Is Paid Journalism Dead?

While this is not really real estate related it has been on my mind for the last couple of weeks. With Iran and China in the news and the main source being social media it gave me furiously to think.

First print journalism.

I don’t want to confuse paid journalism with advertising or marketing. They are a separate topic and as far as I can see alive and well. The old journalism model was that local media (read newspaper or TV station) would have a number of journalists full and part time on the payroll to create copy for fill or feature stories. These people got paid by the amount of their content that was actually used or they were on salary.

Fast forward to 2009. With the upswing in social media usage information is being reported by the participants directly to the people. Examples are Iran where the only reporting we were getting in the west was via social media as normal means were being blocked. To make matters worse the supposed independent press was reporting what the government wanted them to (gee sounds like CNN and pre-war Iraq). Regular media sources picked up the social media content and reported on it. In local news Doctor Mariannette Miller-Meeks reported that Congressman Loebsack was sleeping during a hearing on Capital Hill. Didn’t see any photos so I don’t know if that was picked up by the local media. One more example was pavement buckling and causing lane closures on I-380 this info was out via social media far faster than the print media, in fact it beat the radio reporting (again social media via cell phone) but not by much.

Next video journalism.

Well let’s not repeat same premise this time with cell phones creating video and a few web cams connected to laptops we get on the spot reporting in places that no paid journalist to get to and may not be able to get out of if they did. With video’s you don’t necessarily need corroborating sources. You have the pictures.

The media has fallen into disrepute since Tom Browkaw insisted on pressing a story strictly due to his partisan politics that repeatedly was shown to be false. He did finally get canned over it but Geraldo has more respect as a journalist today.

So back to the top “Is paid journalism dead?” I think it depends on what the media outlets decide is best for them. Currently with a few computer geeks (or just college kids) they have access to free current content like never before. What are they going to do? They are already shedding jobs like my cat sheds hair. Their profit margins have dropped to historic lows and they are struggling to survive. If the real estate market ever figures a good way to advertise open houses and the buying public starts looking to that as the primary resource then newspapers are dead. Too much of their income is derived from that single source and I don’t believe they will survive if it leaves like the rest of their advertising.

Now every time someone brings up this subject you can spot the paid journalists in the comments saying that all this free news is really created by paid journalists and we can’t survive without them. That is plainly a bulls**t. Most of today’s new reporters don’t produce anything that the people can’t and don’t get elsewhere and without the “It is not my job to report the news but to shape public opinion.” I really wish I could remember which famous journalist I first heard make that statement. Now everybody knows it and accepts it as a fact of life.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the first print or video media source that goes “All social media reporting”. I think someone could do this and make a profitable business of it. That being said I don’t think the current media sources will even consider this alternative, it will have to be an innovator like the early Ted Turner or Howard Hughes.

That being said something starting to approach this is being started. It’s being call Hyper-Local Marketing and the folks at DOMUS assisted by the ground force of the Network Communications folks (that’s us!!!) have started creating sites that are coordinating local content. Is this the wave of the future??? Only time will tell.

If you followed my last post and set up a TweetLater and a Twollo account you are going to end up with too many people you are following and/or not enough followers and you will still miss a lot of the people in your local market. Here are two maintenance applications that help fix these problems.

Not everyone you follow is going to follow you back. It’s a fact of life so get used to it. So we have to clean up after our followings. I guess you can call this cleaning the bird cage. You don’t have to do this very often but once a week would probably be a good idea.

NOTE: Don’t do this step right after you use FlashTweet (the next step).

I use an application called TwitterKarma http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/ This is another application that wants your Twitter username and password. Once you log in (it may take a while depending on how many followers and following you have) go to Show: Only Followers. This is to clean up any followers that TweetLater missed. Select check all and bulk follow at the bottom of the page. Next go to Show: Only Following. These are the folks that you followed that have not followed you. Go to the bottom of the page and select check all. There are some people you follow that you do not care if they follow you back. You want to follow their tweets. An example would be the a local TV or radio station or maybe one of the local real estate companies or agents. Go through your list and uncheck anyone you want to follow regardless of whether they follow you. If you have too many to unclick the use the unclick all and click on those you want to unfollow. Then click on Bulk Unfollow at the bottom of the page.

This should clean up your account somewhat.

Next you probably still want more followers. Specifically ones in real estate or your local market. Go through your following list and pick out Realtors, companies or other users that match who your target audience is. I keep a running list of anyone I follow that closely matches my target audience. Now go to FlashTweet http://www.FlashTweet.com. This application is not the best friend of Twitter. It is used by spammers to get lots of followers. However, it is a great tool for building your followers by following the followers of your friends and associates. So this is where that targeted list of followers comes in. Click on mass follow then enter the username of the person you want to follow the followers of. Did any of that make sense????? FlashTweet will only display 100 followers at a time. Click check all and scroll down the first 100 and uncheck any that you don’t want to follow. When you are done click the follow button. This will follow everyone you had checked. If this person has more than 100 followers click on the 2 etc to get to the next 100 followers.

