Jared W. Smith

WCBD, Charleston’s NBC affiliate, is launching a huge push into social media today by getting a majority of its news staff on Twitter. This is huge — I can’t say I’ve seen too many news agencies place a majority of their staff out into the wild amongst the Twitter-using public. Everybody from the anchors to the photogs is on and listening. Just today I was having a converation with morning anchor Brad Franko during the A-Rod (A-Roid?) press conference. WCBD’s had a presence on Twitter for a while, starting with producer Raymond Owens. Raymond was the first of the television journalists — and among the first of the journalists in Charleston in general — to make news a conversation over Twitter. That struck me. I was particularly pleased when chief meteorologist Rob Fowler joined up later, and gradually more and more folks at the channel started to tweet. I still think one of the marvels of Twitter is how it brings the people together with the media; with media listening in on what people are talking about over Twitter, it helps them serve our interests that much more effectively.

So, with that in mind, I’ve put together a few things that WCBD — and other news organizations tempted to take the social media plunge — should give a shot.

Use TweetDeck

TweetDeck is the power user’s Twitter tool of choice. A reporter following a story — or, for that matter, looking for a story — or other trends on Twitter will appreciate TweetDeck’s ability to run real-time searches within its interface. (Read: No sitting on search.twitter.com and hitting Refresh all the time.) TweetDeck’s grouping ability is essential to cut through the noise, especially as you follow more and more people. Yes, TweetDeck is intensive and a screen dominator, but a reporter should demand nothing less. TweetDeck truly is an information dashboard that I’ve come to regard as indispensable.

Use and Follow Hashtags

Hashtags are very useful for keeping related tweets together. In Charleston, we’ve agreed upon #CHS as a hashtag for all tweets relating somehow to the Charleston area. (Most localities will use their major airport code for their metro.) It would behoove any Charleston reporter not only to monitor the #CHS hashtag constantly, but also to use it liberally within any tweet containing pertinent information for Charleston. The #CHS hashtag, in particular, helps single out Charleston-related information on Twitter Search. Tweets hashtagged #CHS also feed into the CharlestonSC FriendFeed room (more on that in a minute). We used the airport code because it is indeed only four characters with the pound-sign included; when working with a 140-character limit, there’s not much room for extraneous metadata.

Watch FriendFeed

Back when FriendFeed was getting going last summer, I created a CharlestonSC FriendFeed room, which aggregates together tweets hashtagged with #CHS, links to blog posts from Lowcountry bloggers, weather tweets from @chswx, and statistical tweets from @chstweets. FriendFeed’s ability to mash this information up into a single source is quite useful for taking the pulse even beyond simply the Twitter conversation (there are quite a few Lowcountry bloggers who don’t tweet, for example). Not every city has a FriendFeed room dedicated to it; that’s up to a resourceful individual to get that going (it’s easy to do, though).

Tonight, WCBD is going to run two stories about their push into social media: one at 5:00, and another at 6:00. I was interviewed by Problem Solver reporter Larry Collins earlier today for the 6:00 story, so be sure to tune in for that!

Update: Here’s Larry’s story. It’s a great piece with a solid interview with Dan Fabrizio, the news director at Channel 2, explaining the shift in newsgathering philosophy.