COMMENTS
Isn't the first step to getting the entire organization involved and trained in social media hiring someone to do that? I think that this is the right step.
I agree with Tim. Using social media is a huge change for an organization like the Times. The in-house guru will not only need to train people on how inbound media works, she will also need to convert a lot of naysayers.
I agree. Hiring a guru will not change the behavior of all people within the company. And how sad that her first post asked how @nytimes should be using Twitter. She's the guru. Shouldn't that already be known?
I concur. I believe the newspaper industry as a whole is doomed unless they learn to:
1. Write for the web - writing articles that allow for quick scanning, bullet points, links to referenced sites, and of course keyword rich content.
2. Promoting news on social media sites. For them not to, I feel is unacceptable - especially considering they are a main source of providing information via technology.
Sad to think that if the NYT can't get it right, what their future holds.
I have to agree and disagree with this post. Hiring a "Social Media Expert" can be likened to hiring a "Webmaster" with today's cross-functional web team needs - Having just one person focused on social media and inbound marketing is not enough, it does need to be a company wide effort. However, I do feel a role is needed to help guide the company with its social-media strategy and be accountable for demonstrating its ROI.
Upon searching for "NYT_JenPreston" no one comes up in the searches. Another article has her as having "protected updates". What good is having a Twitter account if no one can read your updates or subscribe to them?
Did you contact Jen Preston before you wrote this post to get her side and the background story before critiquing this action by NYT? That would have been easy enough to do.
Your points are good (Nos. 1-3) but what evidence do you have that NYT is not already in the process of doing this? Isn't that basically what the memo said she was hired to do, to manage that process?
The Valleywag blog post was basically a rant...like someone who had had WAY too much caffeine...not a very credible source to base a criticism of a respected newspaper.
It's sane to assign someone to manage the social media process. If you have a blog, you have to have a blog policy, and somebody's got to put that together. It doesn't follow that that person would prevent participation from others.
Be careful, there, with someone else's professional reputation. You can make your points without resorting to that.
I have to disagree with you on this post Mike. You said an entire company needs to be trained on social media, but someone still has to organize such training, and it sounds like that is what she will be doing. And the very last line even states "because of course we all need to figure this out together." I don't think there's anything wrong with hiring one person to make sure everyone else in the company knows how to get the best out of social media.
I agree with Robert Sansom's comment, as I am in a similar situation of "guiding" the company towards broader use of Social Media.
I don't know if this is the case with the Times, however, in my experience, many companies hire a "point person" (maybe "expert" is the wrong word) for a reason.
There NEEDS to be a person who is charged with it in organizational structures; I think assuming how an organization is going to use someone is a little presumptuous.
Although we can all sit here and cast stones (Lord knows I have at one point or another), it's really hard to move an existing organization filled with people who have been doing the same thing for decades. It's hard to turn around the aircraft carrier that is a large corporation.
Interesting post. I have to admit the newspapers have been lagging behind when it comes to the application of social media and intergrating it properly into their business. However, I don't think we should get too down on the title for hiring one editor. If she trains the others and they use her knowledge this will be a good thing. The sooner the newspapers start to address social media properly and engage in the conversations rather than using a one-way strategy they will begin to make real money and start to thrive again.
Like many of the commenters above, I disagree and agree with your post.
Hiring a social media expert solely to be the one person performing SM for the organization is a failure. But, hiring an expert to gather information and train the rest of the staff on how to best utilize social media is a very, very smart idea.
Change doesn't happen overnight for a huge organization like the NYT. Hiring an expert helps them feel more at ease with getting everyone at NYT involved with social media.
I have been following Hotspot posts for a while, and many of them are fascinating to me. However, this post and some other posts seem to be not as well thought out or even bias at times. That brings a question - blog is great for SEO, but how much time you would spend to ensure your posts are well thought out and the information in your posts are accurate? That's one downside of producing so much content so quickly.
