Newspaper publishers who want to create an engaged community of readers have to ensure that all the content on their site is published to strict journalist and community guidelines, even content fed from social media platforms. Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media management agency, eModeration, advises on how this can be done.
Newspaper publishers are starting to integrate social media platforms into their websites, widgets and apps allow publishers to share real-time tweets from their roving reporters live from around the world. This is a brilliant way to use social media. It allows people to connect and engage with their favourite reporters, and gives up to the minute insight into a breaking story, or into the reporting process behind that story.
However, as the Telegraph has recently seen, serious problems can occur when you integrate external social media platforms into your editorially controlled, highly reputable news site. In fact, the Telegraph are getting quite experienced with such problems – the paper set up a #budget hashtag tracker in 2009 which resulted in a stream of insulting tweets being published on the website. Apart from the negative impact an abusive tweet can have on the reputation of your brand, how can you expect site contributors to uphold the stringent community standards that the newspaper demands when un-moderated content can be displayed prominently on your home page from your own reporters?
Newspapers have to take a common sense approach to integrating social media into their websites. Don’t display someone’s tweets on your website just because you happen to be working with them. If you want to have more than just the news title’s Twitter account displayed, then be selective about the accounts you pull into the feed. Display only the tweets of staff who have proved that they can use social media in a considerate manner, leading journalists who have built up a personal brand, and whose reputation would be tarnished by inappropriate tweets.
Of course, just because a negative tweet is prevented from being displayed on the news site, it doesn’t mean that the newspaper’s reputation will be left unharmed if it’s published elsewhere. But that is beyond the newspaper’s control. Focus on what can be managed, and manage it to the best of your ability.
1. Use social media guidelines for journalists and contributors. For journalists, these guidelines can make it clear that any opinion expresses on the site or via social media platforms have the potential to damage the reputation of the publication. Organisations such as the Associated Press and Reuters have clear guidelines for journalists, and the Guardian has community standards that are very easy to understand. It’s vital that any guidelines that you do post are easy to find, clear and enforced.
2. Have a response policy. Having the reporter respond to reader comments on his or her article is a good way to encourage polite debate on the comment thread, but there are potential pitfalls. If the journalist feels criticised, or misrepresented, they may find it difficult to respond in an impartial manner. It may be a good idea to have the community management team provide the journalist with comments to respond to, rather than allow the journalist to respond to any comment they please.
3. Moderate reader responses. News websites with communities which are known for intelligent debate don’t happen by accident. Moderators and community managers work behind the scenes to ensure that the site remains free of abuse, trolling and spam. The publishers behind these sites use their resources wisely, deploying more moderators to monitor particularly emotive articles and debates, using a mixture of moderation techniques. Perhaps they allow trusted community members to have their comments post-moderated (moderated after they have gone live), while other reader comments get moderated prior to being published (pre-moderated). These publishers aren’t afraid of blocking comments on particularly inflammatory articles, or to ban community members who break the rules.
4. Moderate tweets that appear on your site. Of course you can’t moderate Twitter. But you can moderate which tweets appear on your site. Telegraph, take note. None of this is about censorship. It’s about creating a strong community. One which bolsters the newspapers reputation and that of its journalists. One that enhances the experience of its readership.
By Tamara Littleton
CEO
www.eModeration.com
This article is based on a white paper on managing social media for news sites and media organisations, which is available to download here: http://www.emoderation.com/about/publications.
