Tag Archives: Megan Garber

Want to Twitter Better? Diversify Your Pronouns

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One of my favorite Joe Pulizzi sayings is “it’s not about you.” For the most part, he’s talking to marketers, trying to get them to focus on the information their customers need rather than what the marketers most want to talk about: themselves. Journalists generally don’t see this as their own problem. After all, their role is to point towards other people. But as a new study suggests, the story is different on Twitter.  There, they mostly point to themselves. It’s a pronoun problem: too much “I” and not enough “you” and “they.”

Pew study found few mainstream media outlets retweet Back in August, I did an informal study of one B2B publisher’s editorial use of Twitter, and found that most tweets tended to be promotional (linking to in-house sources) rather than curatorial (linking elsewhere) or conversational (engaging with users). Now a Pew Research Center study of 13 mainstream media outlets finds an even more dramatic excess of promotion. The organizations studied included The New York Times, NPR, ABC News, The Huffington Post, and Fox News. More than 90% of their tweets with links were to their own sources.  While only 7% of their tweets linked to outside sources, even fewer were conversational in nature: just 2% asked readers for input, and only 1% were retweets.

The causes and implications of these findings have been well covered by Megan Garber, Mathew Ingram, and Ethan Klapper, among others (if I missed other good ones, why not note them in the comments below?).

I’ll just add this suggestion: when you tweet, try to balance your pronouns. Make sure you match your I—links to your own stories—with equal measures of they—what others, including your competitors, have said—and you—reacting to and soliciting information from your readers and followers.

Three Ways to Turbocharge Your New-Media Career

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MUD day 9:

For anyone involved in communications, coming to accept new media is only half the battle. The next, much harder fight, is in leaping into and mastering the ways of new media. There are probably an infinite number of effective approaches to doing so, but, based on my recent reading and on my experience this month as a blogger, I’d start with these three:

1. Be Gutsy. In a recent interview with Nieman Journalism Lab’s Megan Garber, retiring newspaper editor John Robinson offered his profession this advice:

What editors really need right now, Robinson says, “is guts to do the nontraditional things”: to consider new approaches to newsgathering and dissemination, to be open to new ways of knowing the community they’re meant to serve.

Robinson is pointing out here something that isn’t often emphasized: It takes courage to adopt new-media tools. You might just be wasting your time, or worse, risking your job.

2. Be Weird. Though the title of Seth Godin’s latest book is We Are All Weird, its premise is that most of us don’t realize or admit it. Our traditional mass-market culture and ways of doing business are built around serving the mass, the normal.  But as Robinson notes in his interview, “The sooner that we grasp that we aren’t mass anymore—that there is really no mass, that everything is broken apart—the better.” To use new media effectively, you have to be willing to look weird to a lot of people.

3. Be Arbitrary. If you worry too much about how to use new media, or what platform is best, or how to make the most of it, you may never move forward. Pick a platform, set a goal for how to use it, and stick to your plan. If you choose Twitter, for instance, you might pick a number of tweets to do each day and a number of people to retweet. Or, like me this month, you might set yourself a goal of writing one post a day in a set period of time. You might not hit your goals, but you’ll be giving yourself an excellent chance of mastering your new medium.