http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/101882/What-Is-Journalisms-Place-in-Social-Media.aspx

We are working on the infrastructure to help publishers do this. Gregg Freishtat, CEO Vertical Acuity.

It’s the same issue I have with the term “curation” – it’s a vital concept that we in journalism need to understand and practice, but the word is in real danger of being co-opted by marketing types and thus losing its punch.

Thanks for the summary of conference. I would like to politely challenge your sense that engagement is a buzzword or marketing speak. I might suggest that engagement feels like a buzzword because it’s value has been debased not because the strategy is without value but because we’re not really doing engagement.

Certainly, I’ve heard a lot of journalists refer to engagement as marketing. One former colleague believed that as blogs editor my role was little more than editorial marketing, pushing our content to bloggers or folks on Twitter.

Real engagement, with journalists interacting with their audiences, is good in terms of the democratic role of journalism and good for helping us create a new model for sustainable journalism businesses. Since I started blogging in 2004 (then for the BBC), I realised that there was a possibility to re-engage audiences in civic discussions. That’s important.

From a business standpoint, poor loyalty metrics (pages per session, dwell time and average time per user per month) are making it hard for newspapers to replace declining print revenues with digital revenues. An engaged audience is a loyal audience, but journalists have to be part of that engagement. We can’t outsource it automated feeds so that Twitter just becomes RSS 2.0, and we can’t or shouldn’t outsource it community engagement managers. (I think they have a role but not one where only they are responsible for engaging with audiences.)

There is a huge opportunity here, but journalists seeing it as ’someone else’s job’ and editors all too willing to let marketing departments own engagement are making sure that engagement becomes another bit of marketing double-speak. The problem lies not in the term but in the practice.

Thanks for the summary of conference. I would like to politely challenge your sense that engagement is a buzzword or marketing speak. I might suggest that engagement feels like a buzzword because it’s value has been debased not because the strategy is without value but because we’re not really doing engagement.

Certainly, I’ve heard a lot of journalists refer to engagement as marketing. One former colleague believed that as blogs editor my role was little more than editorial marketing, pushing our content to bloggers or folks on Twitter.

Real engagement, with journalists interacting with their audiences, is good in terms of the democratic role of journalism and good for helping us create a new model for sustainable journalism businesses. Since I started blogging in 2004 (then for the BBC), I realised that there was a possibility to re-engage audiences in civic discussions. That’s important.

From a business standpoint, poor loyalty metrics (pages per session, dwell time and average time per user per month) are making it hard for newspapers to replace declining print revenues with digital revenues. An engaged audience is a loyal audience, but journalists have to be part of that engagement. We can’t outsource it automated feeds so that Twitter just becomes RSS 2.0, and we can’t or shouldn’t outsource it community engagement managers. (I think they have a role but not one where only they are responsible for engaging with audiences.)

There is a huge opportunity here, but journalists seeing it as ’someone else’s job’ and editors all too willing to let marketing departments own engagement are making sure that engagement becomes another bit of marketing double-speak. The problem lies not in the term but in the practice.