How the New York Times is Using Social Media for ‘Deeper’ Engagement

Liz Heron is the social media editor for the NY Times and has been instrumental in developing the vision that has helped the paper become a player in the digital age. For the past three years she’s delivered the keynote speech at Journalism.co.uk’snews:rewired conference.  I’ve highlighted her ideas below.

2010 was the year her team were playing the role of “evangeliser.”

2011 was “a watershed year for social media in our newsrooms” due to the Arab spring and other major news events.

2012 is the year when the New York Times is trying to make its “social media projects deeper and more meaningful” with users.

To be deeper and more meaningful, “Be strategic, be different, and strive for meaningful interactions – don’t be content to skate on social media’s surface.”

Here are seven  ways she and her NY Times crew are going about developing deeper meaning. There are a lot of take-aways that I’m going to implement and I’d like to hear your thoughts.

1. Using Twitter hashtags to ask journalists to check facts: if you were on Twitter during any of the recent events — the State of the Union Address, the Super Bowl, or the Grammys — you probably saw a lot of commentary going on. The NY Times is using hasthtags to differentiate themselves from the noise and they are using it as a way of getting their readers actively involved with their content. Readers ask questions and reporters answer them.

2. Publishing tweets on the New York Times homepage: those tweets are posted, via a feed, live onto the front page. This gives the readers a sense of investment and it creates news. The LA Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC also publish live tweets. I’m sure others will soon follow.

3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”: by this she means building interactivity into the website. Design is no longer an after the fact add-on. It’s primary.

4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”: they’ve assigned two reporters who are using facebook posts, tweets, emails, in addition to breaking news to create a narrative about stories on Storify. It’s the story about the story.

5. By experimenting with “hashtag science”: the popularity of an article or series promoted via Twitter will be largely determined by how easily it’s found by the audience. The NY Times social media staff experiments with hashtags before launching major series and invites comments to see how well it’s received. The keys are to use a hashtag that “cleverly and clearly identifies the topic at hand, feels universal and inviting, fits neatly into a sentence, and above all, is short.”

6. By encouraging journalists to use Facebook subscribe: this is a relatively new Facebook feature (it’s been out for about two months) which allows people to subscribe to feeds w/o being “friends.” It allows subscribers to view public posts only.

7. Google+ hangouts: the crew at the NY Times, like a lot of people, are waiting to see if Google+ will hit critical mass. They’ve decided not to spend time and resources on creating the entire NY Times on the new platform but instead to focus on one of the features that makes Google+ unique: “deep discussion” and “video hangouts”. “deep discussion” and “video hangouts”. This enabled back-and-forth conversations between readers and reporters and political commentators.