Let's Be Social

Work on Project Goldfish is moving forward. This week I spent a considerable amount of time setting up social media accounts for the website. A Twitter account, Facebook page and YouTube channel now exist for Project Goldfish. Well, exist for the project under the project’s real name (so sneaky!).

One idea I had when thinking about the function of the Twitter account was to take a cue from The Chicago Tribune and the Col. Tribune avatar. Two years ago, a four-person team at The Tribune came up with the idea of creating this character to represent the newspaper’s social media presence. The name, Col. Tribune, was a nod to Col. Robert McCormick, the newspaper’s legendary owner who died in 1955. (He is also the namesake and financier of my scholarship so, thank you Col. McCormick.)

Bill Adee, editor of digital media at The Trib, describes this character in Nieman Reports:

“Meet 'The Colonel.' He’s a pretty dapper guy. In his early 50’s, he has worked for the Chicago Tribune and lived in the city his whole life—well, except for that stint in the Army Reserves. That’s how he earned his nickname. He started out as a copy boy in the newsroom, worked his way up, and now he’s Web ambassador for chicagotribune.com.”

Adee goes on to describe the Colonel’s favorite place to get a steak, his morning reading habits and even where he lives. Today, Col. Tribune has more than 857,000 followers on Twitter.

With that in mind, I am in the process of creating a character who will tweet for the Project Goldfish site. She is a reporter and a workaholic. She is tech-savvy but clings to old school journalistic values. Beyond that … it’s difficult for me to get creative and make up this person. At first I thought she would be a plain Jane, with a fat cat at home and half a turkey sandwich in her purse. On the weekends she and her boyfriend, an L.A. city firefighter, would go hiking through the canyons. I lived with that version for a while but ultimately decided that was too boring.

This character’s life is still in the process of being created, but her face and likeness are becoming a reality. An artist friend has put together sketches of what she will look like. The sketches are coming out great and it is exciting seeing my ideas become something tangible. Of course, characters and pictures are just one small part of social media. The heavy lifting is building an audience and leveraging that audience to improve content. This was the subject of a class I took last quarter, Building Networked Audiences.

Building Networked Audiences was the class that took an academic eye to social media. For example, Facebook is an undirected graph whereas Twitter is directed. Fascinating, right? We studied search engine optimization, link strategy and ways to determine the "influence" of Twitter and Digg.

Content is important, too. I think it is about being timely and relevant. I follow a certain number of news organizations on Twitter and I’m sure I will add a lot more when I return to reporting in another two or three months. However, the accounts that tweet "news" hours after the event are going to be eliminated. If I’ve already read a story on the Los Angeles Times’ website, what is the point in tweeting about it hours later? It’s not as if it’s breaking news at that point. NBC4 gave me a perfect example of this today. As I'm writing this, it’s about 3 p.m. The ESPY Awards took place last night. This is not timely:

So what is to become of the Project Goldfish avatar? What should she be like, and how will that help set the tone and culture of Project Goldfish?