Chip Oglesby

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.

This is my attempt to track the reactions of University of South Carolina football fans as they take on the Alabama Crimson Tide. Are they general loyal fans or do their reactions ebb and flow with the Gamecocks performance? Let’s see. For this experiment I’m using Cover it Live and keyword searches on Twitter. This experiment would be more interesting if I were able to use Twitter’s Geo-location API to hone in on the exact location of the stadium.

One note, I was only able to search for “USC” and not “USC AND not Notre Dame” so there are also tweets about the other USC in here as well.

There are many new media advocates, online evangelist, and bloggers who are calling for the death of newspapers and the survival of journalism. I support the idea of open source journalism. I also realize that we will reach a point in time were the general interest product is no longer sustainable.

Here’s the dilemma. How long will we continue to carry on as usual? It’s no secret that when layoffs hit the newsroom, the young and well educated are amongst the first to leave, while things continue with a ‘business as usual’ attitude. This cannot continue to happen.

I’m about half way through reading “The Control Revolution” which was written in 1999! It paints a utopian picture for the reader about all of the wonderful things we’ll be able to do in a decade (that’s this year!). Was anyone reading this book thinking “Man this is really going to change everything we’re doing, we better get on it?”

In 2005 I read “We the Media” by Dan Gilmor. It completely changed everything I knew about journalism and made me realize what was possible for us to really do. The day I finished reading it, I started building mockups for my own hyperlocal site which I never started, due to various reasons.

In 2009, I read “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. Again, it challenged assumptions I had forgotten and reminded me that we need to involve our audience if we hope to continue as journalists.

Obviously, these and numerous other books have laid a solid foundation for what’s really possible for newspapers, but why are so few following suit?

We knew this time was coming, but many newspapers felt their digital strategy had been completed after launching their website and that’s not good enough.

Look around, few newspapers have a web-first strategy. Most still view the TV station as their competition. Most newspapers are okay with reporting stories after the fact, instead of starting a live story that continues throughout the day.

A perfect example of this could have been the live coverage of the Tom Joyner story. Twitter would have been a great medium to use. Cover it live would have worked also, but instead, most of the reporting was done after the fact. Also, collaboration with the Associated Press could have prevented two or more news companies writing the same story, thus wasting resources.

Some of these problems could be solved with education and change in newsroom culture. Having a knowledgeable staff member that can tell you what the proper tool to use at the proper time will go a long way. While a cover it live blog at the state fair may not be the best tool for the job, twitpic or twitvid may be an excellent substitute.

As long as we continue these esoteric fights among journalism pundits over paywalls or whatever, we’re never going to get anywhere. Instead, we need to be stepping up and showing people what they can do to help save their own livelihood and create a better environment for journalism.

When was the last time you noticed a dateline in the newspaper? Do your readers even know the purpose of a dateline?

In the 1800 and 1900′s before the internet, mobile computing and GPS, using a dateline was fine, the relationship to the location was understood and in present day it still is, but in the age of the links, having a standard dateline doesn’t work. If the Internet is built on semantic information, why not relate the physical location in a digital environment?

There’s a lot of talk about the future of hyperlocal journalism, but have you noticed how the same old standards for datelines still apply to the online world?

Understand this, it just doesn’t work the same way!

Location based services and stories with specific geolocations will be vital to the next newsroom.

There are numerous applications that use location based services. Brightkite and AroundMe are two examples for the iPhone. As smart-phones gain popularity among users, we will see a dramatic shift in the way people send and receive information. That opens the doors for great opportunities in hyperlocal journalism and advertising.

Who could benefit from this?

Weekly and small dailies who produce a lot of community journalism are most likely to succeed with an idea like this. Their focus is more on covering their community, so they are more likely to have a larger set of data to work with.

What are some examples?

Example 1: Take this story written in the Fort Mill Times, a McClatchy newspaper. Fire destroys Indian Land house under construction The reporter Jenny Overman does a great job of telling us what happened at the scene, but there is no mention of the exact location of the house.

I’m sure that residents in that area saw the smoke and were very curious about what was going on. By using the geolocation of the phone and home, readers would be able to get updates about the story based on their physical location.

Example 2: Let’s say that you’ve decided that you want to go play golf in Hilton Head Island at Harbour Town Golf Links, which has been the past host of the Verizon Heritage Tournament. You’re standing around waiting to tee off, so you open your phone which determines your location and shows you ever article, photo and video about the hole your stand at.

Haven’t I heard this before?

Yes you have! outside.in and Everyblock are very similar, but newspapers haven’t taken the time to get rid of the industry old byline and update it with new methods using longitude, latitude.

Outside.in does a decent job of showing some local news from the Columbia area, but it depends on crowdsourcing to give a link a location or place. This could be circumvented by having a reporter and photographer use a GPS device.

The possibilities for a service like this are endless. All of the dots are slowly starting to come together. Twitter’s geolocation API, Flickr’s support of OpenMaps and Foursquare, Augmented Reality, and the rise of mobile computing.

News companies need to invest in technology that will harness this power if they hope to be a competitor in the online market. It’s only a matter of time before someone comes along and does it bigger and better than we could and we’ll be left shaking our heads asking “Why didn’t newspapers think of this?”

Where do we go from here?

• Every story that’s written in a newspaper that references a real world location should have a gelocation tag associated with it.
• Reporters and photographers should use a Spot Me GPS, iPhone or equivalent device.
• If there’s a way to archive and update old stories to include location, it should be done.
• All future information will have to be catalogued for future reference.

There’s more research that could be done on this and I would love to your thoughts and opinions about it.

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.

On July 14th, I posed a simple question on twitter: Why not use bit.ly links in the newspaper?

Here’s the backstory to all of this. One day, i was reading the paper and I saw a line that read “For more info go to thestate.com” It looked a lot like this: This has long caused a very interesting discussion with our online department. Do people who actually read the paper go online to read an accompanying PDF or see a photo gallery?

This conversation always leaves me wanting two things. 1. A direct link to the story 2. A way to track if people are actually going to this “exclusive” content. That’s when it dawned on me, Why not use bit.ly? With bit.ly you get bot options! There’s a short link that and bit.ly provides analytics of how many people click on a link and when.

There are a few things to take into consideration, such as human error and broken links but there’s no reason this couldn’t be customized into your CMS. Since stories are usually put on the site before the paper goes to press for the first run, there should be ample time to create individual links to stories.

Seth Long took my idea and went into much more detail in his blog post and I encourage you to read it also.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts about this idea.