Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online

Chapter 37. Advice for Traditional and Local News Media

Someone, a brave someone, from Boston's local TV news scene submitted a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Panel members' answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (founder of Monster and Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again or perhaps Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Super Bowl ads for 2008, we'll notice that the majority of them point us to a Web property. With this as backdrop, here's some advice.

BE BRIEF ON AIR, GO DEEPER OFF AIR

The current champion of this method is NPR^[167], which posts all its on-air materials, including longer versions of interviews, on its web site for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn't always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.

This provides added value for people interested in a particular story, but it's also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We track and observe and understand the behaviors of people so that we may better serve them. That's the first-line ...