Is bad social networking better than none at all?

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the ?

A friend forwarded a blog post today that outlined the 10 reasons companies should not join Twitter (My favorite: If you have to wait for your legal department to vet your 140-character Tweet). The author makes great points - with humor. But it begs the question for me whether it is better to network badly than not to network at all? I think the question is yes, it's better to be out there.

Newspapers are going the way of the woolly mammoth for many reasons, but two of the big ones are that they a) waited too long to realize and capitalize on the power of the internet and b) now view social networking as something that goes on external to them - they host the party but don't actually attend.

In part, newspapers are hampered by their history. A bedrock principle has always been you don't mess with people's newspapers. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Any changes to columns or designs were - and still are - subject to vetting and testing procedures that would do the FDA proud. The process can take months - or longer for a major redesign - meaning reacting quickly to changing needs is all but impossible.

In 1999, the American Journalism Review wrote of the digital media revolution:

If newspaper executives haven't fully grasped the extent of changes in communication or the opportunity the Web represents, then the story of online newspapering is as much about culture as business. Executives often seem handicapped by an almost mythic fear that their Old Media franchises will be devoured by their dot-com offspring. They forget how much more pleasant it is to be eaten by your own child than by someone else's. Web-centric companies (or Net-native, as they are also called) are at home in the language of interactivity that Web-enabled companies are still stumbling to learn; many have corporate metabolisms that enable them to move more quickly and imaginatively than Old Media organizations.

In 2006, the same publication didn't find things much different:

Stephen Gray, managing director of Newspaper Next, says the newspaper industry is exhibiting classic signs of an industry shaken by seismic changes, often competition from new technologies. "The newspaper industry, like others that have experienced this problem, needs to learn some quite counterintuitive ways of responding," he says. "One of the things we need to be clear about in our project is the focus of Newspaper Next is how to create innovation outside of our core product. We have as an industry really little record of innovation."

Not for nothing, but that was a full 7 years after newspapers decided they needed to change the identification of their product from the platform it was delivered on to the information at its core.

The newspaper culture does not allow for trying something out and changing it or discarding it completely if it doesn't work out. But the digital information environments - from the web to the tweet - demand change and - more importantly - constant vigilance to identify changing needs quickly.

The digital consumer is an infant - we want what we want right now and if we don't get it, we're going to pee on that nice hand-made linen over there. This is in contrast to the newspaper reader who may have felt vaguely disappointed in the paper so he wrote a letter to the editor and then read the paper faithfully every day to see if his suggestions had been implemented yet.

Fortunately for the digital consumer (and unfortunately for newspapers) there are a lot of places to go out there that are going to pick you up and coddle you, catering to your immediate wants and needs. This isn't to say they're going to be the BEST mom, but they're going to be the most responsive.

In this regard, the blogger mentioned earlier is right. You cannot take a week to vet a message. But rather than use that as an reason NOT to be on Twitter, it's time to change the dynamic in the industry itself.

Newspaper tweets are (for the most part) like reading an index of the paper. The photo at right is the Twitter page of one of the nation's largest metro dailies. And this is not unusual. You find the exact same bland recitation of what we're writing about on the Twitter pages of most newspapers - large and small. Why is it that there's no real interactivity? Why is it we're not engaging our readers? Why aren't we asking our readers to be our eyes and ears out there?

The answer is pretty simple: because automated systems can't do that - at least not yet. It's easy to push headlines out the door to any different number of publishing platforms. But it is much harder to monitor web sites, blogs, Twitter and whatever is next to see what people are talking about, to gather information from a variety of sources, to decide what kinds of questions you want to stir the pot with. That takes thought; that takes effort.

In the constant rush to save money, newspapers are succeeding in accomplishing what no other competitor could actually have done. They are making themselves irrelevant. The industry waited too long to react to the changes in the mediascape. Some, like Gannett, waited far too long because the payback was not readily apparent. Now that the boat has all but sailed, the industry is trying desperately to catch up by giving lip service to user interaction, crowd sourcing and citizen journalism.

• Pumping out a tweet digest of headlines is not engaging.
• Creating blogs for moms, pets, artists, entertainment and then largely abandoning them to fend for themselves rather than mining them for the contacts, story ideas and news tips they would certainly produce is not interacting.
• Establishing a presence on YouTube and Facebook but not taking the time to update is not compelling. (A newspaper Facebook page I looked at today said in its status that it was "considering its endorsements in this election season.")
  
• Having a website that parrots the newspaper with little increased depth or interactivity to drive readership between the two is not working.

Unfortunately, there are more that look like this than are really using a world of new digital tools to build readers involvement with their products (note to newspapers: this is not the same thing as inviting readers to send in photos of their children and putting those on a community page!).

So to those who fail all 10 of the measures to determine if you should be a twit, it's time (maybe past time) to use your failure instead of hiding behind it.

• Listen to your readers. See what they are tweeting about. You might get some story ideas.
• Check out some of your local Facebook pages - what stories are they talking about, what issues are tripping their triggers. There's a real good bet that the sewer easement isn't among them.
• Generate buzz for your ideas and sources for stories by throwing them out on as many social media sites as you can. Why keep calling the same old contacts when there is an entire world of new voices just a few clicks away.
• Pay attention to what you get back. No one likes to be asked to contribute if those contributions are never used. Find ways to use the info you get back - chances are if you actually read it, you would want to anyway.
• Start updating your digital persona. Its embarassing for a newspaper site to have a six month old status on FB. Would there be any reason at all for your potential readers to go back there? Would you?
  

Newspapers: start wrapping your head around the fact that this is your new home. You haven't completely moved in yet, but if you want to land comfortably you'd better get busy getting to know your neighbors and making new friends.

And don't worry if each message, each tweet, each blog post isn't perfect the first time out. They won't be set in stone, but that's OK because 10 seconds from now no one will remember.

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