Rob Paterson's blog has a fascinating post about a St Louis public TV station apparently getting to grips with the role of old media in the world of new media. KETC’s H1N1 Blog - FluPortal.org

When the mortgage crisis began, KETC experimented with blogging as “a way to get information out to the community” during critical situations, Berenc said. The station’s mortgage-crisis blog (which is still up and running) “proved highly successful,” she told me. It generated lots of audience comments and drove traffic to KETC’s site.

So when swine flu emerged, Berenc said it was a no-brainer to create another blog “as part of an overall strategy to connect people to information on-air, online, and in the community.” To get started, KETC “convened a group of community organizations that have a stake in H1N1,” she explained, to solicit advice on “how to connect people to trusted resources.” The group included people from the city and county health departments, regional school districts, the United Way of Greater St. Louis, and the American Red Cross, St. Louis Area Chapter. Using their input, the station created a Wordpress site and started a group blog. KETC’s web coordinator vets posts written by staff, interns, and the Red Cross.

Although KETC doesn’t have stats yet on the success of the H1N1 blog, Berenc assured me that the station will continue it until H1N1 is no longer an issue. She believes the H1N1 page as a whole is “a prime example of what happens when public media organizations collaborate with trusted partners — the community wins.”

At the EYC conference in Wellington last month we had a couple of questions about how expert or authentic organisations working in specific social areas could be sure that the community is getting good information rather that being hijacked through Twitter or Facebook into donating to either outright scams or well-meaning, but inappropriate or ineffective actions.

This might be the answer. Of course, it will mean that your local media people wake up to their role online, which may take a while yet.

How effective are your local media in

1. using online technologies to improve the quality of information they publish and
2. using your expoert and informed resources to do that?

Comments open.

Share this post

Hide Sites

Its very easy to get enthused about new technologies and start new things all over the internet. But when they don't work out as well as you hope or you lose interest or the enthusiast leaves the organisation, the litter of your work can have downsides.

First, you may be represented by information that is out of date or just wrong, and second, those social networking tools may be open to abuse by others. Facebook Hijacking Points To Social-Networking Holes [Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites

Pressure to reduce travel costs and the carbon footprint associated with flying to meetings led scientists from the Australasian Conversation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG) to trial running a conservation planning process using free web tools.

Focused on saving the endangered mala, which inhabits Australia's dry centre, an online workshop process unrolled over a two month period from early August 2009.

The online workshop mimics a similar process typically run using face-to-face meetings. Just as important as the technology (which included Google Sites, Vyew web conferencing and Skype) is adapting processes and activities from the face-to-face world, and mentoring around technology uptake for the participants.

Caroline Lees, co-convenor of CBSG Australasia, has generously agreed to talk about the workshop process, including sharing some early lessons and reflections. Although this case study is about a conservation project the lessons have very broad applicability to any organisation wanting to trial online collaboration at low or no cost.

If you’d like to find out how to make effective use of online tools, come along to an online seminar. Find out more about webinar.

Webinar details:

2pm Monday 23 November
RSVP required. Use the contact form or email me and I will send you login information.

[Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites

Some days you can get to see that something big has shifted in the way the world works. Twenty years ago it was the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Berlin Wall and when things happen on that scale seeing the change is easy, but sometimes the change needs to seek you out and slap you awake. Like this. I’ve Got Nothing: Crowdsourced Song Created by YouTubers [Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites

We don't ride in horse buggies any more, we don't use hurricane lamps to light our kids homework and nobody appears to find that a problem, but for some reason a new technology like the Internet or txt messaging creates all kinds of moral panic and dark warnings that we are on the glide-path to hell unless we revert to our previous behaviours of, well, being couch potatoes.

Fortunately, we are collectively not only smarter than that, we are vastly more adaptable than we are given credit for by the guardians of the status quo. Technology hasn't made us hermits: study [Read more →]

Share this post

Hide Sites