I love Chron.com. It’s a terrific site. But they’ve created a frustrating Twitter experience that I can’t help but use as an example. The concept is great: create a Twitter account dedicated to covering the incoming hurricane. But each Twitter post is a headline, a truncated sentence and a link to the original story on Chron.com. They’re just copy-pasting stories and press releases. In many of the “tweets,” you get very little information out of the headline and the first few words. Even worse, the important information is cut off…
But the value of Twitter in this circumstance is it delivers self-contained news updates to mobile users who may or may not be able to access to the site — and probably don’t have the time, as many folks are getting ready to evacuate. So this is doing more damage than it’s worth. Lesson: when using different forms of delivery, you need to tailor the content for that particular platform. This is just Twitter shovelware.
