By Francis Moran
In the near-universal rush to write print journalism’s obituary, it was refreshing this week to hear the perspective of a guy who might otherwise be seen as an active undertaker in the whole thing. Mathew Ingram is an online journalist, editor and Twitterer with Canada’s national — and, I believe, best — newspaper, the Globe and Mail. He spoke to Ottawa’s Third Tuesday gathering, held on the fifth Monday(!) earlier this week, about his paper’s many experiments with various online channels.
As the guy often leading the digital charge at the Globe, Ingram could be fairly accused of seeking to hasten the demise of the paper’s print edition. Except he grasps one fundamental concept that seems to elude many of those who think newspapers are already extinct, and that online — and, probably, free — is the only way to go.
The problem is, this isn’t working for the vast majority of traditional media properties. Their online editions are generating little revenue while their print editions are on life support, having bled too many readers and advertisers.
The Globe, on the other hand, seems to be prospering online and holding steady, at least in its circulation numbers, with its dead-trees edition. Why is this?
Well, in a contention I raised at Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast a couple of weeks back when presenter Brady Gilchrist likewise praised the Globe for its mastery of the online, I don’t believe the paper is a roaring digital success just because it thoroughly exploits every available online channel. Other Canadian media properties. notably CanWest, are similarly aggressive at adopting new media but with much less apparent success. The Globe generates enthusiasm online because it offers superb content.
(I am not a disciple of Marshall McLuhan. I have never believed the medium is the message. While messages may have to be shaped by and for, or may be better received via, one medium rather than another, I believe content is king, that excellent content will triumph no matter via which medium it is transmitted.)
Now here’s the rub. The Globe‘s online content is available only because much of it was originally produced for the print edition. Expensively and originally produced by this country’s best team of journalists who not only cover the country more comprehensively than any other paper but staff the most overseas bureaus of any media outlet in Canada and more than most media outlets in the world.
How, I asked Gilchrist, is the Globe to continue generating such content when the very pillars of its economic model are being eroded? He had no answer but Ingram took a credible shot at this conundrum. The Globe‘s writers and editors are passionate about creating outstanding journalism, he told me in a brief conversation before his session started. And their readers are passionate about reading it. And so long as passionate readers come together with passionate journalists, there will continue to be a market for excellence.
Damn I hope he’s right.
I did not Twitter the session
Unlike other events I have attended where I have put out a stream of live tweets reporting highlights from the presenter(s), I opted not to at this event. Why? Well, being a Third Tuesday event, which attracts digerati in the city, there was barely a pair of thumbs in the room that weren’t banging away at tiny keyboards and tweeting Ingram’s every word. I didn’t think I needed to add to that.
However, nor did I take any notes. A quick scan of the tweets as they went out told me I would be able to fully rely on them for any pithy quotes or other details I might need for this blog post. So I ain’t dissing those who tweeted.
By Francis Moran
As recorded here, I started Tweeting a bit less than a fortnight ago. (Handle is @francismoran, if you’d like to follow me.) Today, I want to come up for air as I barely tread water in the Twitterstream and share a few first impressions.
1. Twitter is the most addictive thing since crystal meth was synthesized, and it has precipitated a massive relapse in my online behaviour.
I am an easily distracted guy at the best of times. So over the past few years, I have instituted some processes in my work life to diminish the potential that my focus on the task at hand will be derailed by incoming emails, news feeds or other bright shiny objects. I turned off all email alerts, stopped using instant messaging services and schedule specific times in my day when I will deal with email, my RSS feed and the like.
Then along came Twitter. At the office, at home, waiting for my Clover at Bridgehead, at the breakfast, lunch and dinner tables, at red lights while driving … hell, almost anywhere and at any time of the day, I MUST check Twitter and see what the ‘Stream is bringing me. It’s obsessive, and I’m actively seeking therapy.
2. Twitter is also incredibly seductive.
I wrote that I intended to use Twitter not as a sort of ersatz IM tool, or as a way to stay in touch with friends, or to post self-promoting updates about what airport I was now landing at. Nope. Twitter, for me, was going to be strictly business. I intended to use it to tweet about things not worth a full blog post, to draw attention to interesting things that came through my RSS reader, to promote great content secured by one of our clients here at inmedia, and to participate in Twitter conversations.
Well, it was that last one that pulled me in. (Right now, I’m channelling Al Pacino’s character in Godfather II.) Before I knew it, I was giving grammar tips, talking about what I’d name my boat if I had one, and, most un-businesslike of all, posting pictures of myself on a Jamaican beach.
3. Twitter has really goosed our blog traffic
It hasn’t all been obsession and personal indulgences, though. While the data points are still relatively few in number, we saw a tidy spike in blog traffic last week, with visitors up about 25 per cent from the weekly average for the previous month, page visits up 80 per cent and a 10-per-cent increase in subscribers. And Twitter has become the third-best source of referral traffic to our blog. All in less than two weeks. Nice.
4. The tools are a bit bewildering
Selecting a Twitter client has been a bewildering exercise. Initially, I started off both reading and posting directly on the Twitter site, hitting F5 every time I wanted a fresh deluge of tweets. Of course, as any member of the Twitterati knows well, there is a plethora of clients that can be installed.