I work at a non-profit, and in this world if you know a little bit about something you are suddenly the guru of all of it, hence my "Queen of Removing Paper Jams" title. I think it's dangerous to title the NYT position so specifically because the semantics of it indicate that it's a stand-alone piece of strategy, and I think Mike's point is that it should be all inclusive in order to succeed. If training others is part of the job, I can see where a gut reaction might be, "Well sure, she can Facebook, but what does she know about my job?" (esp. to Jeremiah's point about how hard it can be to move people). On the other hand, maybe she's already thought of all of these things and will go in there and turn the place on its ear.
Time to go remove another paper jam.
Interesting this one. The first step for any organisation is surely to bring in someone with an understanding of inbound marketing and social media to help spearhead the company's efforts.
True, those efforts should ideally include the points made in the post but there's nothing to say that this won't be the case with the NYT.
Indeed, quoting from the NYT memo, the remit of the post is to: "work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond."
Sounds like a reasonable start to me - and probably not unlike the intentions of many organisations who are turning to the inbound marketing experts Hubspot ...
Personally, I'm happy to see them making an effort - we'll see how it goes.
First, I think that hiring a primary social media person for a communications enterprise as large and complex as the NYT is a good move. These people aren't going to figure it out across the board without some internal guidance. On that note, I can't imagine for a second that she is going to be the sole person responsible for their SM efforts; that's an absurd thing to assume.
Second, if the NYT starts writing articles to be "keyword rich," instead of just writing articles in good journalistic style, I'm going to stop reading. Keep keywords out of journalism, it's not the venue for SEO taint. SEO tactics can be employed in other ways that will not cheapen the publication.
One correction to point out in this posting: NYT is not hiring a "social media expert", they are hiring a "Social media EDITOR". Noting this small difference puts the context of the NYT press release into a different light. The traditional role of an editor at a publishing house is to guide the direction for the relevant content.
Imagine if the NYT had no sports editor? We wouldn't think twice if NYT was bringing on a sports editor. We would embrace them with open arms and anticipate how much better the NYT will be. We would look to the sports editor to guide the publication in how best to engage us the readers when reading about our favorite teams.
Therefore, isn't a Social Media Editor just as important?
And what was her first tweet? She asked the community what the NYT should be doing. http://bit.ly/16ZkeE I think it was a good move and I'm anxious to see how she sculpts the role.
The biggest point that makes so much sense is that companies need to embrace social media and make it part of all their employees' work lives as they represent the company. That is the new thinking and not the old thinking, which the Times is currently employing with this. Nice post.
My company did hire for a short time an SEO/social marketing expert. To be completely honest, we got better results when I struck out on my own having absolutely NO idea what I was doing.
I have found that using resources like Hubspot, watching free webinars/videos, and asking friends and co-workers for thoughts and ideas has actually gotten significantly better results (for free) than hiring a consultant ever did.
Thanks everyone. This is one of those articles where the value is in the discussion, you are all bringing up interesting points.
@michael grover - aren't her tweets protected? How did you know what she tweeted?
I think that each person in the company should have their own accounts. Be proud of where you work.
What do you think about @google? They have over 1,000,000 followers and we all want to know what they say. I still wish there were more people that worked at GOOG that you could "follow" and listen to, like Matt Cutts
I actually think this is progressive thinking on the part of this major news publication to bring on a Social Media Expert. Now as a Social Media Consultant myself, one of my key roles is training, so it is entirely possible that this person will be charged with the task of building awareness and educating other staff and departments on the importance of understanding Social Media Marketing in 2009 and beyond. If they didn't have the "in-house" experience to take their Social Media efforts to the next level, then the natural next step is to hire someone to spearhead the initiative.
