Listening Post: Being sociable
Learning “new media” was a big new trick for old media dogs, and just about when we got it in hand, it became time to learn “social media”–the world of Facebook, Twitter, and the whole neologism soup of competing services that connect people online.
It’s pretty easy to see how to use this world to promote things, to share photos of the kids, to generate flashmobs to do the boogaloo in public spaces, to let people know where you’re having a latte and what you’re streaming from Netflix. What is harder to see is how to use these tools to do the mission of public service journalism.
It would be easy to say “You can’t, don’t bother,” except for this. Preliminary results from our current media survey show that two-thirds of our respondents use Facebook; half of them on a daily or more than daily basis. Compare that the average visitor to the NCPR website, who comes twice a month. In fact, only 20% of NCPR visits come from people who visit twice a week or more.
For an increasing number of people, Facebook is the Internet, accounting for the overwhelming percentage of their time online. So, if NCPR doesn’t have a smart, effective and mission-oriented presence on the most popular social media platforms, we fail in a significant chunk of our public service mandate.
The question is not whether, but how we use these tools. And best practices are still totally up for grabs (shades of website 1999!) If you spend time on Facebook and other social media platforms, and rely on them for news and information about the world and about your neck of the woods, we want to hear from you. What’s an example of something that really helped inform you about an important matter? What news organizations are doing the best/most useful job in the social media realm. What’s something you have shared with your social network in the last week?
Let us know in a comment below. Or post it on the wall of the NCPR Facebook page. Or tweet us @ncpr. And yes, it’s still OK to just stop one of us in the supermarket aisle.
Tags: listeningpost
If you can help me understand how Facebook works, more power to you. I simply don’t have time to figure it out.
Hi, Dale. I’m 75, and though I have responded to requests to be a friend on Facebook and visited it a few times I’ve yet to see any of my friends doing anything very interesting with it. In fact people seem reduced to the little they tell about themselves, not the intersting stuff at all usually. I’m willing to be persuaded, though. But when I heard you and Martha talking earlier this week about your survey results, and you drew the conclusion that you’re doing something wrong if you don’t have more young people responding, my reaction was you could as well have said, guess that’s an indication we need to serve the old folks better! Or, we must be doing something right! I muse about proposing a new call in talk show like On Point featuring some smart old broad as the anchor and other smart old grouches as the experts, all local/regional. Emphasis on smart, regional, and old.
Don’t sell yourself short. Your website is far more useful than Facebook. I’m one of those who use it more than twice a week and Facebook almost never. A few quality messages, like a warm gentle rain, have more value than a torrent of empty drivel.
I have a Facebook page but I find Facebook to be virtually a total waste of time. The idiotic games, stupid posts, discussions, and “updates” most people post are pretty useless in terms of real information. I get freind requests from friends of friends of friends. What’s the point? Virtually all of the “notifications” I get from Facebook are for useless posts or replies to useless posts. Even though a NCPR Facebook page might be a way to reach some more people, the problem is that Facebook is designed as a social networking site, not a news and information site. I’d much rather go to a professionally maintained and well-designed web site than wade through all the colatteral clutter that I would get with Facebook. Anyone using Facebook also knows how to use a web browser so they can go to the NCPR web site if they choose. So I would say go ahead and post quick updates and little snippits of info on the Facebook page for those people who just want short updates and/or to make more people aware of the in-depth info on the web site, but Facebook is never going to take the place of a real in-depth news and information web site or the actual radio (or audio stream).
I don’t do tweet, and dipped a tentative toe into the Facebook waters mainly out of curiosity and that nearly all my family is on it. But, I believe the only way to have quality communication is one on one, whether that be email, ‘phone or in person. You can’t have 1000 friends. Facebook is a black hole that can suck up 110% of your free time. It is good for general announcements and updates to the world at large but no substitute for real friendship and relationships. It is just another communications tool, on the other end of the continuum from a pencil and paper.
As an artist who spends much of my time alone, I enjoy the “conversation” that runs on Facebook. Sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, it’s a social life I can turn on or off. “Conversations” there can be in depth or shallow, private or public. Through FB I’ve become much better acquainted – yes, become “Friends” – with several wonderful people I had often seen in town but never had the opportunity to know.
The St. Lawrence County Arts Council FB page is a good example of a social network and arts news source that I use. I also find FB a good way to share my latest work and any achievements. I can and do provide links to NCPR’s Photo of the Day or Artwork of the Day, for example, and I can quickly and easily plug The Frederic Remington Art Museum or Canada’s National Gallery to a wide range of people.
I visit NCPR at least once daily, but to maintain my sanity, I have to limit my exposure to the REAL news of the day. I once was a news junkie, but at this point in my life I feel “the world is too much with [me].” It’s an easy click to any number of news sites when I choose to become irritated by current events. Facebook does not provide this, but it does provide me with a social interaction that balances the seriousness of today’s realities.
As far as NCPR is concerned, it would be useful to me to receive headlines, not full stories, via FB. I could then choose to hop to NCPR.org – or not – for the details.
There is a serious problem with Facebook and Twitter. The problem, too much tweeter at both.
Let me put it this way. It’s almost as if you went to your USPS mail box, opened it and were met by a never ending stream of junk mail. With the box open, the stuff keeps gushing through like a fire hose.
Sharing? It’s almost a joke.
I post. I share. I hardly ever look at what others share and post, and I believe many do the same. It’s darn close to spitting into the wind.
