Paul Balcerak: Don’t just ask for news material via social media – offer help
March 18th, 2010Posted by Laura Oliver in Editors' pick, Social media and blogging
Assistant editor of new media for a local news publisher in the US, Paul Balcerak looks at how a bread-and-butter bad weather story can use social media for more than just crowdsourcing images from readers by sharing information and answering their questions:
Essentially, I was trying to flip the information flow around (again), by asking, “What do you need?” and hyperfocus it down to an individual level. To me, that’s what social media is anyway: connecting one-to-one to help each other. If even just one person @ replied me and asked about where to find a place with power and free WiFi, that’s one person helped (and I’m betting a few more people would’ve been interested in the information anyway).
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