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.

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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 →]

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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 →]

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We here, and many others, constantly push the value of online tools and resources for communicating with your stakeholders. But how do you know they are doing any good? For some ideas on how to measure that, PRWeb has a free online seminar that you, or your PR or comms people might like to check out.

If you’re still lugging a clip book around to demonstrate that your online news programs are successful, you might want to bring your strategy into the 21st century. With so many marketing channels available today – blogs, social media, SEO, and RSS feeds – you can’t continue to rely on measurement tools like press clippings.

Join guest speaker Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, for an hour long webinar on Measuring the Success of Your Online News Releases. Learn how you can:

* Use current analytics to measure your online news efforts
* Apply SEO results to improve your search rankings
* Measure the impact of your social media networks and blogs
* Build an effective PR plan and strategy using what you’ve learned

Event Date: October 21, 2009 2:00-3:00 PM EDT (New York)

Cost: This Webinar is FREE

I'm going to be tied up with a bunch of meetings over that time but a 7-8 am NZ time for it isn't too bad. if you decide to take it in, let me know how it goes.

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We are addicted to magic bullets to solve all our problems. We want pills and potions and surgery and in business it is best practise or some new fangled software that will change everything and make you hugely successful. But the need for hard work and persistence just wont go away. On the other hand, it can work. Facebook friends open door to new employment [Read more →]

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