With email, I glance to see who/where it’s from and delete 90% rather quickly.
The phone? I have caller ID and if I don’t recognize who is calling, I don’t bother answering. Block calls are not accepted. Please leave a message if I don’t know you or I will never call back because the caller is probably looking for money and/or wants me to vote for someone.
My point is there is so much junk, you just can’t be bothered being “sociable.”l
Hi everybody–
Lots of pushback here. I’ll try to take them in order.
Nancy–you don’t have figure out Facebook. We don’t plan to use social media to replace the radio, or the website, or whatever. We plan to use each platform in the best way to reach our audience. I don’t advocate the use of one over the other.
Tim–We need our survey to reach younger people, not because we want to be hip and youthful, but because we have a mandate to serve the public, not just our existing (aging) radio audience, or our supporting members. For that reason, we are pushing the survey out by means other than radio, to reach beyond our current audience.
I think I share your assessment of the present value of Facebook in becoming an informed citizen. Unpromising puts it charitably. But no more unpromising than websites looked in the 1990s. It took a lot of work, and lots of mistakes and wasted time to move the web from an undifferentiated hellscape of nincompoopery toward something of civic value. To misquote Donald Rumsfeld–we go to war with the media we have, not the media we wish we had.
Joe–Thanks for kind comparison, but our website, however useful, is only useful to the portion of the audience that actually goes there. As a publicly-funded (in part) public service operation, we have a duty to be as ubiquitous as possible. When we learn that a service like Facebook is becoming the nearly exclusive channel through which large numbers of people receive their news and information, it is incumbent upon us to be there too.
Pete and Pete K (if you are not the same person)–Social media indeed can be a firehose of crud. (see “hellscape of nincompoopery” above). It badly needs a reduction valve and an activated charcoal filter. That is a service that a professional media operation might be able to provide. I too would rather go to a “professionally maintained and well-designed web site.” But I don’t get to pick the tools that people will or will not use. Public media can, however, make the tools they do choose serve them better as citizens. It’s what a neighbor might do, if they were inclined to be sociable.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
I’m 65, I use the websites of NCPR, the Adirondack Enterprise, and the New York Times daily, along with Facebook. I too find Facebook a bit over the top, though I could easily throttle it back by turning off the Huffington Post’s posts and a few other overly noisy FB posters. But I unplugged the TV about seven years ago and I’m retired, so I have plenty of time most days to wade through what comes in.
I don’t see Facebook, or Google+ for that matter, replacing good local or national websites. But no news outlet can afford to ignore social media these days, just because there are some folks for whom, as you say, Facebook IS the web (kind of scary to think of that, though).
Personally I find Facebook to be a big waste of time. Sites such as this, the complete opposite. Love my NCPR in the morning (and afternoon….okay sometimes evening too!).
I’d like to turn the conversation from “Facebook–Threat or Menace?” back to the original question I posed:
“If you spend time on Facebook and other social media platforms, and rely on them for news and information about the world and about your neck of the woods, we want to hear from you. (A) What’s an example of something that really helped inform you about an important matter? (B) What news organizations are doing the best/most useful job in the social media realm. (B) What’s something you have shared with your social network in the last week?”
I asked this because I am one who learns from best examples, and I’m not shy about adopting the best practices of others.
But let me go first to answer the question:
(A) I get most of my national news from NPR, and most of that by listening to the radio. I would have been totally oblivious to the fact that protestors have been doing an occupation/protest in Wall Street for weeks, except that friends kept posting on my Facebook wall stories and video from the protest site. NPR gave the story a pass up until the last few days, at least in broadcast.
(B) KPBS in San Diego gathered well-deserved national attention a while back for the way it used a combination of Twitter and Google Maps to cover the spread of devastating wildfires in Santa Cruz. It set a gold standard for “crowdsourcing” the news and for disaster preparedness. Andy Carvin at NPR did groundbreaking work using Twitter and Facebook to cover breaking events during the Arab Spring protests in North Africa and beyond. Since the protesters were using the same tools to organize and communicate, it was where a reporter needed to be.
(C) The best thing I shared in the last week (on Facebook) was Nancie Battaglia’s photo of 1925 kayaks clustered on the water near Inlet NY to raise funds for a breast cancer cure. The photo was eventually re-shared out to more than 6000 viewers, resulting in a doubling of normal traffic to NCPR.org that day. Hopefully, it also generated some additional support toward a cure.
Dale,
I am not “aging.” I am just getting older. Sorry. Couldn’t resist. For similar reasons, I am not a Senior Citizen. I just happen to have been born in 1942.
The absolute last places I would ever go for news are Facebook and Twitter. I post at both but hardly ever bother to read any postings.
Current news almost always comes from radio, TV and Yahoo which is mostly AP.
Newspaper, news magazines, along with public radio and TV are best at in-depth reporting and naturally are a little late with “breaking news” for what I believe are obvious reasons. This should not be seen as a problem.
No one can be all things to everyone.
I think the push-back you are receiving can be summed up by saying, “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken.”
You provide a service that is unmatched north of the Mohawk.
sorry I can’t help. Im a news junkie but all I get from Facebook is gossip. I check frequently to see if one of my kid’s wives has posted any general news. Occasionally random people, “friends” ,post those viral you-tube videos. I understand that in many third world countries important political news travels via twitter, but I haven’t seen anything like that here. Maybe, though, that is the way to get to the next generation.