Karaoke-pal Jeremy Wright gave the keynote at this year’s Wordcamp on how and why social media can fail.

He’s promised to post his camel-filled slides online and I’ll update that soon. For now, here are my rough notes.

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Social media failures

Believe it or not social media can’t do everything. It often fails. Jeremy Wright outlines a few reasons why below:

Overinflated sense of self-worth

Because of hype social media practitioners feel like they’re the shit… but there is an echo-chamber effect. Not everyone is on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, etc. Not everyone cares about how good at it you are.

Spam

Comment spam, DM spam, etc. are all a pain in the ass and cheapen the value of social media. It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by it too.

Mob mentality

Social media can amplify a backlash (i.e. Motrin, Nestle).

Some people go out of their way to be “social media terrorists”

Twitter interns

Big companies try to do this on the cheap. Lame

No strategic direction, no support

The drive for followers

Some people get “follower envy” and want to accrue followers by sometimes annoying and idiotic ways (auto-follow, spamming, etc.)

@aplusk vs. @cnnbrk

The Social Media cult…

“If you don’t use Twitter, I’m sorry but you’re an idiot” - @unmarketing

The social media community can be a bit of an echo chamber. Sometimes the community aspect is great, but other times it shuts out divergent views.

Acting like we deserve it

Are we owed anything? Uhm, no. Stay humble and respectful.

Automation is EVIL

It’s deceiving. Autofollow, etc. SUCKS!

Broadcasting is NOT engagement. It’s SOCIAL media not social MEDIA.

Assholery as insight

Being a jerk doesn’t make you right…. it just makes you an asshole

Hypocrisy

Don’t be a hypocrite. People will call you out on it.

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Stay away if…

• someone is talking more than listening
• you’re being more media than social
• more tweets than eye contact
• leading with a business card…
• watch out for the word “leverage”

Tips:

• Listen more than you talk
• SOCIAL media, not social MEDIA
• Give more than you get
• Don’t paint the old as new
• Don’t steal
• Things look easier from the outside

Blogs, Facebook, Twitter: Using social media as a journalist

Most journalists should be active in one or more social media tools. Not only because of the benefits but at least to understand how these tools work and how they can be used in journalism.

Personally I use these social media tools to generate story ideas, improve my profile, gain exposure, network and gather news.

1. Blogs

Probably the most time-consuming but the one that has the most potential reward. I’ve listed some great examples of journalists who use blogs to great effect.

Mathew Ingram

Former communities editor Globe & Mail, now at tech blog GigaOm. Mathew was a great advocate for social media/web 2.0 at Globe. He’s now at the frontline of tech reporting with GigaOm.

David Akin

Canwest Parliamentary correspondent, uses social media to enhance day-to-day work. Note how David has used Twitter, Facebook, etc. on his blog to give you a sense of how active he is on social media.

Corey Mintz

Corey’s blog is very off-the-cuff but gives his readers great personal insights into his process, outtakes from his column. It shows off his personality, and creates a great relationship with his readers.

What do these blogs all have in common? They extend a personal brand, they give you more insight into the person behind the work, it’s a platform for writing, ideas, stories that might not fit in a traditional media format (newspapers, magazines, wire stories, etc.

Blogs and traditional media
Blogs do things well that traditional media don’t: opinion, curation, aggregation. It’s why we at the Post really like them. We probably run 10+ blogs. Here are a few examples from the Post.

Full Comment

A blog that’s home for our opinions/columnists/editorials. Started because the Post saw a gap in right-wing commentary/blogging in Canada. As a result Full Comment has become very popular among this comunity. The blog gets lots of comments, thousands of page views a day. More importantly, we’ve got tons of buy in from our more senior writers AND younger writers.

Posted

Our news blog lets us experiment and do things and chase stories that we wouldn’t traditionally be able to do. Our blog is a lot less rigid than our normal story pages, so we can do things like embed videos and maps, add more links, images, etc. Also, it’s a good repository for off-kilter stories non-traditional news, etc.

Many other outlets do something similar. A few good examples, the NY Times’ City Room blog, NPR’s the Two Way.

2. Facebook

I actually don’t use Facebook too much profesionally. It’s more of a personal tool for me to keep track of my friends, family and colleagues.

But for a publication Facebook can be very powerful and in fact crucial.

