The wonderful, wild, wide-open nature of social media leaves the door wide open for discourse of any kind – rude, nasty, sharing, loving, informative, political, connective, entertaining, persuasive…story-telling of any kind. All of it has an audience, large, small, gigantic.
Newspapers, how are you gathering that audience, the news that can be filtered from the background noise, the dollars that come with audience volume?
Are you putting up a Twitter module and letting it roll? Posting to Facebook, and appreciating any clicks back over to your site?
Good deal. But in the face of savvy, creative competitors, will that stand up for a longer haul, as digital becomes even more important to your core business? And as non-newspaper sites become even more aggressive in seeking local audience?
A great deal of quality journalism is taking place today on non-newspaper sites. Newspapers need to give the audience more reasons to stay with their own sites, or watch as the audience eases away.
Take a look at one example of digital strategy and striving for success.
As the Blizzard of 2015 bore down on the Northeast, two companies who partner in several areas – AccuWeather and Crowdynews – launched a quick plan to capture a variety of social media – in one place – from the storm.
AccuWeather is a 52-year-old privately-held company that reaches a billion customers worldwide daily via its media, business, government and institutional products.
Crowdynews is a Dutch technology company that provides a social media platform for media companies worldwide, helping them drive audience, news interest and revenue.
With the forecasting and information resources of AccuWeather and the technology of Crowdynews, in a matter of minutes a social media channel focusing on the storm and pulling in all categories of social media, plus AccuWeather-specific content, was built.
It was up for only a day (screen shot attached), but that’s the way social media works. Storms over. But you can bet another one will come. And social media will be there.
The concept is built around quick, easy launch, and immediacy, urgency, timeliness – with audience and revenue built in.
News consumers expect products like this. Can you deliver?
Publishers, what’s in your toolbox?
