You don’t tip competitors on Twitter; you beat them

You can’t get scooped because competition gets tipped to a story when you tweet about it. Your tweets already scooped the competition.

A Digital First engagement editor who’s been teaching colleagues how to use Twitter got these questions from a veteran reporter:

Thank you for helping me understand Twitter and how to use it. What I don’t get is: If we tweet where we are and what we’re doing, how do we keep the competition from making a few phone calls on a story we sat through a meeting to sift out and develop? Or they’re not at the fire, but I’m tweeting and now they know.

And if I give results on Twitter, why would they buy a paper to see the results of the game?

I thought Twitter was to draw readers to our paper. So this is a struggle.

This is classic print-centric thinking. The newspaper has an early print deadline so “they’ve been scooped a lot,” the engagement editor told me. In this kind of thinking, scoops are based on who has the print story first.

That’s not how Digital First journalists and newsrooms think. If we had the story first, we had the scoop. And you have the story first if you have it on Twitter and/or on your website. 

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Whale-watching tours show how you can compete and collaborate

As you drive the main drag of Tofino, a coastal resort town on Vancouver Island, competing signs beckon you to go whale-watching.

The competition among tour operators is genuine on the street and in the fliers hawking tourist attractions and activities. Each business wants to attract the most tourists to its boats.

But out on the waters, the captains turn from competitors to collaborators. They share their whale sightings by radio, and the competing boats race to the area and follow the same whale(s) for a while, their boats bobbing on the water and their passengers pointing and exclaiming each time a great beast surfaces.

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You can compete and collaborate at the same time

Howard Owens is one of the smartest journalism entrepreneurs in the business. He launched The Batavian as a digital challenger to the Batavia Daily News in New York, and his small business is thriving.

I was interested yesterday to see that Howard had blogged with some advice for local websites competing with Patch. I had written about the challenge presented by Patch a few weeks ago, and was interested to see what Howard had to say. Not surprisingly, his advice on competition was more detailed and better than mine. But I had also noted the potential for turning Patch into a collaborator or a customer. So after tweeting a link to Howard’s post, I tweeted a link to my own.

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