The National Post fan page

A Facebook fan page lets users incorporate the Post into their Facebook experience. People spend a lot of time on Facebook, so it just makes sense that we’re there too.

The ability to share interesting stories is also key. Facebook is one of the top 5 ways of referring links to news sites (e-mail, Google, Twitter are some of the others). When a user shares your story that’s a great thing, it’s extra clicks, it’s exposure, it’s buzz.

Finally, it’s also an easy way to do a little community building and gain more interaction with your users

Some other great examples:
Mashable Look at the number of fans! That’s 100,000+ people who may share, comment and talk about your articles!
the Walrus Magazine Look at how they extend their real-word product into Facebook, changing up their profile image to match their current covers, mentioning real-world events, etc.

3. Twitter

I started using Twitter about two years ago and it’s tough for me to overstate how useful and rewarding it has been. I use Twitter in two very different and complementary ways.

a) Twitter in
I use it as a personalized news wire by subscribing to news sources I like.
Eg. I do a lot of writing and have a personal interest in books… so I follow a lot of publishers, authors, book publications, etc. The Twitter list function makes it a bit more manageable.

I also use it as a way to see what people I like, respect, and have crushes on are thinking about.

Many, many examples:

@susanorlean (an amazing New Yorker writer)
@jeffjarvis (author, J-school teacher at CUNY)
@cshirky (NYU j-school prof, tech advocate)
@walrusmagazine (large mammal, also a great magazine Twitter account)
@ivortossell (tech writer, pal, drinking buddy)
@xoxsnp (Fashion writer, go-getter, up and comer)

b) Twitter out
I use Twitter as a way of communicating and developing a personal profile.
I sync up my blog to Twitter, I also use it to promote things I’m doing, even ideas that I’m thinking about. I think it’s how your professor found me.

@boyreporter is my personal Twitter account. Follow me if you want. I’ll try not to bore you.

How the Post uses Twitter:

No big surprise, but we’re on Twitter and we love it. Here’s a few reasons why.

a) News gathering and dissemination.
Twitter is fast. Blazing fast. In the last few months alone, Twitter has helped us cover stories like the Fort Hood attack and the Haiti earthquake. Twitter gave us almost real-time updates from people on the ground, whether they be local media, eyewitnesses or officials.

@nationalpost our flagship account has about 7,600 followers and we use this as a way to spread our stories, they often get retweeted and spread virally which, of course, means more traffic for us.

@npbooks, which is an account that I help start and run is a niche books/literature account for our books blog. It’s very targeted, has a lot of personality and people love it.

So a few parting notes:

Work social media into your daily routine

Checking Twitter, blogging, Facebooking all takes time and if you’re working, going to school, writing, etc. You might not have time to do all this. Try to work some of these things into your daily routine. Use a program like Hootsuite, which allows you to embargo your tweets, to plan tweets in advance.

Blog in spurts, write two or three posts, and then push them out later in the week. (Hint, hint, the author of this blog might do this once in a while)

Don’t overshare

Not everything needs to be and should be public. Remember, most of the time, you get to decide what goes up online. Writing about that bad break-up on your personal blog might not be a good idea… unless you want a career as a relationship columnist, in which case, it’s probably pretty brilliant.

This stuff won’t replace basic skills

You can be a social media guru, tweet like crazy, blog like an overeager 15-year-old girl and have a thousand Facebook friends, but they don’t replace basic journalism skills like writing, reporting, research and interviewing.

The club doesn’t seem particularly difficult. Write and design yer paper, upload a pdf and then they’ll print it for you. Judging from some of the posts on their blog, the idea might work for small-run art pieces, programs, etc.

Here’s what they do in their own words:

And if you want us in a nutshell it’s this; we think the web is wonderful and printed newspapers are a tremendous, highly-evolved way of reading stuff. We think combining the two is a good idea. We’re not about news or any particular form of content, we’re about ink on newsprint. Whatever you think would be good to print that way; we think you’re probably right.

Sadly, they seem to be a U.K. only service… although I’m sure there’s a local printer/jobber that’ll do this for you.

If you’re curious, journalism instructor and online editor Kat Tancock reviews the GQ app.

