re all going to get better at this, we need to celebrate that sometimes, we suck.

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap: How Errors Make Us Better

View more documents from Tony Saucier.

Filed under: social media, arik hanson, fail, social media, tsauce, unsummit