Engage with your audiences instead of talking at them
As part of the prep for my presentation for this week’s o’Reilly Event on Publishing, I looked at how some old school media companies are using social media.
One of the funnier things that I ran across was how the New York Times was using twitter when compared to Guy Kawasaki with his Altop publishing company.
Funny when you look at it. The NYT has 68K+ followers and is following 80 people back, mostly NYT people. Guy has 60K+ followers and is following about that many back.
So the New York Times is bringing its legacy mindset to twitter – “we talk at our audiences with limited feedback capabilities.” I bet you they might have suggested a letter to the editor feature to the twitter folks 
Guy on the other hand is talking with his audience…a much better thing to do.
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February 14th, 2009 at 1:40 am
It’s no different with any site that is based in traditional media. I just wrote a post a month or so ago about my local news stations and how little engagement there is. It’s very frustrating, really.
It’s no wonder traditional media is quickly losing it’s foothold, whatever hold they still have. Without engagement, all media is doomed.
Good post Francois.
You validate MY opinion. I knew I liked you. hehe
February 16th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Nice post Francois. I like the idea of conversation and think tha lot of companies are getting it wrong not only with the social media sites but also with their own web sites – they try to hide any contact information from their customers hoping that this way they will save movey.
I think the trend we had in the past 10 years to “deflect” people from our employees was the wrong approach and now we see prove for that in the socual media.