Remember you only have 100 Twitter API calls per hour so if FlashTweet stops working you have probably done enough for a while. There is also a 1,000 person per day follow limit if you reach that you have definitely done enough for one day. Using FlashTweet too much or too often will cause Twitter to suspend your account for aggressive following. If you only do this once or twice a week and follow less than 1,000 each time you should be OK.

Don’t be aggresive. You build a much better list if you take your time. The more targeted your following the more targeted the people that find you.

You can have multiple accounts so don’t mix MLM with TREB. You get a really weird mix and the tweets can be hard to follow. Make a second or third account and follow based on what you want in that account. Hey I learned this one the hard way. I have a lot of cleanup to do on my TREB account and I keep getting more and more non real estate followers. Not necessarily a bad thing but my TREB tweets are probably not going to interest the MLM crowd.

This step is not necessary but recommended because it enables tracking of your shortened URLs. Go to bit.ly.com and sign up for a free account this gives you some tracking on who is clicking your links. Another source is to signup with HootSuite and use ow.ly. Not sure which one I like better but ow.ly will allow you an additional income stream if you use or are going to use Google AdSense. I will cover AdSense in another post. If you sign up and start using one and want to switch no problem you will just have one site for new data and one for old. Look at both and decide which one you like better.

Follow this link to Tweetlater.com www.TweetLater.com/86768.html and get an account. This is free just sign up. There is a paid TweetLater service but we can do most of that stuff with other websites. If you decide to use the paid service to consolidate your functionality do so after checking out the free services.

After you set up your account, login and go to the accounts tab then add account tab. Select Twitter then enter your Twitter username and password. Under that you need to check auto welcome and provide a welcome message. I recommend something like “Thank you for following The Real Estate Book of Cedar Rapids. Our local site http://bit.ly/G56kh or our national site http://bit.ly/Ba02V” notice I have used bit.ly to shorten my URLs, this allows me to track usage later. Make sure for the national URL you don’t just use www.realestatebook.com do a search for your city so you can bring them directly to your local page. Check the Auto Follow box. Your choice if you want to vet each person that follows you. I really don’t care maybe one of them will be interested in what I tweet and check out one of my advertisers. What happens is once they follow you the auto welcome message will be sent. The next thing is the auto unfollow box, your choice but I check this as it will keep your list a little cleaner and unfollow the pump and dump type. This option will unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Twitter doesn’t like people who have large following list and less than an 80% follower list. Lastly do not check the email me box. This generates a huge amount of email and we want to automate this not create more work. If you have a private project that you do not watch often this may be a good option for you.

Next follow this link to Twollo www.Twollo.com sign in with your Twitter username and password. This is another free site. At bottom is search by keyword. You can follow 10, 20, 50, 100 etc. keep number at 100 or below because Twitter has an aggressive follow policy. If you get your account deleted you just have to start over. Select keywords appropriate to TREB things like Real Estate, Homes for sale, name of your city etc. then click add. This will then show people that match your keywords. Careful on your keywords as you can end up with people that are unrelated to your business. Click add and you will automatically start following them. These are saved searches and will run every so often through out the day. You can refine these searches yourself by doing the same search on the Twitter homepage and looking at the results.

You now have a Twitter account that takes care of most of the daily chores. There is still some maintenance you need to do but I’ll get to that in my next post.

I recently had one of my passwords compromised. This is pretty hard since I use strong passwords. The simple fact is just because a site asks for your Facebook password does not mean you should put it in!!!!

Yes, everyone does it sometime and this was my turn. No problem, I changed it using strong techniques and we move on. But what is a strong password? Simply it is a password using letters, numbers, uppercase and special characters( ~`!@#$%^&*()_-+={}[]:;”‘<>?/|\ ). Here are some simple rules for making strong passwords for all your logins and not have to spend 2 weeks learning them again.

Pick a 4-5 letter word, let’s say card. Put a special character in front and replace a letter with a special character you like, let’s say ~c@rd. Now capitalize one character (anyone but the first!), let’s say ~c@rD. Last two steps, pick 2-4 characters that mean something about the account this is for and add a number and another special character to the end, let’s say ~c@rDtwit7[. 

Change the 2-4 characters for the account for each and keep the rest the same. 

If you want to make it even stronger capitalize, change for a number or special character 1-2 characters in the account portion of the password.

