Blurry journalism or good social media
Today a tweet appeared on the Austin American-Statesman Twitter account that read:
Mention this tweet for Buy 1 Get 1 tix to area’s #1 haunted house - offer ends Sept 30. http://www.mansionofterror.com (Ad).
My immediate gut reaction was to recoil at the sight of advertisements on my newspaper’s twitter account. It’s journalism, dammit! The lines shouldn’t blur. But that’s also the idealistic part of me that doesn’t always realize news sometimes has to make money (not that it always does - rimshot!)
The Stateman’s advertising plan was laid out in this article. The ads have to be tailored and offer something — a specific discount — to the viewers. They can only be for food, drink, or local entertainment, and they’ll only run twice a day. I was most impressed that it had to be a service, hopefully so that followers will feel like their being offered an additional service instead of spammed.
The Statesman’s social media head, Robert Quigley, said these factors were very important to him when picking an ad.
“I really care about the Twitter community, and I know the community well. I won’t jeopardize that, and that’s why we are strictly limiting this to two tweets a day per account,” Quigley said.
Full disclosure: I know Rob and consider him a friend, and I can believe him when he says this stuff. I think that the Statesman has picked the best way they could to run this experiment.
That said, I’m not sure I would ever consider doing it on a news account. I feel that news accounts can deliver much more light-hearted feel on Twitter while still being informative, but you’re still providing a service and gaining your follower’s trust. I don’t want to feel like they are being mislead or being offered something they may not actually want. I even have problems retweeting things on my personal account if I feel it wouldn’t best serve my followers (or annoy them). And trust me, while I love my PR friends, this happens a lot. It’s up to each account owner to run their account as honestly as possible.
The Statesman has over 13,000 followers, and the Mansion of Terror paid $150 to reach them for Thursday. It’s not a bad deal, and from what Quigley says, he’s gotten a lot of questions, but mostly positive feedback.
“It has been mostly positive. People seem to understand that we’re a business and that we’re trying innovative things to remain strong,” he said.
I’ll be trying to get updated numbers on how well the ad worked from the Mansion of Terror, so stay tuned.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Newspapers have ads. TV news runs commercials. Internet news sites have ads. What the hell is the difference? If anything, those are far more important in terms of disseminating objective news, because if anyone gets the majority of their information from freaking Twitter, they’re probably not so much looking for journalistic integrity.
September 24th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
i am most impressed by the thought and care that The Statesman has put into this venture. perhaps this is the new paradigm; subscribed advertisement. opt-in for special offers. really this is nothing new. there are tons of consumer survey and bargain hunter sites. this is only interesting because it’s twitter. new tech has a history of offering more while asking for less. this just makes it harder to turn a buck. either you adapt (by offering more value/quality/service) or get left behind (go out of business.)
September 25th, 2009 at 6:35 am
I agree with xls - the preparation and focus ahead of time is impressive. I also like that they say (Ad) in it, so when the twitter clients catch up to the features we need… say, textual filters… then we can just ignore / filter those out as needed.
For example, I can’t wait for TweetDeck to support filters so I can stop getting blip.fm links. Or football game updates. I don’t want to unsubscribe to the people doing the things I find annoying; I just want to add a phrase to my killfile.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:58 am
Thanks for this post, Chelsea.
One other thing I want to point out: The advertising is being handled and inserted onto Twitter by our advertising department. I worked with them to come up with the rules, and I have some oversight to be sure the ads “work” within Twitter, but they are handling the money/business side. As far as “blurring the lines,” It’s really not much different than the ads we sell on statesman.com or Austin360. Just a different medium.
Also, I am listening very carefully to the response to this.
September 25th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
And as the client in this case we are hoping our social media bet pays off. We will let you know after this weekend! We are loving the attention so far.