Have a reason for using social media techs

Robert Picard, a fel­low at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, writes in the lat­est issue of Nieman Reports that news orga­ni­za­tions should have a clear-cut and finan­cially based rea­son for adopt­ing new tech­nolo­gies for dis­sem­i­nat­ing content.

The most impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion, Picard says, is whether adopt­ing a new tech­nol­ogy will ulti­mately ben­e­fit the orga­ni­za­tion, whether that ben­e­fit comes in the form of money, increased brand recog­ni­tion or some other form.

And if its uses don’t gen­er­ate money—or, at the very least, pay for their full costs—one needs to have an excep­tion­ally clear answer as to why it is being used at all. Reasons can be found to use some with­out full cost recov­ery, but those should be based on strate­gic think­ing and informed choice, not on tech­no­log­i­cal hype and exuberance.

Business mod­els don’t exist yet to take advan­tage of many of these new tech­nolo­gies. As a result, Picard says, news orga­ni­za­tions have come up with another rea­son for adopt­ing social media tech­nolo­gies: build­ing a way to inter­act with its audience.

But appar­ently he looks at this goal as sim­ply an interim rea­son for using social media — the egalitarian-like rea­son we’ll list until we fig­ure out a way to make money off it all. Not sur­pris­ingly, Picard thinks of community-building as a half-baked idea, say­ing that “news orga­ni­za­tions must become much more sophis­ti­cated in their think­ing about them and how to achieve those ben­e­fits” of a user community.

He goes on:

If inter­ac­tions are the goal, the rea­son for each inter­ac­tion needs to be clearly delin­eated. And what should it accom­plish? What mes­sages and images should it project of the news orga­ni­za­tion? How are the ben­e­fits of those inter­ac­tions to be measured?

Rational ques­tions, yes. But his con­clu­sion is the same as every other critic writ­ing about new media — basi­cally, these tech­nolo­gies are too new, so we can’t pre­dict how things will shake out with­out first devel­op­ing some sys­tem to quan­tify it all.

New sys­tems to quan­tify community-building prob­a­bly need to be cre­ated. After all, news­pa­per­ing is a busi­ness and busi­nesses need charts and graphs and quan­ti­fied data to base their deci­sions on.

And yes, all of Picard’s advice is sound. He’s like your accoun­tant advis­ing you not to take money out of your retire­ment fund to invest in some hot new startup. It’s good advice, and it’s safer to just do what he says and for­get about all that new­fan­gled tom­fool­ery until wiser heads than ours have fig­ured it all out and pack­aged it for easy consumption.

But then again, some of us like to exper­i­ment. Maybe it’s not sound busi­ness; maybe I won’t retire as a mil­lion­aire as a result. But nobody’s going to get any of that data the experts need to eval­u­ate social media unless peo­ple out there starts tak­ing risks.

I guess we need to keep Picard’s voice in the back of our heads when we do it, just to make sure the risks we take are cal­cu­lated and not foolish.