May 1, 2008

Public Broadcasting and Twitter? Engagement and Authenticity!

Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don't know WBUR, it's an NPR member station in Boston that's been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.

In his blog post, WBUR's Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they're now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:

Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.

After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain - to the point of apprehension - about what I should "Tweet" about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?

An excellent example of Twitter's utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal "ah-ha!" moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday... cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?

Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR - and any other public broadcaster, for that matter - as far as Twitter is concerned?

Above all else, I would expect two things: engagement and authenticity.

Since I first started encouraging NPR folks and shows to use Twitter last year, I've seen us try a lot of things: Twitter accounts like nprnews, which is just a rehash of our primary headlines RSS feed; bpp, the Bryant Park Project account used to chat with their community of users on a wide range of topics; and accounts like nprnewsblog, which blends automated blog updates with occasional comments from Tom Regan or me, particularly on primary nights.

Which of these work best? Well, it depends on your perspective of course, but for my money, BPP is the best thing we've got going on Twitter right now. It took a while for it to reach critical mass - it averaged less than two tweets per day in October - but as Bryant Park staffers saw the number of folks replying to their tweets, a rolling conversation erupted. They began incorporating it into their work routine, and kept the tweets going after work as well. Now, they're averaging upwards of 20 tweets a day. And looking at their tweet stream, you'll see that just over a quarter of their posts are actually public replies to others, either answering questions or participating in multiple conversations simultaneously. The team has gotten very good about signing off each tweet so you know if it's Laura, Allison, Matt or someone else writing the message. And it doesn't take long to recognize who's who - they each have their own style, even though they're compressing their thoughts into 140 characters or less.

Meanwhile, they're using these conversations as sources for on air dialogue as well. BPP staff regularly ask users questions via Twitter for topics they're trying to cover on air. Sometimes Twitter users will suggest stories or guests - and in some cases, they become guests themselves. One of my favorite examples of this happened when BPP began chatting it up with redsoxcast, a twitter account that offers play-by-play coverage of Red Sox games. It didn't take long before the conversation blossomed into a radio story as well as an online slideshow. Conversations generate coverage, which generate more conversation - a virtuous cycle that's a win-win for show producers and their community of fans.

The BPP Twitter strategy is beginning to rub off on nprnewsblog as well. When we first set up that account in the fall of last year, it was just an automated rehash of blog posts, with a headline and link for each new post. That in itself was perfectly okay for a while, but it didn't exactly generate much interest. By the time we got to Super Tuesday in this past February, it had only attracted a few hundred followers. But that night, we shifted gears in a big way. While Tom concentrated on posting new blog entries, I manned the Twitter account, writing summaries of precinct results as they came in from the AP, asking Twitterers about what was going on in their precincts, and passing along the calls when NPR's election unit called a race for a particular candidate (sometimes beating our on-air coverage, much to the amusement of our Twitter fans).

Since then, the nprnewsblog account has grown to nearly 4,000 subscribers, making it one of the largest news services on Twitter. While most days the bulk of messages are still automated summaries of blog posts (63% of them, for those of you keeping score), Tom's gotten comfortable in chatting and answering questions much more often than he used to do it. "It's a great tool," Tom told me earlier today. "I often get story ideas from the folks on Twitter. It's like having a whole lot of people looking for stories or passing along interesting ideas."

Meanwhile, I still chime in as well from time to time, along with Michael Olson of our election unit, particularly during major political events. Even if we're not physically present at an event like a caucus or campaign rally - and personally, I'm never present at these things - there's a good chance that other Twitter users are there, so we're able to use Twitter to track these folks down, find out from them what's happening on the ground and join them in a conversation as the story unfolds.

In each of these cases, I've pushed really hard for our Twitter experiments to embrace authenticity and engagement. Tweets from NPR folks need to be written in their own voice. Public relations-speak on Twitter is the kiss of death; you just don't get the medium if you're using it to spew talking points. If other Twitter users don't have a sense of the human being behind the Twitter account, they're gonna lose interest in you real fast.

Even if you're being true to yourself when you're posting your tweets, you can't ignore the fact that there are all sorts of people who want to interact with you. That's why I'm trying to get us away from feeds like the nprnews Twitter account where we just publish, and embrace feeds where we converse. Even though the Twitter tag line is "What are you doing?" the heart of twitter is really "What do you want to talk about?" And it doesn't take long to notice that Twitter users are serious news junkies; they want to talk about what's going on in the world and in their lives. Twitter is helping my NPR colleagues tap into these conversations for ideas and inspiration, while providing users with even more things to talk about. Creating a more informed public is at the heart of NPR's mission, and Twitter is an emerging tool for us to accomplish that mission.

