Chip Oglesby

This post will be short, sweet and to the point. Social Crush was a very intense two day hands-on social media conference for Columbia, SC.

Monday featured a bootcamp that taught basic 101 information for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. I taught the Twitter session and felt like there was some really great engagement with questions about how to compose tweets, how often someone should tweet and how to track analytics using services like bit.ly.

Tuesday we absolutely hit the ground running full speed! We covered every topic from ‘like-gating’ to geo-location services. The afternoon sessions featured more breakouts that covered Youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and location based services. Social Media Club again volunteered to help lead some of these workshops. I was looking forward to hearing Skeeter Harris’ Youtube talk, but I totally missed it.

I spent the day taking notes for Social Media Club. You can find those here.

Wednesday was another full-speed hands on session that featured a keynote speaker from Hubspot as well as a great overview of blogging from the guys at Zementa.

All of my notes from Wednesday can be found here as well.

In my presentation last night to Social Media Club Columbia, I discussed how bloggers can legally choose images for their sites. We also discussed the best options for hosting content, ie: self hosting, using a Content Delivery Network, Amazon’s S3 buckets or a third party service such as flickr.

We also discussed how you can embed photos from sights such as flickr or picasa. We also dicussed how a Photographer or content creator can protect themselves by embedding IPTC and EXIF data into their photos and use the tineye.

There are also people who don’t want to copyright their images, instead they want to freely share their work with the world and there’s a copyright (copyleft) for them as well at creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons allows people to freely license their work any purpose that they would like. As you can see, today’s post is licensed with a CC license that allows remixing and requires a share a like.

WordPress has a plug in for blog posts if you would like to use this service. It’s called wp-license reloaded, it’s easy to install and customize.

Here's another Photo of the shuttle from my plane. on Twitpic
We also discussed what happens when someone like Stefanie Gordon takes a photo, the one above, and all the sudden it spreads across the internet like wildfire. If someone uses her photo without permission, what’s her recourse? Does she deserve to be compensated because she’s not a professional photographer? Did she happen to be in the right place at the right time?

Photo copyright Brett Flashnick 2011, All rights reserved.

Columbia, SC based photojournalist Brett Flashnick also gave an insightful presentation about copyright from a photographers perspective. What happens when a blogger steals your content? Can you sue? Can you ask them to take the image down? What happens if you don’t?

Brett also shared the copyright document “Title 17.” If you have time to read it, you should check it out. It has everything you could ever know about copyright policies.

Here are the slides from last night’s presentation:

Quick on the heels of Jeff Sonderman’s announcement about joining allbrittion, I learned they’re hiring a social media producer, a job that was written for me! Below, I’ve written a few bullet points fleshing out why I think Steve should hire me for this job.

If you agree with me, be sure to send a tweet to @stevebuttry letting him know that he should #hirechip!

Managing social media outlets, such as Twitter feed(s), Facebook fan page(s), YouTube and Flickr channels;

I manage the following accounts: @thestate @thestatesports @gogamecocks @cophotog @smccolumbia.

From managing these accounts, I’ve learned that interaction is best. It’s great when someone asks a question and realizes that there’s a human being on the other side that is listening. Social Media goes much further than just listening though, it’s also about immediacy, which is why we’re getting news much faster on twitter than through traditional news services and the Associated Press.

I also manage fan pages for The State and SMC Columbia.

Monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

I kept a close eye on @thestate during the coverage of Mark Sanford and we used twitter to help identify Joe Wilson as the “You Lie” commenter, giving us a jump on our local competition for the story.

Aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site; promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media;

We crowd-sourced storm photos for thestate.com and fan photos during the Kenny Chesney concert. We’ve also used twitter to collect photos from accident scenes as well as football games. We also aggregate tweets at sporting events based on their physical location for our @thestatesports accout.

Using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

We used @thestate and @gogamecocks to post breaking news of Ben Axon, a USC recruit charged with simple marijuana possesion. We also used the account during the Travis Barker/DJ AM plane crash, Mark Sanford coverage, Michael Phelps marijunana saga, coverage of Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment and other small breaking news events in the area.

The biggest help with breaking news came with Twitter’s location API, we are now able to search certain areas for tweets related to events.

I’ve also used Qik on iPhones to stream live video from house fires in 2009.

Other accomplishments include conceiving and implementing the use of other social media tools including Cover it Live.

CIL was most recently used in the the USC Baseball tournament which was lead by Neil White and Dwayne McLemore and with the Soccer State Championships lead by Akaliah Nelson and I.

Both of these examples have a high return on investment for our website.

Planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

As president of Social Media Club Columbia, we hold regular tweetups and events for our community in Columbia. In October of 2009, we held our largest meeting about the future of journalism with Dan Conover, Doug Fisher, Holly Bounds, Adam Beam, myself and Jeff Elder. You can find more here: http://bit.ly/1wmEMr

In addition to my work responsibilities, I’m also an award winning photographer. You can view my work here: http://bit.ly/8NB7AZ

I was also a first round finalist in the this years Knight News Challenge with my idea for Augmented Reality using data relationships. You can read that here: http://bit.ly/39Zc00

The thing that intrigues me most right now is location based services. I feel like newspapers have a really great opportunity to harness LBS for news. Everyblock is a start, but I imagine something more granular than that. You can read about that here: http://bit.ly/5NzoX9

I’ve also been very critical over the media’s (mis)-use of twitter. I’ve written numerous position papers for my company on what we can do to better harness social media and most of those efforts went unnoticed. http://bit.ly/397JLR

Media outlets have done so poorly at Twitter because they haven’t taken the time to learn and adopt to these new tools and because they try to apply their old set of standards and control to this new tool.

The history of twitter is well known, the service started as a way of quickly letting people know what you were doing through SMS like messages.

In the recent article, “Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter,” the story reveals how twitter users dictate what changes twitter needs to make.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”

These changes happened because of demand. The media will not be part of this transition.

Look at all of the rules and restrictions placed on reporters and editors by organizations such as the Washington Post, New York Times and ESPN. Most of their rules are so restrictive that it’s hard to have an online presence.

When managers look at social media, they’re looking at it from an old-guard point of view. They want to apply their rules. Control the information and control the message. There have been two exceptions to this rule, The Colonel Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. These two news organizations social media strategies work because of clearly defined goals. It’s difficult for people in traditional media to understand the significance for two reasons: 1) They see media as a one-way street. 2) They are so disgusted by comments on their own Web sites they would rather not participate because they see it as noise.

Mass Amateurization

Columbia twitter user Ryan Bowen recently asked Mandi Engram on twitter “any chance of us cola peeps starting news/traffic/etc hashtags?” Ryan has a great idea for using #cae hashtags on his site. This is the type of ground-up movement we need to see more of.

In the book, “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky points out that “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from Why publish this? to Why not? The problem is, citizens can’t wait on newspapers to publish that information for them.”

Starting a revolution on twitter isn’t hard, it just takes the right group of people. Asking a media outlet to start a twitter account for traffic isn’t going to get you anywhere because they’ll never decide on any sort of standardization or rules for the account. When do we tweet? How often do we tweet? What do we tweet? Since there is no definitive answer, the solution is simple, the mass amateurization of media.

Dan Conover and the folks at the Digitel held a #CHS hashtag summit earlier this year with the idea of standardizing hashtags for the Charleston area. They include #chsnews, #chsweather, #chs and #chstraffic. This was a great idea. A way for people in Charleston to filter their news to receive what matters to them. It worked because dedicated group of people got all media outlets to come together and agree on what to do and how to do it and most importantly it started from the ground up.

Twitter list gone mad

In a recent conversation with Mathilde Piard, we both questioned why the LA-TIMES, NYT and other newspapers created lists for the Fort Hood shootings and Orlando shootings when other news organizations had already created those lists.Those tasks were duplicated and unnecessary. The idea that they have to be the authority on the internet is a classic holdover in print to online mentality. Why duplicate the work of others? Why not just point to the original source? I would trust you much more if you did that instead of asking me to follow your news list. I’m not suggesting newspapers ask users to follow a list of a reader they don’t have a working relationship with (for obvious reasons). But if Etan Horowitz creates a list for the Orlando shootings, just ask people to follow his list.

Twitter accounts done wrong

Prior to media outlets actually listening to their followers, most ran RSS feeds for headlines. In the case of @thestate, short headlines mean more retweets. But tweets with context usually provide the user with more information than “two die in crash.”

One of the assumptions with @thestate is that we provide headlines from accross South Carolina. We don’t do that. We provide news from Columbia and the surrounding area, because that’s the news we produce.

Recently we started tweeting about traffic jams from the Columbia area. For our Greenville and Charleston followers, this amounted to nothing more than twitter spam because it means nothing to them.

The Greenville News includes an API on their account that automatically tweets about car accidents. What an awful idea. It alienates followers who send @ replies to Greenville asking them to stop the service. Because no one is manning the account, the rub continues and the users will stop paying attention.

Twitter accounts done right

In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, The Austin-American Statesman created an account for updates specific to the shootings. What a brilliant idea. Instead of spamming users with updates, they used @FTHOODSHOOTINGS and asked people to follow that account. After seeing this in my tweetstream, I retweeted the request from @thestate’s account asking users to follow them. There was no need for us to tweet details of the shootings since it was outside of our coverage area.

