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sharing what we learn in the social space.

mel and wright
@mkramer and @wrightbryan3

Howdy everyone,

NINA ON REDDIT

1. Nina Totenberg is going to do an AMA on Reddit on Monday, the 17th, at 12PM ET. Please share on social, if you can. 

ANALYTICS DASHBOARD NEWS

USING SOCIAL TO PROMOTE MINE INVESTIGATION

2. And I also wanted to highlight a great example of using social to promote an investigative piece.

Yesterday Kate Parkinson-Morgan worked with some of the people on NPR’s investigation team — that’s Howard Berkes, Nicole Beemsterboer, and Alicia Cypress —  to prepare tweets about the NPR Delinquent Mine investigation. 

Howard Berkes tweeted every few minutes after the story was published, as did Nicole Beemsterboer and Alicia Cypress and Anna Boiko-Weyrauch. Kate retweeted these into the NPR News feed and they sparked some interesting discussions with our audience about the story.

Howard’s take on the process: “[I was] Inundated with new followers on both Facebook and Twitter.  Engaged in conversations on Twitter and listeners/readers grateful for contact and more information. Twitter-verse is wild on this.  Readers responding to those.    Helped that this coincided with a week doing training, a public talk and journalism classes in Oregon.  Students, station reporters and audiences buzzing about the series and joining the Twitter-fest. The best part: having a series of informational Tweets highlighting facts in the stories, our main graphic and powerful quotes.”

What did well on the NPR News Twitter feed? Facts, graphics, and humanizing quotes/photos. Some of the story’s terminology of the story is tricky. For example: what are delinquent mines, exactly? But we theorized that we would draw attention to the story by focusing on its human element. We were right:

https://twitter.com/nprnews/status/532655143087788032

This tweet had the highest engagement rate of all. People care when there’s a human face to the story:

https://twitter.com/nprnews/status/532881368812777472

And, as always, there’s the power of the facts:

https://twitter.com/nprnews/status/532639047307771904

Speaking of facts… Kate Parkinson-Morgan took over the NPR Twitter feed for NPR News on Wednesday, continuing with the week-long Twitter experiment. This tweet did really well: https://twitter.com/nprnews/status/532554158604558337

It had almost ten times the average engagement rate for our feed. From Kate: "The combination of the bright, eye-catching photo and the intriguing fact makes you want to click and find out more.”

Mel 

howard berkesnina totenbergreddit
emkrar asks:
Dear NPR, You're doing Snapchat wrong. It's a two-way street... If I'm going to watch your Fact of the Day videos, you should open the selfies I send you. Sincerely, Emily St. Helena, CA

Thanks for setting us straight. We’re working on it. We did open up messages sent to us on election night. It’s not a primary platform for us right now so we may not always have the time to engage. —Wright

Hungry for some more social insights? Here they are!

1. Are you reading NPR’s “On The Road" Tumblr? We just wrapped up an amazing journey with Joanna Kakissis telling the story of displaced Syrians making new lives in Sweden. And before that, Anastasia Tsioulcas put us in the middle of the World Music Expo in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. But wait, there’s more! David Greene and Lauren Migaki traveled to the Crimea and you must see what they saw.

2. “Dark Traffic” sounds mysterious, doesn’t it? It’s growing and it seems to be driven by mobile and social platforms. Business Insider recently published a  useful overview of this phenomenon, looking at it through the lens of The Guardian’s experience with hard-to-trace traffic.

3. “My goal as one of the leaders of Quartz is that unmediated collaboration, brainstorming, is one of the ingredients for success going forward.” Digiday highlights some of the things that make the Quartz newsroom special. h/t Krishnadev Calamur

4. Reader comments on news articles can be so annoying! But Matthew Ingram argues in Gigaom that there’s value in the comments and that interacting with our readers is a “necessity.”

5. Dan Oshinsky of BuzzFeed tells Poynter that newsletter traffic is up 700 percent for the site over 2013. What’s the secret of his success? Being polite is one key.

Wright

P.S. Send tips, examples and questions to us! @wrightbryan3​ and @mkramer

wright bryancommentstumblrdark trafficnewsletters

Moving to a place you’ve never been before is an occupational hazard for reporters such as NPR’s Elise Hu. She’s on the move and turned to a couple of well-known Internet communities for advice.

I recently took on a new challenge: I’ll be moving to Seoul to open a new Asia bureau for NPR. I haven’t been to Seoul before and now find myself preparing not just to live there, but report from there. So my approach was to ask the Internet for guidance.