I’ve been testing TweetDeck. It’s okay, but its constant pings are just too demanding on my too-fleeting attention span. Maybe I’ll play around with TweetDeck a bit more and explore its greater functionality but for the moment, I think I’ll continue to use my browser on my desktop.
I’m on my third client for my mobile platform, the iPhone. And it’s here that my obsessiveness really runs amok anyway. I’ve been using the free iStore application TwitterFon for the past several days. I really like the interface, especially how it uses colour to categorize incoming tweets and shows all replies whether or not I follow the person replying. Conversation threads are also very easy to follow. I think I’ll stick with this one. Until a brighter, shinier one catches my eye…
5. @snolen takes the prize for best Twitter Stream this first two weeks
The Globe and Mail‘s excellent Stephanie Nolen, who was recently reassigned from the paper’s Africa bureau to its India bureau, kept up a steady stream of live tweets reporting on the Dalai Lama’s speech to his followers marking yesterday’s 50th anniversary of his flight into exile from Tibet. This is the future, kids.
By Francis Moran
“Angry phone calls are your friend,” writes Seth Godin in a blog post today. “They’re your friend because the alternative is angry tweets and angry blog posts.”
I agree so completely I’ve already tweeted this post of Godin’s.
But I think companies should have more holistic approaches to customer satisfaction and service for good business reasons that go beyond fear of being slagged on the ‘net. We write about this a lot here at inmedialog so forgive me for sounding a bit like a broken record.
Superior customer service is the only sustainable competitive advantage available to most companies. If you have a technology advantage, your product will swiftly be reverse-engineered, or the next refinement by a competitor will leapfrog over it. If you have a price advantage, outsourcing and off-shoring will swiftly erode it.
If you treat your customers better than your competitors do, however, you will build and expand an advantage than no one will be able to take away from you.
Don’t treat your customers properly just because you’re afraid they’ll write nasty things about you on Twitter or on blogs. Treat them properly because it’s the surest way they’ll stay customers.
[tag] Customer service, Seth Godin [/tags]
By Francis Moran
It might seem odd for this tech-focused blog to be writing about ringette, Canada’s other very cool game played on ice. Believe it or not, however, Ringette Canada was an original inmedia PR client, one for which I had been working for a few years when I founded the agency in 1998.
Another inmedia original was Alayne Martell, who was employee number 3, joining us scant days after we legally incorporated the company. Alayne swiftly assumed responsibility for the ringette account and, when she and inmedia parted ways a few years back, we agreed it made most sense that she take that account along with her.
Alayne being the phenomenal media relations practitioner she is, she has built up the account and continues to provide incredible service to the Canadian — and, periodically, even the international — ringette community notwithstanding that she lives on tiny Brier Island off the very tip of Digby Neck in her native Nova Scotia.
Alayne told me a few days ago about a terrific media hit for the sport and I promised her I would blog about it here. The CBC’s resident funny man and political satirist Rick Mercer suited up last month with the Cambridge Turbos of the National Ringette League and the piece will run on The Rick Mercer Report tonight at 8 p.m., repeating on Friday at 7:30 p.m.
Maybe the only thing in Canada faster than Mercer’s mouth when he’s doing one of his famous rants is a ringette player closing in on the net. Tune in; it should be a hoot.
By Francis Moran
When we launched this blog about 18 months ago, I blamed congenital social media addict Alec Saunders for persuading me that I and my colleagues here at inmedia PR had enough to say that we should be blogging. Nothing we’ve seen in the time since would persuade me he was wrong; our blog has hugely increased our online presence, vastly boosted the ratings for our corporate web site, and both brought us interesting business opportunities and helped validate our expertise on others.
Now we take the next step. Twitter.
And, as I wrote in my very first Tweet, if Saunders is to blame for making me a blogger, then Scott Lake has to take responsibility for making me a Twit. Scott has been pushing me to join the twitterati for a while now, and last week, I did. You can follow me at @francismoran. The tipping point for me was this blog post from the folks at Velocity about how they use many different social media tools, including Twitter, to gain the greatest possible leverage for good pieces of content they generate for their clients.
Now, much as I like to claim to be an early adopter, I’m not terribly early to this particular party. In fact, I’m not even the first person at inmedia to start a Twitter account. That honour belongs to my colleague Linda Forrest (@lforrestinmedia), who wrote her first update in May last year and has been a bit more active while on maternity leave. (We all know that first-time Mums with months-old babies have oodles of time on their hands, right Linda?)
Scott has promised to drop by and give me a crash course in how to make the most of this interesting social media tool. For my part, I think I’ll use it for all the quick comments that seem to occur to me in the course of a week, things insufficiently detailed or profound to warrant a full blog post. We’ll also add a tool to this blog that automatically issues a tweet when we write a new post. I’ll tweet about other posts I read in my hundreds-deep RSS feed, participate in some of the conversations that are going in the twittersphere and, like Velocity, draw the broader web’s attention to some of our clients’ successful content generation.
As with our blog, we’ll keep you posted on how this goes. As a newbie, though, I’d be keen to hear from readers who have had good or bad experiences with Twitter, and how you use it.