While we're not entirely sure what this person will be doing, I do think it will be an editorial focus. You're assuming they are hiring someone to teach people social media at NYT. NYT already has a considerable amount of staff who are using Twitter and other forms of social media for promotion of themselves and NYT content. The position is more likely a reaction to Bloomberg and Newscorp's policies and philosophies in regards to proper usage social media tools. While the social media editor position is largely undefined for now, NYT eventually needed someone to oversee social media ops in the newsroom. While your points regarding training journalists in SEO are valid, as is the notion that there are far too many "experts" poisoning people's heads, you approached this topic from the point of view of a marketer, and not a journalist. While every journalist in this age needs to be versed in the ways of social media and SEO, NYT and other publications also need uniformity and someone to shepherd the herd in a time when information is being pumped out everywhere across multiple platforms. For a good example on how a newspaper deals with social media amongst their reporters, check out Chicago Tribune's Twitter Taxonomy.
I don't agree with this post. I love Hubspot, but honestly, what would you want an organization like the NYT to do? There has to be one person, or at least a small group of individuals to help facilitate this sort of paradigm shift within their organization. If not, there could be all sorts of craziness coming out of that place that is misdirected.
I agree, you should educate your company on things like SEO and social media, but for a media giants such as the NYT, this sort of "process" is inevitable.
I think your comments might be a little disingenuous to NYT. A company has to start somewhere and by appointing an 'expert' it demonstrates that they want to take this seriously.
I agree that it then needs to become a part of the NYT culture and shared by other employees but you do need a champion. People don't suddenly wake up and think, wow I'm ready to embrace social media! They need someone to push them along and motivate them to get involved.
It is the same with eCommerce in general - a Head of eCommerce will join a company that has no integrated eCommerce strategy and their primary internal task is to get buy-in from key departments. If you don't have a passionate person driving this, nothing happens.
So i think you should recognise that NYT has taken a positive step and encourage rather than criticise. Social media 'experts' are all too quick to criticise which amazes me, we should be encouraging brands to succeed because the more high profile companies that achieve, the greater the impetus for the rest of the market.
I am a big fan of Hubspot blogs but this post is off mark, in my opinion.
I think your main point is on mark-- social media tools and tactics should be part of everyone's job. However, I think the path to getting there requires someone internally to galvanize the effort-- namely, someone needs to play the role as 'expert' internally to drive strategy, & best practices. This won't happen on it's own. Over time, there will be no need for such a person as the market matures and enterprises incorporate social technologies as a core part of the business, but until that time, an internal 'galvanizer' is key.
As usual, a positive and courageous step forward by a big company is rewarded with ... snark. Mike, you're off-base on this one. The NYT took a brave step, and they should be applauded and supported.
I agree with the bulk of the commentary here. I would just like to add a slight twist.
My belief is that within 5-10 years, social media is going to be a part of the basic skillset that anyone who communicates for a living will have to have a decent amount of knowledge and expertise in.
There is precedent for this turn of events, of course. Roughly 10 or so years ago, you still had designers who were exclusively "print people" and others who were exclusively "Web people." Nowadays, it's almost unthinkable for anyone who works in the graphics communications field to pigeonhole him/herself as "Print-only" or "Web-only". Yes, there are people who make a living specialized in one area or another, but for all intents and purposes, they all work as Designers, period.
Social media will go in the same direction. Yes, you'll have areas of specialization, but the day of "one or the other" is rapidly diminishing.
And just so nobody thinks I'm just knocking on this for no particular reason, far from it. I'm someone who has made his living as a "social media specialist" and am already preparing for the days where that won't matter quite as much.
cheers,
Michael
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Michael E. Rubin
847-370-3421 // merubin@gmail.com // twitter: merubin
I think everyone needs to read this follow-up on the huffingtonpost. Corroborates @mvolpe 's point: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-palevsky/nytimes-social-media-edit_b_208405.html
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Good: hiring someone w/this title
Bad: hiring someone w/this title & expecting them to be the funnel for all messaging.
I have been working with CEO's for almost 4 years on social media & you can't have buy-in from the bottom up (enthusiasm & some influence, yes), you have it from the top down.
Once you can get in front of the actual decision makers, I have found it is less like pulling teeth & more like spreadin' buttah. ;)
-jen
@jenharris09