On Friday I gave a brief speech at the Sydney Media140 conference, along with a number of other presenters. Because I only had 5 minutes to talk, I chose to focus on one message and one social networking platform — the most important one currently — Twitter.
This entry consists of my brief speech notes.
This is what I have learnt after gathering more than 2,600 followers on twitter and after posting 11,000 tweets.
BE HUMAN.
Journalists have been trained to be objective. We write articles usually without our own opinion, unless we’re a senior journalist or an editor. We usually can’t include emotion or our own personal experiences.
Twitter turns all this on its head.
Journalism is ALL ABOUT achieving credibility and authority with an audience. On Twitter, achieving authority with the audience means showing that you are human and building trust relationships with people.
How do you do this?
Show your opinion … for example the National Broadband Network. We cover it obsessively at ZDNet.com.au and people want to know my opinion about it.
Show emotion … if you’re angry, get angry. If you’re sad, be sad. If you’re excited, be excited! Put “colour” into your tweets.
Put your own personal experiences on there. Not just about work. About everything. Hobbies, your holidays, if you’re going for a beer after work. For example, I often post about karate.
One example:
The other day I went on a rant on Twitter about how I really hate self-checkout machines at Coles and Woolworths. I had about 100 people reply and started a massive discussion about the issue which attracted the attention of Woolworths PR.
Now I can’t tell you how this relates to journalistic ethics or so on. And from my experience, ZDNet.com.au’s audience still wants traditional objective news, with opinion separated out into commentary pieces and so on.
But, I can tell you that in practice, when you show the Twitter audience that you’re human, they will open up to you.
They will trust you, share a constant stream of news tips with you, respect your journalist work, and really back your publication.
And that’s what every journalist needs.
