The true measure of social success

I’ve heard many times now statistics about how social media sites are/aren’t driving traffic to the main website. This misses the point. The goal of being social is to be social. Success comes, not from pushing people to the site and then converting them into viewers (damn near impossible) but from their engagement with individual stories. A digital media honcho was kind enough to point out to me an astonishing finding: people were commenting, often ten times as often, on a story posted on his station’s Facebook page as opposed to the “official” page. That’s engagement, and this is our real goal. The longterm goal is to build trust. You do this by being a provocateur – one who puts out ideas for discussion. If 300 people are discussing your story on Facebook, that’s tremendous. You’ve sparked something. You’ve done an act of journalism in your community. Be social, not because it’s a marketing tool, but because it’s how you earn your part of the conversation of news.