29 Comments Add your own

• 1. Joe Rosemeyer  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:03 am

  Set up a Facebook account for your site, then sync your Twitter updates to your Facebook status. It puts your news stories on your friends’ homepage when they sign into Facebook.

• 2. Anonymous  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:06 am

  If you haven’t done this yet, do a search for each city in your DMA on twitter and follow everyone in your DMA… A lot of people will return the favor, especially since you’re a TV station.

• 3. Rob  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:18 am

  Link in my name … I’ve been using it for my station for a while now, we’re still working on some best practices, though I think you just gave me a great idea with using Twitter Feed and RSS Feeds from our site.

• 4. Brooks Bennett  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:22 am

  Conversely, you can have your site ingest content from your Twitter RSS feed…

  We use this to post emergency information from the field by sending a mobile message to Twitter and it automatically gets inserted into a bug on every page on our site.

  When the emergency is over, you simply login to your Twitter account and delete the tweet.

• 5. Kayla  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:33 am

  Our page is linked in my name. We don’t have set practices just yet, but I also use Twitterfeed, plus I try to Tweet out breaking news alerts, live video alerts, and poll questions. We’re not incredibly consistent with it, but we’re working on it.

  Also, check out the Philly Inquirer Twitter page (@PhillyInquirer) They do a great job of interacting with other Philly Twitterers about news, and ask interesting questions of their followers. There’s a great community there.

• 6. Matt Sokoloff  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:39 am

  We have two feeds set up; orlandosentinel and osbreakingnews. Our newsroom manually does both.

  The first one was our original one and for the most part is updated when we send out breaking news text alerts.

  Durring a major traffic accident on I-4 (40 car pile up) we were updating quite often which upset some of our followers, yet others loved it. We had a handful of people drop and some angry bloggers.

  We put out a couple of tweets asking what people preferred. In the end the newsroom set up a second breaking news one.

  600 plus followers on the first one, almost 100 on the second.

  The lesson we learned know why your users are signing up to follow you and stick to that need and don’t be afraid to ask what they want.

• 7. Gorman  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:50 am

  Have the recent hiccups with the overall Twitter service affected any of you adversely?

• 8. Jason DeRusha  |  May 30th, 2008 at 8:55 am

  I’ve been tweeting personally for awhile, mixing in personal tweets, asking for people to participate in stories. My name links to WCCO’s Breaking News twitter feed. We only post breaking stories. We don’t do a spam dump from an RSS feed. We follow everyone who follows us, and reply via direct message instead of the “@” reply method. It’s been fun.

• 9. Doug Perry  |  May 30th, 2008 at 9:16 am

  We’re using Twitter to provide updates for an ongoing trial. Our courtoom reporter has Twitterberry installed on his Blackberry and is sending an update when something happens in the trial (usually someone new taking the stand).

  We actually embedded the Twitter feed onto one of our pages so we get the page view and we aren’t sending viewers to the Twitter page.

  Some trial junkies have started following the pure Twitter feed.

• 10. Don Day  |  May 30th, 2008 at 9:16 am

  You guys rule - some great ideas here.

• 11. Jeff Bailey  |  May 30th, 2008 at 10:05 am

  I’ve dipped the station’s toes into Twitter recently with mixed results.

  One of our sites, which uses blog software, updates every time I make a post thanks to a plugin someone else wrote.

  However, our main site, which is hosted by WorldNow, can’t use Twitterfeed because the RSS feed from WN doesn’t have the XML field, and that’s what Twitterfeed uses to check what’s new and what’s not. In this case I have to manually update Twitter.

  We have a couple dozen followers even though the feed has had zero promotion.

• 12. tdc  |  May 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am

  quick!!! twitter everyone!!!

  angelina just had babies!!!

• 13. pickletoon  |  May 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am

  I would suggest not following too many people without a corresponding number of followers. Having an extremely large number of followed and only a few followers gives you the look of a spammer.

  Get your important keywords in the actual tweets and people will find you…you know, those important words like Boise, Nampa, Broncos, Craig and Taters

  And you will pick up a lot of followers from your on-page promotion.

  Some twitter utilities I use all the time

  twittermail for tweeting by email
  twitterbar for tweeting from your Firefox address bar
  and twhirl which is a desktop application that makes twittering from mulitple twitter ID’s a breeze

• 14. Anonymous  |  May 30th, 2008 at 2:30 pm

  I’m clean and have test results to back it up.

• 15. Rob  |  May 30th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

  @ Jeff Bailey - Thanks for the info about WN. I’ve been doing my Twitter updates manually and came up against the same WN brickwall when Don suggested it earlier today. Tried filtering it through Feed Digest, Feed Burner … I didn’t realize with WN we’d be Feed Screwed until I read your post.

