On your mark
The Chicago Examiner has unveiled a new article, touching on what it takes to be a social media director for their organization. With nearly all local media outlets attempting to bring social media to their Web sites, the psuedo-quiz really outlines the necessary effort that goes in to managing social media outlets.
With the question of necessity of a director, comes the question of the necessity of the social media, itself. While these tools (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.) are beneficial to use to find stories, is it super beneficial to be using them ourselves?
Twitter is useful for sharing stories. But with the way that advertising is dying, don’t we want to bring in the most amount of money, as possible? Why should we share our headlines on this Web site, when the users can easily go to our site directly to see what’s up. Users are still getting back to the original site, but in a round-about way. If they’ll follow us on Twitter, shouldn’t they be reading our Web site, anyway?
Facebook is another pseudo-useless thing for news networks. Sure, it gets your name out but let our work do the talking. With all the rush-rush, hush-hush going on, let’s see strong reporting so that readers are inclined to keep coming back.
Though I know most of these tools are super beneficial to use to find the good stories, we shouldn’t need things to help us promote the good stories. Perhaps social media is expanding media, but it’s certainly not getting better as it gets bigger.
