According to a recent article at Poynter.org the New York Times decided to turn the auto pilot off of their main Twitter feed, for a week and put actual people in charge of Tweeting!
Social media editors Liz Heron and Lexi Mainland were taking turns running the@nytimes account during weekday business hours, writing Twitter updates and engaging with readers.
Engaging with readers! Wow, what a novel concept!! Actually it's quite the change from how they usually do it, which has traditionally been a combination of automated headline-and-a-link feed of homepage stories with occasional contributions from staff. That approach has created a bad perception: “that it’s mostly an RSS feed of auto headlines,” Heron said.
Well, I say it's about time that an entity such as the New York Times "gets it." Social Media is just that, designed to be SOCIAL and the point is to be a person interacting with other people, a.k.a. your followers.
The Poynter.org article went on to say that the @WSJ account has been run by people since January 2010, and that the metrics went up considerably and almost immediately after switching from automated to personal.
To that I say No, Duh!!
The truth is the New York Times has wanted to do this for a while but hasn't had the staff in place. From the looks of it though, the experiment is over but hopefully they'll look at the metrics and decide that a human behind all of those tweets is the best way to go, all the time. But don't you think that's something they should have figured out a long time ago?
Read more here
Dave.
Social media editors Liz Heron and Lexi Mainland were taking turns running the@nytimes account during weekday business hours, writing Twitter updates and engaging with readers.
Engaging with readers! Wow, what a novel concept!! Actually it's quite the change from how they usually do it, which has traditionally been a combination of automated headline-and-a-link feed of homepage stories with occasional contributions from staff. That approach has created a bad perception: “that it’s mostly an RSS feed of auto headlines,” Heron said.
Well, I say it's about time that an entity such as the New York Times "gets it." Social Media is just that, designed to be SOCIAL and the point is to be a person interacting with other people, a.k.a. your followers.
The Poynter.org article went on to say that the @WSJ account has been run by people since January 2010, and that the metrics went up considerably and almost immediately after switching from automated to personal.
To that I say No, Duh!!
The truth is the New York Times has wanted to do this for a while but hasn't had the staff in place. From the looks of it though, the experiment is over but hopefully they'll look at the metrics and decide that a human behind all of those tweets is the best way to go, all the time. But don't you think that's something they should have figured out a long time ago?
Read more here
Dave.