Time to change your password all you need to do is change and memorize the start and end parts. Keeping 2-4 characters the same will not affect the strength of your password

Unfortunately some places (especially banks) limit you to silly things like all numbers. All I can say is use the longest number they will let you and don’t use things like your phone number or SSN.

Hope you find this useful.

I was spending so much time organizing my Twitter contacts that my wife began calling me a ‘Real Twit’. I realized I need to get organized.

Here are some organizational tools I am using to cut down the hours I could spend keeping track of “Social Media” for The Real Estate Book of Cedar Rapids, IA. If you are on a computer with limited resources i.e. memory this may cause a massive slowdown, so be aware.

I hope you find this helpful.

General

First I am using a different browser from my norm to follow all my social media connections. I am using Google Chrome. Firefox or Internet Explorer both work as well as they all have tabbed browsing although my experience shows Internet Explorer tends to be more of a memory hog. If you decide to use Firefox it will remember which tabs are open when it is shut down and open them again when you re-start it.

Open tabs for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and my WordPress Blog. These are the ones currently being discussed by NCI in the Massive Network webinar series. This allows you to flip between each site with no loss of time.

Twitter

I use an application called TweetDeck to automate my filtering process. With over 1,700 that I am following the noise is considerable. I used the following article as the basis for setting this up, it’s pretty easy but can take about an hour to get your groups and searches sorted out if you have a lot of followers. TweetDeck Makes Twitter Better. Why Aren’t You Using It?

The only drawback I have found to this system is that the people you want in your groups have to follow you back to show up on the list. Then, you can add them to the group. So I have a list at my desk of people I want to watch and when they follow me back I can add them to my friends group.

There is other software to do this but that will be the subject for another post.

Facebook

This is not so much a management system as a getting started tip. If you go to Friends/Invite Friends, there is a link for “Import Email Addresses” in the top right. Once the new window opens go to the bottom and look for the contact file area. You can use this to import your contact list from Constant contact or other contact manager. It should be a TXT or CSV file and the first line contains the words “Email Addresses”. Just follow the directions from there.

LinkedIn

Again this is not so much a management system as a getting started tip. Go to Add connections, click on the Import Contacts tab, select other address book from the options at the right. On the next screen select choose file. Again this must be a TXT or CSV file but this time you need three columns, Email, First Name and Last Name. Export from Constant Contact or other contact manager and upload. 

If your contacts have a LinkedIn account you will see that listed in the contacts list. I would only invite those that have LinkedIn accounts to start with.

Hour a Day Checklist

To keep control of the time I spend on Social Media, I have developed this ‘Hour a Day’ checklist. Just 20 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the evening.

Morning Checklist

__ Go to the Twitter tab in your browser and click on your followers. Follow any new ones and check off any from your want to watch list that have followed you back.

__ Check TweetDeck and add any new follows to your groups or searches.

__ Check TweetDeck and look at all direct messages and the messages from your searchs and groups.

__ Go to the Facebook tab and refresh the screen.

__ Check the requests box and answer any found there.

__ Scroll through messages respond to any you want to.

__ Go to Friends/Recently Added. Put any newly added friends in the correct list.

__ Go to the LinkedIn tab and refresh the screen.

__ Check your inbox 

__ Check the people you may know box for anyone you might know.

Evening Checklist

__ Go to the Twitter tab in your browser and click on your followers. Follow any new ones and check off any from your want to watch list that have followed you back.

__ Spend 5-10 minutes finding new people to follow.

__ Check TweetDeck and add any new follows to your groups or searches.

__ Check TweetDeck and look at all direct messages and the messages from your searchs and groups.

__ Go to the Facebook tab and refresh the screen.

__ Check the requests box and answer any found there.

__ Scroll through messages respond to any you want to.

__ Go to Friends/Recently Added. Put any newly added friends in the correct list.

__ Go to Friends/Find Friends and spend 5-10 minutes looking for new friends.

__ Go to the LinkedIn tab and refresh the screen.

__ Check your inbox 

__ Check the people you may know box for anyone you might know.

A very special post for Kenn Wilson @ Corvid Works. He published a page with some extreeeeeeeemly helpful instructions for getting my Wordpress Blog to display on the main page of my website. I still have work to do on it but the hard part is done. 

After looking at 100+ pages I come across a simple clean set of instructions that do exactly what I want.

Thanks again Kenn

Getting wordpress to display on another webpage is really easy if this works. All the posts at wordpress.org make it look hard. This guy is fantastic it took me 5 minutes. http://www.corvidworks.com/articles/wordpress-content-on-other-pages Now I just hope it works.

Well It’s time to see if I got this thing working right.