I put a question about what it’s like to live in Seoul in two places I consult for the wisdom of others: Quora, the question-asking site, and reddit, the everything-site.

On reddit, I received more than 75 comments from folks who live in Korea or have lived there previously. They shared big picture advice and specific tips, like which apps to use for language training. When people brought up certain ideas, like how the first few months are rough, I responded to their comments with more questions, like, “Why is it so hard the first few months?” We kept the conversation going and got more folks involved this way.

Quora tends to take longer to get responses since it’s just a smaller community. But I do have one thoughtful answer so far, and hope the thread grows.

I’m grateful for all the tips from strangers and hope to make more connections with them as the move date draws closer.

—Elise Hu

elise huredditseoulnpr

We’re the Social Media Team at NPR. We think about NPR’s social strategy and build/deliver tools that make our newsroom more efficient, agile, and in tune with our audience in the digital space.

We also make everything we think and do public, even the stuff that doesn’t work. Here’s why.

Here are some ways to get started:

Feel free to share this with your newsroom. And if you see something neat on the Internet, find a great tool, or see something great on social, please let us know! 

Best of social sandbox:

1. Using Reddit to find Story Ideas 

2. How to make Instagram Photos look like native Twitter images on Twitter 

3. Geolocating tweets during breaking news 

4. A guide to NPR’s social media platforms 

5. How NPR is using Pinterest 

6. Really great Facebook groups and listservs to join 

7. Exploring Twitter chats (with Bob Mondello) 

8. The best ways to tweet your stuff

nprwiw14

Hello everyone,

Apologies in advance for any typos. It was a late night, last night at the Mothership.

SERIAL HAS A SUBREDDIT

I love this. People are actively discussing every single episode of Serial on a subreddit. There are also blogs that are actively discussing and picking apart EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. (h/t Stephanie Ebbs)

Related: the AV Club has a section of its website for reviewing podcasts, called Podmass. Noah Chestnut speculates that a podcast recapping site might not be far behind. (Could we do this?)

Also related: There’s a new newsletter that’s all about podcasts. It’s called Hotpod. I don’t know anything more than that, because it’s starting today. 

ON THE ELECTIONS

Kate Parkinson-Morgan tracked how many people were tweeting the hashtag #nprparty throughout the night. It peaked around 7:27 PM, when the site was live and reporters from around the country started using the hashtag. Here’s a annotated visual of traffic related to the hashtag.

One of the top shared bits we put out was something that Evie Stone and Elizabeth Baker passed along ahead of the evening: NPR’s pronunciation guide. It was shared hundreds of times on Twitter. Imagine what we could do if we added AUDIO to this for next time. i.e. people could hear our reporters pronouncing the names….

Also: I made a Pinterest board of interesting things that NPR and other media outlets did last night, trying to highlight what we could take away from each one.

SNAPCHAT FOR WHAT?

Avie Schneider sends along news that Snapchat is in partnership talks with Buzzfeed, Time and ESPN. Key quote: “Snapchat also wants to serve its users text and audio, which would make it an all-inclusive media consumption app.”

Is Snapchat a better form of push notifications? Are headlines the best way to use push notifications? I had this interesting conversation earlier with Noah, who is developing Buzzfeed’s new news app, that might be food for thought. 

(We’re NPRNEWS on Snapchat.)

See something? Send it along.

Mel 

snapchatpodcasts2014 elections

Mel here. I hang out a lot on Reddit. I have for years — particularly during my trying medical school year. It was quick, it gave me the news in easy-to-consume bits and it made me laugh.

I often spend time on /r/news and /r/worldnews. If you’ve spent time there, you’ll notice there’s a bot called Bit Of News which summarizes articles for you. Like this:

image

It only works, I think, on articles above a certain comment/like threshold. Here’s the code that it uses. But here’s what’s really, really smart.

It takes the summaries it makes on Reddit and feeds them into an app. 

image

So the person who made this app knows that:

1) people have already deemed the content within the app to be interesting

2) people have already clicked on these things

Furthermore, people find out about this app on Reddit because it’s so helpful. That’s smart.

Makes you think: maybe the first step to creating a viable product is to think about the Reddit bot that would also be created. What does it do? Who is the audience? How is it not annoying?

Reading this piece on Flipboard’s auto-summarization work made me think of this. 

@melodykramer