Twitter thoughts

I've gradually expanded my use of Twitter and it is part of the arsenal. Though I think the folks (writers) who tweet everything under the sun need to be slapped with a baseball bat -- wood, composite, aluminum.

Worst news, however, is that at our place we're blogging/tweeting our collective asses off and building our digital brands. We've been ordered to do so and told it is the only path to save jobs.

Yea, whatever.

Just had more buyouts, though not enough.

One deck, more push-outs.

 

I haven't been a beat writer since 2007. I would've loved Twitter for my job. I'm a little sad I didn't get the chance.

 

The click-through rate for Twitter is pretty low. Ours hovers around 5-9%. I'm sure there are better click-through rates out there, but none that will blow you away.
Your one commodity left in this business is news and information. So, it's best to have something posted and include a tiny or bit or .gl/ link. Otherwise the user will go elsewhere -- if they deem it worthy -- to find a report beyond 140 characters. Lost clicks and all.

 

I think it is a great resource to break news, to try and drive traffic to your blogs and your stories and to share some of your personality.

What I can't understand is this - why do so many guys feel the need to give us a play by play of whatever game they are covering? Why do they feel the need to tell us every little personnel move going on?

If there is a huge development, if there is something you can add insight to (like, oh I don't know "the coach scolded the player just before he made that big play") I get it - but this shit where I have to sift through hundreds of posts of "it is third-and-four and Joe Schmoe threw an incomplete pass" is just ridiculous. Who gives a fuck about that?

 

Thanks.

 

You're welcome.

 

Twitter made me lose all respect for Will Carroll.

Jose Canseco said there's already a juicer in the Hall of Fame. Carroll tweets that it must be Rickey Henderson. Canseco says it's not Rickey. Carroll tweets that it must be Dennis Eckersley. Victor Martinez gets traded to the Red Sox. Carroll tweets that Clay Buchholz is part of the deal. Buchholz of course was not part of the deal. A rumor is spread about Sarah Palin. Carroll repeats the rumor and tweets that she's getting a divorce.

In none of these instances did Carroll follow up to apologize for being so wrong.

That's just a few examples of how little self-control or responsibility Carroll takes on his Tweets. Not sure how any of you who are so quick to complain about the Big Lead could support or praise Carroll.

 

People care about that? We live in a world where ESPN takes credit for breaking every story, whether they did or not.

Bottom line is the bottom line. Show me a way to profit from Twitter and I'm in. Otherwise it seems like we're just repeating the fatal mistake of the Internet -- giving out information without requiring anyone to pay for it.

 

As I have said elsewhere here, it has proven to be a powerful tool for us in coverage of high school football.

We can track most games in our coverage area, either being tweeted by our reporters or others, and "put teams on the clock" when we know games have gone final.

A few teams, we'll get a call within 5 minutes of seeing a final on Twitter. Others, we make note of the final and we'll start chasing them if we haven't heard within a short period of time. It's making a huge difference in our success rate in getting game summaries and roundup info for Saturday papers.

 

I do follow high school football well on Friday nights with tweets.

It's necessary to be diligent about who you follow, though. There really is a lot of brainless garbage out there, people just using it for train-of-thought missives.

 

I do broadcast, but we use Twitter somewhat extensively *while* we're doing a game, posting and retweeting scores (and reading them on the broadcast). But we nearly always put a link to the website where you can listen to the live broadcast on our tweets to drive hits *toward* the mothership and raise awareness of our fairly small brand.

Other than results and scores, we don't use it much.

However, if f I'm a newspaper, I'm putting a link to the story with anything breaking.

It needs to be used judiciously -- don't tweet everything -- but there are times it can be used very effectively.