So as far as WBUR is concerned, here's my advice. Don't publish - converse. Use your Twitter account to start new conversations in your community and learn about what people are saying. Get some of your colleagues using it, though if you do it all on one Twitter account, be sure to sign your tweets individually so users know who they're talking to. Follow as many people as you can manage, even if they're not all following you back. Whenever possible, answer user questions publicly. Organize local tweetups, or attend ones that others have organized. Become a part of the local Twitter community. And above all, explore ways of using these conversations to improve the quality and diversity of your journalism, whether it's on air or online. There's a huge community of people out there rooting for you and eager to help. Open the doors and invite them in. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 2:40 PM

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January 28, 2008

Twitter: Nighthawks at the BPP Diner

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Rob Paterson wrote a blog post about the new NPR show, The Bryant Park Project, and its use of the community messaging system Twitter. With the subtitle "My Diner in the Morning," Rob's post talked about how he's experienced the show via Twitter - in particular, the slow progression of observing, and then interacting with BPP staff. And it really got me thinking about the role of Twitter in developing community around radio programs.

BPP has had a Twitter presence since just before the show launched on October 1 of last year - a feed of all of their blog posts and radio stories, for Twitter users who wish to be notified each time something new is posted, and a BPP staff account. My thinking behind the staff account would be that the show's producers, editors and hosts would use it to post quick updates about what was going on behind the scenes, as well as to develop a more personal rapport with the audience. They were already doing a great job interacting with the public over their blog, but those interactions always had to be on topic for each particular post. A Twitter-based conversation could be more free-form, spontaneous and immediate.

At first, not much happened. BPP online producer Laura Conaway jumped into the fray, posting notes via Twitter from the beginning. Over time, other BPP staff began posting over the Twitter account, too. But not many people were paying attention; it was tough getting other Twitter users aware of BPP. So I convinced Laura to add a Twitter feed directly to their blog, so users could see their notes right there, and hopefully be enticed to follow them.

Meanwhile, as Rob notes in his post, Laura began to find her voice. For a while, her posts were more like notifications - what was going on at the show and so on. But Rob and others began to reply to Laura's posts - and Laura started replying back. Rob likened it to visiting a diner. The first time you go, you may not interact much with the waitress behind the counter. But after a few visits, you develop a rapport, develop a routine. Next thing you know, it's an essential part of your community life.

Nighthawks at the Dinah's

I've struggled for a while trying to come up with the right metaphor for Twitter, but Rob's diner metaphor pretty much nails it. As people begin using Twitter, there's often hesitancy, a sense that it's just an absurd broadcasting of the banal. That's not surprising, for when you first join Twitter, you need to build up a list of friends and acquaintances, then begin to read their tweets to get to know them. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself. And it's only when you start opening up - soliciting their ideas and replying to their comments, that Twitter transforms itself from a simple microblogging medium to an ongoing conversation. For users of IRC and other chat media, this may seem obvious, but if you're new to these types of conversations, it takes a while to get a hang of it.

And that's what's happened with BPP. From October through December, Twitter was mostly a notification tool. Since the beginning of this year, you can really feel how it's evolved into an ongoing conversation between BPP staffers and its community of participants. (I'm trying hard to avoid using the cliché of "listeners" and "audience" since they really don't apply to BPP in the same way they do to traditional radio shows.) Now, the tweets fly back and forth between Laura and other Twitter users - and it's a marvel to watch.

Laura recently invited Rob on air to discuss the phenomenon, and in their conversation he suggested we find a way to make it easier for followers of the BPP Twitter account to communicate with each other as well, and not just with BPP staff. They spontaneously started collecting the account names of other Twitter users and encouraged each other to follow each other. Meanwhile, I decided to create yet another Twitter account - named BPPdiner, in honor of Rob's analogy - that would automatically aggregate every post within Twitter that mentioned the word BPP. That way, users could simply follow the BPPdiner account and include BPP in any tweet. This would allow them to keep up with each other's BPP-related tweets. Think of it as an email list, but over Twitter.

It's not a perfect system - I'm using the Twitter search tool Terraminds and the rss-to-Twitter tool TwitterFeed, which can only process a maximum of five posts per 30 minutes - but it's a start. Every time a new person joins the group, it's like another person climbing onto the stool at the diner. You may not know if and when they'll open up and have a conversation. Maybe they'll just sit their and talk to themselves while reading the paper. But you can be sure that the waitress, short-order cook and their fellow customers are ready to chat. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 10:06 AM

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