1) the Esquire drinks app

What Esquire is good at are drinks, they’ve done whole books about them. They even have a databse on their website. As a bonus, the ad guys at the mag could very easily sell ads on this. Some of their high-end drink clients would undoubtedly bank-roll a drinks/bartending application

2) Esquire/GQ girl of the day

Hey, if newspapers can run photos of a sunshine girl, why can’t Esquire and GQ? The magazine already runs features like these in the magazine. It’d be easy to repurpose. It would also be a good way to upsell the full-mag. Preview a photo from a spread and point to your website or your mag.

3) A shopping app for men

Women have the app from shopping mag Lucky, but the boys are screwed. Hey, we like stuff too. And it doesn’t have to be all clothes. You know. Wired’s got one, but everyone knows Wired is for nerds. You guys are cool.

From the horse’s mouth

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Executives of The New York Times Company said they wanted to create a system that would have little effect on the millions of occasional visitors to the site, while trying to cash in on the loyalty of more devoted readers. But fundamental features of the plan have not yet been decided, including how much the paper will charge for online subscriptions or how many articles a reader will be allowed to see without paying.

Times media columnist David Carr tries to explain his bosses’ decision and there are some interesting points that I’ll pull out below:

1. The paywall is a flexible tool. The NYT will be able to dial up or down the amount of free articles, charge more or less for online subs.

By building a metered system, the executives have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times. Access can be gradually ramped up or down depending on macro trends in the market. Given the dynamic state of the advertising business and how quickly things change on the Web, not so dumb when you think about it.

2. What works for a big brand like the Times might not work for a small paper.

People will assign all manner of broader meaning to The Times’s approach, but The New York Times – like The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, which also charge for content – is very much a unique business and consumer proposition. What might work for The New York Times probably won’t work for a regional daily. There will be a lot of speculation on price – The Times is, in part, defining what a digital newspaper is worth – but that number is far less important than habituating a certain kind of consumer to the idea that conveniently accessing certain kinds of content is worth money.

3. Being the middleman is GOLD.

One of the biggest lessons of Web 2.0 is that the company that controls the relationship with consumers is the one that owns the future. It would have been much more expedient to partner with Amazon or iTunes, because they already have the machinery in place and own the credit cards of millions of consumers. But in the long run, they would have controlled and benefited from the relationship far more than The Times.

The more mathematically minded should read Felix Salmon’s post on the numbers behind the paywall.

From the post:

The way that it seems the NYT paywall is going to work, visitors to nytimes.com will have a free allowance of n articles per month. To read the n+1th article, they will have to pay a subscription fee F. After that, they can read as many articles as they like for the rest of the month.

If a visitor to nytimes.com normally reads N articles per month, then the key number in their mind will be N-n. If reading that number of articles is worth more to them than F, they’ll pay the fee. If on the other hand N-n is small, or perceived value-per-article is small, then they won’t pay. Specifically, if the average value to the reader of any given article is v, then they’ll pay the fee when v(N-n)>F.

Across the pond the Daily Telegraph weighs in on the paywall question and says that it likely won’t work, simply because there are too many ways to get around it.

Ken Doctor over at his blog Content Bridges tries to answer nine questions about the Times’ strategy.

And the good people at the Nieman Lab, who are paid to think about this stuff all the time, have an amazing roundup of talk about the Times. Happy reading.

Man, how many books can you get in this Boston Public Library book bag?

A hat-tip to Ms. Sara-Beth Hayden for pointing me to Letterheady, a blog that looks just at letterhead, mostly from famous (and infamous) people, but sometimes from companies like this one…

Hat tip to my sister via her friend Serge Gonchar (no, not the Russian hockey star, although he gets that a lot)

Or maybe all you cheeky special-effects mad directors are just trying to tell us how much you love New York?

If you are worried about New York’s future, take heart: The city is being destroyed at a theater near you. The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building. For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s preeminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end. — Max Page, Boston Globe

You can also get all of this destruction in a convenient list.

Over the last few months I’ve grown to really appreciate the stuff that crops up on Kitsune Noir, the blog of seriously awesome things curated by L.A.’s Bobby Solomon.

The guy serves up ridiculously great mixtapes. Like this, this

Little Murders move

Thelma & Louise hd and this

• Cyclops rip Zoolander dvdrip Ralphie May: Austin-Tatious ipod Kill Kill Faster Faster
  
  Sweet and Lowdown download
  Kicking & Screaming film

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Hit the Ice movie Basically makes sure that my iPhone wallpaper is always sexy and has pretty great taste in just about everything.

Check it out. Oh yeah, he’s on Twitter too. Zoolander dvdrip