A social-media guide for public broadcasters targets the skeptical and the ambitious » Nieman Journalism Lab
Even though NPR and PBS have social media policies (while other news organizations choose not to and still others debate their value), hundreds of independent public broadcasters have shared no common resource for social-media best practices.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting wants to fill that gap with a newly released social media handbook for stations, which is hosted at the National Center for Media Engagement website. CPB commissioned the marketing firm iStrategy Labs to write a guide that targets a broad audience: not just the stations who need guidance, but the stations who still need convincing of social media’s value.
“There remains some hesitancy in public media toward embracing social media,” said Daniel McCoy, CPB’s product manager of media strategies. “This is a resource that we knew that stations would trust coming from CPB and NCME.”
In other words, there are a lot of social-media guides out there but none that speak directly to public media’s core values. And for many small stations, social media can be a hard sell when the news director is also the morning anchor and the metro reporter.
The handbook includes fill-in-the-blank templates for creating social media campaigns, with sections for goals, staffing, tactics, and measurement. It includes suggestions for a station’s “voice” on social media (be human, establish traditions, call for action). It includes case studies conducted over the past year that demonstrate social-media success — KQED’s one-day Groupon deal for membership, HoustonPBS’s Bon AppeTweet campaign, KPBS Radio’s, erm, lively Facebook discussion about its format change.