That’s what’s so great about twitter: it’s fight or flight. It takes nothing to setup a temporary account, (other than an email address to get started) and once your event is over, you can phase out the account.

Where this is all heading: FILTERING

The theme here is the ability for users to filter the information most important to them. Does there need to be traffic accounts for Columbia, Irmo and Gilbert? No, because hashtags work just fine. Instead of media outlets always talking about twitter or going to twitter, they could spend time teaching users how to use twitter. Of course, that would mean employing someone who actually knows how to have use it as well. I am willing to bet at least one person in every organization knows how to use twitter, and more than likely that person is not a manager and has been with the company for less than five years.

Unfortunately, media outlets have neither the time nor the staff to constantly update an account for traffic incidents in any given area. Asking the public to help partly crowdsource this information would be a good idea.

There are a lot of issues that plague newspapers. Aggregation, fair use, copyright infringement are just a few, but when you really hone in on the problem it may surprise you.

The two main issues keeping newspapers from moving forward are control and education.

Why control?

The Washington Post’s new social media policy is a great example of what I consider ‘control.’ Before the immense rise of social media fueled by recently by twitter, it was easier for a journalist to hide their opinions. Services like twitter keep their thoughts and opinions archived and always on the record. There are plenty of conversations going on about transparency and objectivity in journalism, but why is the Washington Post so concerned about controlling the message of their journalist?

The one-way street that newspapers had are quickly coming to an end. Newspapers need to prepare and educate their staff on how to properly handle these situations. Just because journalists need to remain objective doesn’t mean they can’t engage with readers and sources.

Let’s take a look at the Ombudsman’s blog on the Post’s situation:

In today’s hyper-sensitive political environment, Narisetti’s tweets could be seen as one of The Post’s top editors taking sides on the question of whether a health-care reform plan must be budget neutral. On Byrd, his comments could be construed as favoring term limits or mandatory retirement for aging lawmakers. Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage. The tweets could provide ammunition.

A lot of this can be avoided if newspapers would adapt the idea of transparency in the newsroom as Dan Gillmor and numerous others have suggested. Journalist, like everyone else are people and they have opinions and bias. They may as well be as open as possible about it from the beginning. Some will think that this could lead to “Fox news style journalism” but there’s a difference between being transparent and injecting your opinion into every story.

One of the things we’ll be talking about at Social Media Club in October is how journalist can use services like twitter to engage with readers and help build a stronger audience through transparency and engagement. Newspapers also need to have active social media users in their company draft guidelines instead of relying on senior management or editors with little to no experience with these tools.

The second example of control is the continuation of the general interest product. I’ve borrowed this quote before and paraphrased it but it really applies to newspapers as well: “If publishers would focus on how people read and not how they publish, they would be a lot better off.”

The actual quote comes from Clive Thompson:

To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark’s perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.

The Internet has completely unbundled the newspaper and allows news to come to the reader instead of the reader going to the news. Although newspapers continue to see a decline in print readership and an increase in online readership, papers still operate in an old school model where stories are routinely held until midnight deadlines. It’s understandable that the paper is still the golden egg of newspapers, but failure to embrace the wants and needs of your readers will result in the end of your business, plain and simple.

Why education?

What’s wrong with your company when 100% of your employees know what a furlough is but less than 75% can actually write a full hyperlink? If your employees can’t finish this “a href” you’ve got some serious problems. Some of the main divisions in the newsroom come from the simple fact that employees aren’t being properly educated. I’m not just talking about continuing education through school, I’m also talking about educating them about their future of their jobs and their trade in a real world environment.

If you ask a typical employee why newspapers are doing so poorly, you’ll likely get an answer like ‘I blame the Internet’ or ‘it’s all Craigslist’s fault’ when in actuality, it goes much deeper than that.

Education also includes teaching coworkers things like although the AP is useful for print, it’s unnecessary for the web when you combine tools like Publish2 with ideas like the link economy. So wire editors now become curators of news instead of copy editors.

Education also extends past institutional knowledge and also includes having an open conversation with coworkers. Before you groan about having another meeting or another brown-bag lunch, consider the fact that these conversations will be one of the most important things you’ll ever talk about at your paper. Leaving coworkers in the dark about what’s going on is just another form of control and shows a lack of education.

Where do we go from here?

All of this starts with a conversation. It could be in small groups or it could be through email, but it must happen. Newspapers cannot afford to operate in the business as usual mentality. Don’t wait for higher-ups to start this conversation, take it to your coworkers and start it yourselves.

Take the time to see how your paper uses ‘control’ and question if it’s really necessary. Ask questions about everything and don’t be afraid to raise the question of education, the only thing worse than an uneducated audience is an uneducated newsroom.