While brainstorming a topic for my news analysis assignment for my Web Publishing class, I thought about setting up my website, blog and social media accounts for the class. How should you use each effectively, as an individual tool, while still maintaining brand continuity? Facebook’s different than Twitter, and blogs are different from both, so what should be your goal when using each?
I interviewed LA photographer Francis Specker about how he uses blogs and social media to get his name out there and build a successful brand. In addition to answering all of my questions, he also sent me a link to this article from The Next Web: “How blogging gives student journalists an edge in the job market.”
The article interviews several students who have found success by starting blogs and producing their own hyperlocal reporting and content. By keeping up with their sites and experimenting with multimedia, they’ve gotten attention, made invaluable contacts, and become great information resources for their viewers. One student, for example, live blogged the 2010 UK elections, with photos, video and audio, updated constantly to keep viewers connected.
Francis made an interesting point in his interview. His blog, website and social media accounts are about more than just promoting himself as someone with a service to offer–he uses them to connect with people and establish himself as someone with knowledge to share, as someone clients can trust.
Stand tuned for the full story, with more from Francis, and other journalists on how they harness the web.
Like television journalists are already aware, blogging catapults traditional print journalists into the limelight because like your source says, it sets individuals up to be information go-to people. Print journalists are no longer behind the shield of the big name on the masthead. With their own blog, each is front and center I think even more so than having a story published on 1A. Why? The 1A story may create buzz for a day but then it gets lost in the din of the other stories in that issue for the day. On a blog, each post becomes an easy-to-access collection that as a group has more power than any one individual piece. Information is truly powerful when you know how to harness it for the good of your career and the betterment of knowledge to a mass audience. I can’t wait to read the rest of your story.