• 16. Amanda E.  |  May 30th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

  @Jeff Baily and Rob

  Dudes, just parse and reformat your WorldNow feeds so you have the PubDate option inserted into the proper place in the feed (The story timestamp is included in the guid variable)

  Click my name for a quick and dirty example.

• 17. Don Day  |  May 30th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

  Sounds like we need to create a WorldNow support group…

• 18. Barney Lerten  |  May 30th, 2008 at 11:55 pm

  Don, I’d LOVE a World Now support group - actually created one once long ago in Yahoo groups but couldn’t figure out how to connect with other WN stations easily to get ball rolling. I’m tired of waiting for WN to get smart and create such a community.

  It could even be a forum, maybe via Yuku, like I created because KickApps (Yuku’s parent) is a WN partner.
  Whatcha think, Don, Jeff, Rob, Amanda? Or were you just joshing?

• 19. Amanda E.  |  May 31st, 2008 at 2:21 am

  @Barney

  Don’t look at me…I’m just an IT geek fascinated with the media world and full of crazy ideas and visions on the web, media and the know-how to implement them - not a web producer associated with any particular media group

  Only thing I know about WorldNow is what I’ve gathered from poking Rob’s site with a stick to figure out its limitations on adding widgets. Couldn’t even tell you what WorldNow Producer even looks like.

  Though I would suggest invading wiredjournalists dot com if you really want to set up a WorldNow group. They appear to have groups for news widgets, CMS’es, et cetera already - WorldNow would fit in over there.

  Back onto the Twitter subject - click my name, I have an actual WorldNow RSS feed being fed into Twitter (just a test site that may go away if I think of something new to use that account for of course).

• 20. Don Day  |  May 31st, 2008 at 11:08 am

  Barney -

  I was about half kidding. I\’m not a WN customer, but know lots of folks who are (and have heard lots of… misgivings). I\’d be happy to help point LR folks to something if the ball gets rolling.

  A good place to start might be Lost Remote\’s The Circuit

• 21. Rob  |  May 31st, 2008 at 12:54 pm

  @ Amanda - Thanks for the info … easier said than done on the parsing and the reformatting because I know enough to be dangerous when it comes to code writing … call me the Ted Stevens of web programmers. I’ll drop you a line.

  @ Don - Actually, using The Circuit might be a good place for WN users to discuss issues if it’s OK with you guys. I’ve been looking for a place where I could collaborate with other end users who face similar challenges.

  @ Barney - I’m up for it. If we can do it in The Circuit with these guys’ blessing great, if not I’m up for a neutral location where we can talk about stuff.

• 22. Amanda E.  |  May 31st, 2008 at 2:46 pm

  @Rob - Told ya you have lots of possibilities since you have access to a PHP5 server

  @Everyone else - Well I own webproducer dot tv and have access to a lot of bandwidth and space on a personal web server of mine. If y’all don’t want to use Circuit for a WN group, I’d be more than happy to setup and host a PHPbb board on that domain.

• 23. Safran  |  May 31st, 2008 at 5:13 pm

  How did the thread go this long without someone throwing a nutty about you not immediately monetizing this idea?

  Good work.

  I can’t believe I’m going to be the voice of caution here… but here goes: Twitter has been SO gnarly of late (yes, I said gnarly) that I would just keep that in mind. Not a reason not to do something. But they have a nasty habit of crashing at the busiest of news times. So when your audience becomes dependent on you — poof - there goes Twitter.

  And I’m one of its biggest fans. I certainly hope they’ll pull it out.

  It does raise the interesting question of what would happen if we were all dependent on a major system and it were to go away. Free, paid for or otherwise.

• 24. Amanda E.  |  June 1st, 2008 at 9:43 am

  Twitter’s architecture allegedly consists of one MySQL master database w/ two slaves and no hot spare failover - so its not surprising that it goes down so often.

• 25. Safran  |  June 1st, 2008 at 5:00 pm

  Indeed, their Tweets have exceeded their grasp.

• 26. Anonymous  |  June 2nd, 2008 at 2:15 am

  They need Tricker Tweets.

• 27. discreet_chaos  |  June 2nd, 2008 at 3:04 am

  Safran: I’d assume the monetization comes in the 140 character limit. To tell a complete story, you’d most likely point people back toward the website.

• 28. Rob  |  June 2nd, 2008 at 8:12 pm

  Dang it.

  Now every Tweet will read something like “Road Rage in the Valley leaves one dead brought to you by NAPA Auto Parts.” And I still have 67 characters left.

• 29. DTV Help  |  June 3rd, 2008 at 8:39 am

  Find some good television sites to link to you! It’s the best for search engine traffic.

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