Testing Twitter on the Whitman Campus
Last week, the Whitman Pioneer broke out of its weekly publication mold a bit to cover a story about the administration’s decision to cut varsity sports funding to the Alpine and Nordic ski teams. The same day the announcement was made we had an article written by one of the Editors-in-Chief posted, and started spreading the word around campus for students to visit the site and weigh in. As I posted earlier here at CoPress, one of the major goals we wanted to accomplish with our new site was to use it as a forum for student discussion about heated topics; we saw this as a great chance to test it out.
Breaking the News
Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.
First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.
While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.
We were also interested in seeing how word spread about the article over Facebook. We didn’t post anything to the site, but it appears that others used it to send the link to friends. 
Over the 3-day period we received 19 visitors from Facebook (about 2%) without having to do a thing. College students may not be using Twitter to communicate yet, but they definitely use Facebook.
Finally, it seems that the best method for getting people to visit the site was to place a banner on the top of the homepage. This linked directly to the article until we were able to put together full coverage of the event. This method resulted in more than 700 visitors (or, 68%) over the 3 days. Furthermore, this visitors spent far longer (almost 4 minutes) on the page.
Takeaways for Next Time
Overall, the whole experience was very informative. Our new WordPress-powered site really made it all possible because, were it not for having a quick and easy way to push out content digitally, the Pioneer would have had to wait until Thursday to print an issue with articles about the cuts. It was also a bit of a reality check for my expectations of Twitter. Ultimately, if the campus community isn’t using it, then updates sent out via Twitter will largely be irrelevant.
Also, with more than 20 comments left on the main article this really showed the need for the site to have a forum feature (which I’ll be adding over the coming weeks). If we had this in place at the beginning, I think that student and community discussion would have been much more productive.
In the end, this was our first real test of covering breaking news digitally and then covering in print later on. We seem to have done alright, but I know there’s things we could have done better. Anyone else cover a recent breaking news story on their campus? I’d love to hear suggestions, ideas, and solutions.
Great post, Andrew. I can tell that you guys put a lot of thinking into how to create virtual space for discussion on the campus. I have a few points of feedback.
First, I think your assessment of Twitter is almost there. It’s all about meeting your audience on the ground that they’re most comfortable participating in. I don’t think the Whitman campus is there in their adoption of Twitter, and might never be, but there is the possibility that more people will use it in the future. They just haven’t figured out how to use it to find the best parties on Friday night
Second, I’m not sure that a forum will solve all of your problems. It will offer a bit different format for discussion than a blog post but both tools won’t be good unless they’re used effectively. In the forum, I might post several of the broad questions raised in the administration’s decision to cut funding to the team. This would offer a venue for people to weigh in with that they think the answer should be. I would then use the blog to offer a daily synthesis of what the discussion is, as well as to introduce more of the background facts that your reporters are pulling together.
All of this being said, I think you guys did a stellar job breaking out of the weekly print mindset and adopting web tools to enhance conversation.
[...] Pioneer, saw the controversy as an excellent time to experiment with their new website. In a post published on the CoPress Blog today, he goes into detail about the different tools they used to get the word out (Twitter, list serv, [...]
Funny you should mention breaking news… I’m working right now to do live coverage of an event on campus this evening. Dr. William (Bill) Ayers is coming to visit as part of an annual education lecture series on my campus (I’d say nearly half of the students on campus are education).
The result? I’m in our student center looking at a news van, with state troopers walking around the venue across the street. The event is being held in a small venue, and we were only able to secure 4 press passes, which we have 3 journalists and a photographer covering. Outside, where we expect protests, we’re have four (or more) staff, including two photographers. And then there’s me… I’m going to be using CoverItLive to publish what’s going on.
CoverItLive is an awesome platform, and if you haven’t heard of it, check it out. It’s completely free and has tons of features for doing live coverage. This will be my first time using it tonight, but I’ve used the “practice session” feature a few times to test it out. It even has a feature to allow a few people’s twitters to show up (I think it’s up to 12 people & 6 #hashtags). I thought of maybe using this so the journalists inside the venue could text to twitter and have their info appear immediately on the live coverage… I still have a few hours left to explore this, but I think I’ll have them text me so I can type it up (and fix and spelling/grammer).
I think CoverItLive would also be good for breaking news that’s unexpected- it allows for multiple “producers” to post. This could be used in a lockdown-type of situation where journalists are located all over, and each have a different story to tell.
I’m very… eh about twitter. If anyone caught the latest South Park, twitter is like “The Coon” – hopefully someone gets that. If not.. I think twitter is cool and all, but it’s all hype to me. Is it a neat service? Sure. Is it for me? Nope. For my peers? Doubt it. Sure all those “New Media” and “cool” people might be using it, but it’s not the next big thing… it’s just a niche market. I don’t see my campus of 8,000 becoming a twittering campus anytime soon. Heck, I think more people [in the General Public] know about WordPress than they do twitter.
…and I think I’ll just stop there.
Wow, that sounds really sweet. I’m impressed.
@Joe Wow, that sounds incredible. It’s a pity that we didn’t have the web presence in place that we now do my Sophomore year when Salman Rushdie came to speak. That could have provided for some interesting coverage.
@Daniel You make some excellent points. By no means did we do this in the best way and looking back I do wish that I had created more of a Facebook presence for the paper before getting us on Twitter, but oh well. That said, we’ve got some stuff in the works that will fix that. A Facebook page will be launching soon and I’m toying around with trying to do an iPhone app this summer. Time will tell, but it should be fun.