Automatic updates get clustered in Facebook News Feed

I have noted before that journalists and news organizations should be conversational in social media. Here’s another reason why: Facebook clusters autofeeds together in its News Feed, which means that fewer people might see them and click your links.

In a comment on my post about syncing Facebook and Twitter accounts, Graham Gudgin wrote:

But I think there’s another reason for doing this that you may have overlooked. Facebook seems to have recently “downgraded” status updates coming from other applications. For example, people who have set up their blogs to auto-post to Facebook have been reporting that, whereas they used to get plenty of comments on Facebook about their updates, they’re not getting them to the same degree. It is thought that Facebook is trying to encourage people engaging ON Facebook, so is not making these auto-updates from other applications quite as visible as before.

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Social media (mostly Twitter) resources for journalists

Here are resources to help journalists using Twitter and other social media.

For the last few months, as I’ve been visiting Journal Register Co. newsrooms and blogging more tips for journalists using social media, I have been meaning to update my Twitter resources for journalists (now more than a year old). After today’s news that a new Journal Register subsidiary, Digital First Media, will start managing MediaNews Group, I suddenly got messages that I was being followed by lots of MediaNews journalists, particularly from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

I don’t know yet what my specific role will be in working with MediaNews, but I think it’s safe to say I will remain a leader in social media news for JRC, with likely roles in leading social media use for Digital First and/or MediaNews. So maybe I should introduce myself to my new colleagues with a list of resources for journalists using social media.

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Confessions (strategies) of a branded journalist (or a journalist with a reputation, if you prefer)

Update: Joe Grimm is leading a workshop on building your personal brand.

Much of last week’s discussion of journalistic “branding” focused on whether journalists should engage in something that sounds so much like marketing.

In this post, I want to address how to develop a brand as a journalist (call it a reputation, if branding makes you uncomfortable). Toward the end of this post, I will discuss whether we should call this branding, but I’d like to focus initially on how to do it. I’ll make this point now: The opposite of brand is generic. And no one looking for a job wants to be generic, unless your strategy is to land a low-paying job.

At the risk of boasting (an area in which I am not risk-averse, but more on that later), I will discuss here specifically how I built my own brand as a journalist, and through my experience, how you can build your brand.

I will deliberately avoid repeating here any discussion from last week about Gene Weingarten’s humorous branding advice to journalism student Leslie Trew Magraw or the responses to him (including mine). This is about advice, not arguing. However, Gene is continuing that discussion in his weekly Chatological Humor chat today.

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A public-relations rookie’s handling of the TBD launch

In the days of my callow youth, I remember referring to journalists who ventured into public relations as having “sold out.”

Never mind that many in PR toiled for pay as low as many journalists. Never mind that PR ethics also insist on getting the facts right. We like our world simplified into us and them, and to a journalist, the PR world was always them: trying to keep us from the story, trying to manipulate us somehow.

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Don’t bet that Google Me won’t succeed in social media

Bloggers, including this one obviously, are abuzz about Google Me, the Facebook-killer-wannabe rumored to be under development in the Googleplex.

Of course, the naysayers are pointing out that Google has flopped with two ballyhooed social tools in the past year: Wave, which was launched with lots of hype and anticipation, and Buzz, which snuck up on the market, generated a lot of brief (yeah) buzz, then virtually vanished from the social conversation.

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Resources for journalists using Twitter

Journalism professor Julie Posetti has compiled a helpful analysis of the use of Twitter by political journalists in Australia, The #Spill Effect: Twitter Hashtags and Australian Political Journalism.

I highly recommend reading it and will deliberately not quote or summarize it extensively here because you should just read it. I will. though, note her summary of the various ways political journalists in Australia are using Twitter:

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