Mining Social Media Engagement To The Max

This prediction comes from Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor of professional practice in journalism at USC Annenberg, but better known to many as the go-to source for insight into social media’s rapid incursions in legacy journalism. From where Hernandez sits (and tweets and posts and blogs), it isn’t enough for media companies to be in the social landscape; they need to regularly demonstrate that they understand just what’s so social about it.

For Hernandez, that means not just knowing social media’s protocols but also regularly engaging in its back and forth nature. And for journalists, he sees it as nothing less than a gold mine for tips, sources and a real and echoing engagement with the finished product.

Hernandez is also ringleader of a weekly Twitter-based discussion, #WJChat, which confronts some of the most exciting — and vexing — in-the-trenches issues that journalists face in social media today. In an interview with NetNewsCheck, he shared some of them, including mandating social media use for journalists, the implications of geolocation and the next platform likely to elbow into the Facebook-Twitter social mainstream.

An edited transcript.

It’s commonly accepted now that media companies and individual journalists need to be on social media, especially Twitter and Facebook. But for all of the growing investment in time and resources in that space, where are the revenue streams?

There are no numbers, per se, that say that if you send a tweet, you will get this money. What it really comes down to are modern human consumer experiences. Good customer service, good business experience … that brings back loyalty, a returning customer. That spreads good business brand. And you have to be in this space whether you like it or not because your customers are. And your customers, your readers, your community are talking about you. And they want to engage with you. They’re either talking about you saying positive things and you want to thank them and engage them, or they’re talking about you saying negative things, and you need to put out that fire.

What social media has done is level the playing field and allow everyone to be approachable. That’s a fantastic opportunity, but if we don’t take advantage of that opportunity, whether as a journalist or a news organization or a business, we’re really not going to be around very much longer. You can’t ignore having a social media presence.

That said, how does a company effectively monetize its presence on social media? Who are you seeing, if anyone, that is showing the most promise in making money from their roles on Facebook and Twitter?

When someone poses that question, I always want to say what’s your ROI in making phone calls to folks or your ROI on having a promotional event somewhere? You put your word and your brand out and then whatever comes back, comes back. It’s an investment that I don’t think translates to exact dollars, but you have to do it.

Now we have Google Plus that just released its branded pages. That’s another platform. Yes, these take time, especially if you want true, genuine engagement with a community, but they’re well worth the investment.

But do you think it’s going to remain in this unquantifiable territory indefinitely?

I don’t think indefinitely. There are things like Klout — it’s kind of like a gauge so you can see the hierarchy of people in the crowd. But the thing that I think really helps people’s brands is that good customer service will help everybody out. True engagement involves helping everybody out, engaging with everybody. And that is what makes this space so unique — everyone’s on a level playing field. Yes, I have X number of followers and you have another amount, bigger or smaller, but the fact is we can both tweet the president if we want to.

There will be stats about how many things get retweeted and echoed — those are instant gratification things — but you can also see it if you use the tools out there to monitor that space. Maybe you’ll see a critic, but you’ll also see the community defend you or prop you up. It can celebrate you or correct you when you need to be corrected.

Quite honestly, if there are folks that are making a case that social media is not worth an investment, I’d be concerned with the direction of that company.

Well what percentage of a daily paper’s traffic should come from Facebook or Twitter, for example?

That is hard to say. In the history of journalism, we’ve always wanted these kids of metrics to help us out. Our biggest metric before was circulation — how many people took in the newspaper. That’s great, but that didn’t tell me who took it and put it in the recycling bin or read A1 or the article inside of B3. With the Internet and technology, we can get that type of information, but things are so fragmented that we’re underimpressed when something isn’t a huge number. It’s very difficult where we are now to have a standardized metric — you can’t compare one to the other. And a lot of folks are really conservative in sharing those numbers.