Former home of Headlines and Deadlines : 02/01/2014

Friday, 28 February 2014

Tweetdeck: A short user guide to getting the most out of it

I ran my first Webex training session this week; it was a 45 minute run-through of How To Be a Tweetdeck Ninja, which contained my tips for getting the most out of Facebook.
Ahem.
I've used Tweetdeck for years and I like the Chrome extension very much - I personally find Tweetdeck the desktop tool for Twitter I wouldn't be without (one other being Buffer).
So when asked to give some colleagues an introduction to Tweetdeck, and others a bit of a power-user insight, it was a chance to sift through what is useful or not to me, and share it.
Because Trinity Mirror uses Google Apps, I've slanted the presentation to the Google Chrome Store Tweetdeck extension - obviously that isn't a prerequisite to using Tweetdeck.
Having not used Webex before (other than a nice, safe 'this is how it works' session between me and the trainer) it was a little nerve-wracking but, used properly it is a great tool for engaged learning. (My main learning outcome was that background noise can hugely impact on the sound quality.)
Anyway, before the session started I did ask the Twitter hivemind for its thoughts on what was good and bad about Tweetdeck, and and then pulled a selection together into a custom timeline* of the responses:

Social media tips/tricks

There was also a powerpoint sent around as an aide memoir, which I've uploaded to Scribd:

How To Be A Tweetdeck Ninja

Sunday, 23 February 2014

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Olympian Bode Miller: ‘Be Gentle With Christin Cooper’ for NBC interview | Poynter.

Never a good look when an Olympic hero cries as a result of your question. However, I don't think she was insensitive (although the camera work was too much) "Olympic skier Bode Miller told his Twitter followers that NBC’s Christin Cooper was doing her job when she asked him questions about his brother who died last year. Miller cried and viewers jumped online to complain. ("

tags: interviewing+techniques
BBC journalists' interviewing techniques - YouTube

This is a fantastic interview with Peter Allen, 5Live's wonderful Drive journalist, talking about how to interview. It includes a particularly affecting interview with the mother of murdered Lucy Blackman, and you can hear him trying to maintain a professional interviewing manner, even as her hear audibly breaks on air.

tags: journalists interviewing+techniques bbc

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, 17 February 2014

Shifting my social media life around

I bit the bullet today and made myself a Facebook page.
I'd actually created it a few months ago, but I didn't publish it because it seemed a bit, well, extravagant - I have a Facebook profile, I'm on all the usual social networks, plus I have various about.me type pages. What was the point of a Facebook page as well?
But my social media world is starting to become a bit too much of a mashup for me to do anything particularly effectively.
If you're interested in seeing the page, it's here under the imaginatively titled vanity url alisongow.journalist.

The need to put a bit more organisation into my social media life is something that's been bothering me for a while.
Take Twitter: I have used it for more than 6 years now and it's a different beast to what it started out as (of course it is!) but the way I was using it hadn't evolved quite as much.
So, for example, I've got 5,000-odd followers, some of whom are actually Really Real People (there are also some Really Odd People, and I'd prefer them not to follow me, but that's for another post).

Some are journalists, some are from what I tend to call In My Liverpool Home, or from Wales, and follow me either because they know me or because we move in the same circles and geographic spaces, as well as the same digital spaces.
But the intersection of those worlds isn't of that much interest, I guess.
I've had to change the way I think about Twitter; I genuinely used it as a micro-blog initially, then it became a crowdsourcing tool, then a replacement RSS feed, then a way to promote my news title's journalism. And, of course, it's always been a noise I couldn't live without.
But, that means I now think of what followers are looking for from me more than before and so the micro-blog part of things has gradually decreased, as as the amount I tweet.

Often, I can't tweet about work things, interesting as they might be, because it isn't the right platform, or the right time.
I can't get involved in long tweet-debates any more because I don't tend to be on Twitter as often - I might be in meetings, or driving.
Also, I notice some people use Twitter in an incredibly focused way - just to talk about journalism, for example. That would drive me nuts - I enjoy posting pix from my days out-n-about, for example, and I'd struggle to be quite so single-focused and earnest.
However, things evolve all the time.

Then it struck me that while I'm refining the way I use Twitter all the time, I've done little to change how I use Facebook.
That is a place where a lot of my non-journo life spills out, from the problems of renovating an old property to the perpetual war waged against sheep breaking into the garden, to - yep, sorry - my cats. Look, I never said it was an interesting spill-out of my life.
But I felt that was limiting my potential to use Facebook; having said that, I don't really think my old school friends give a rat's ass about my Thoughts on Journalism.

So I thought I'd experiment with a page, and it was born today. I suspect it will be very handy too, for mini-blogging, and I've also set up an ifttt recipe to auto-post my Diigo bookmarks to the page.
My friend Dilyan is very good at cutting to the heart of things with his questions, and he did it again today; I'm not sure I have an answer...

I'll see how it goes.

Sunday, 16 February 2014

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Sunday, 2 February 2014

This week, I've been reading... (weekly)

Outlook for 2014: InPublishing

"Is there light at the end of the tunnel for the regional press? Will their efforts to realign their businesses start to bear fruit? Peter Sands looks at the priorities for the year ahead and solicits the views of senior regional executives."

tags: future+of+news journalism business newspapers editors

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Saturday, 1 February 2014

Investigating whether it's worth investing time in LinkedIn (aka Help, please...)

I've been involved in interviewing for some journalists jobs recently, and I noticed that while some CVs will state the applicant's Twitter, and occasionally their blog, hardly any referenced a LinkedIn profile.
More interestingly, during social media role interviews, LinkedIn was mentioned by just a handful of people as a potentially useful tool.
Twitter and Facebook, of course, were top of the pile, with Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and Google+ cropping up (Google+ interests me - I don't find it compelling, but it is engaging. When I remember to post there...)

So, LinkedIn. Do any newsrooms do it well? What are the opportunities for users? I thought I might test the water with a poll, and so I dusted off my Ask500people.com login to find that the site was moribund. Which is a real shame - I liked it for when I needed plenty of responses, but they didn't necessarily have to be local to my new patch.
Anyway, I tried easypolls.com instead, just because it came up first on a search for 'free, embed, poll' as I didn't need anything as fancy as SurveyMonkey.

So, if you have two moments to spare, tell me why you use LinkedIn, and help me work out whether it's a network or the digital equivalent of a business card - something most of us have to promote ourselves, but don't tend to use that much. If you really want to tell me more than clicking a button allows, you can always post a comment. I'm going to pop this link on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, and see which sends most traffic to the blog and where most (if any) comments, likes, shares or comments happen, and then update this post with my findings.
Thanks for helping with the research!

survey service