CoPress

Twitter

I've probably over-discussed the topic of how student media should use Twitter, but I'll do it once more. Twitter is not meant  to be an RSS feed of headlines. Use Twitter to maintain a conversation with your readers. Utilize search.twitter.com to find what people are saying about your campus, community and publication — and then respond. Live-tweet events and topics and games. Basically:

• Do searches daily for topics relevant to your publication (using search.twitter.com)
• Use hashtags for topics (example: #CSUbudget or #calpoly)
• If readers ask questions or give suggestions, respond
• If you do tease to your headlines, do it sparingly or present the article topics in a discussion-like way (example: Instead of "CSU raises student fees" tweet "What are your thoughts on the CSU student fee increase?")
• Keep a personal conversation going

Facebook

I'm not a shining example of someone who has used Facebook effectively. I used to post albums and upload videos but it was too tedious on top of all my other responsibilities, so I just linked our YouTube and Flickr with our Facebook page.

In theory, students are spending a lot of time using Facebook so therefore the network should be used to draw readers to your content, but I'm not a believer that Facebook is the best tool for that.  Still, it's good to at least have a presence. An idea I've toyed with is using Facebook as a way for user-generated content, but I haven't really developed a plan for it.

You can see our Facebook page here. It's no fun because no one is interacting with us. Hopefully that'll change now that the fan pages are spiced up to function like profiles (although my updates still don't appear in the main newsfeed like Mashable's and other big fan pages do, any idea why? If I can figure that out, Facebook will be a far more effective tool).

Flickr

We recently started using Flickr in the newsroom:

• All photographers have access to the account
• They upload photos and tag them with at least one entirely unique tag that won't be used again on another batch of photos (this tag is used to embed albums within articles)

A few advantages to using Flickr:

• Others can embed your slideshow on their sites/blogs
• Slideshow can be viewed full-screen at high resolution
• The photos are tagged and searchable in one of the largest photo-sharing Web sites on the web
• You don’t need to have access to your newsroom’s server to get the photos– only an Internet connection
• You can always go back and download the full-resolution image if your original gets erased
• Flickr makes the slideshow for you — you just grab the embed code
• The Flickr account  can be synced with Facebook or your paper’s blog

Individual best practice

After a question that came up at the ACP conferernce about reporters/editors on social media, the Mustang Daily editors and I are in the process of writing a series social media guidelines for reporters and editors. I think it's important for newspapers to lay down the law (not too obtrusively, though) about basic social media rules, I just haven't figured out the exact way to do it.

For instance, a reporter is not allowed to tweet "Trying to contact Mr. Head Administrator and the asshole won't return my calls" (but they could tweet it in a polite way).

They can use networks in a personal manner, but if they're representing our newspaper, there needs to be a sense of professionalism about it.  I'm not sure where to draw the line though when it comes to drunk photos on Facebook (especially for underaged staff).

 Any thoughts?