Title:
Digital Communities Manager, The Dallas Morning News
Year:
2014
Category:
Next Generation Customer Experience
Result:
Finalist
The Company:
The Dallas Morning News is the fifth largest metropolitan newspaper in the country, and is proud to provide the news to its near 700,000 print subscribers, as well as its 5 million unique visitors and users each month to DallasNews.com.
They are a major regional media company in the United States, with 570,000 combined social media followers, as of January 2013. In 2011, the Dallas Morning News began a coordinated effort to embrace social media and strategically integrate it across their organization to engage more effectively with their readers. Since then, they’ve grown their social media following by 250%.
The Problem:
Like many papers, the Dallas Morning News’ initial social media efforts grew up organically, resulting in many overlapping and duplicate streams. The company had multiple accounts fed by various parts of the organization, and needed to eliminate rogue and sometimes dormant duplicate accounts to gain visibility. Above all, Dallas News wanted to keep most social media posting close to content origination, which wasn’t easy.
The Solution:
The Morning News needed a dashboard that could provide centralized reporting, but was also accessible across the organization and scalable to support growth. In late 2012, The Morning News started using Hootsuite to help with social media management, and by Spring 2013 they had removed most duplicate streams and gotten content under control. With Hootsuite, The Morning News had the tools for fast-paced, short-lived engagement and the ability to carry these spikes over to ongoing customer interactions.
The Results:
One recent success story of how The Dallas Morning News integrated a secure, centralized and streamlined social relationship platform into their workflow is during the 50th anniversary of the JFK shooting.
In the past, Dallas News might have put a single person on the breaking news scene posting tweets to the main account every five to ten minutes. Now with Hootsuite, they have the visibility to see news coming in from our entire staff and can run a much more comprehensive effort. There were 15 reporters around Dallas sending out social messages and feeding posts to Landauer’s team; the Hootsuite dashboard was set up like a newsroom command center where they could see what was unique and of the highest value to our readers. “Hootsuite is set up so we can have a centralized back-at-base approach to reporting, making sure we provide robust content to our flagship Twitter streams. The end result was a great overall social media effort and much higher engagement,” said Landauer.
Metrics:
Like many businesses today, The Dallas Morning News is focused on tracking the ROI of social media. In less than a year with Hootsuite, Dallas Morning News achieved the following:
- Increased follower growth by 52% on its flagship Twitter account and 133% on Facebook.
- Attracted 270,000 new followers to its Google+ circle.
- Saw social referrals to dallasnews.com increase from 5 million to 10 million.
The Dallas Morning News also added better efficiency and coordination to their news efforts, coordinating close to 30 newsroom team members from one centralized dashboard.
The Technology:
Hootsuite’s Enterprise social relationship platform.
Hootsuite is a social relationship platform for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ Pages from one secure, web-based dashboard. Advanced functionality includes tools for audience engagement, team collaboration, account security and comprehensive analytics for end-to-end measurement and reporting.
Disruptive Factor:
Having an organized social media portfolio enables The Dallas Morning News to put the audience front and center and is changing the way the news organization packages news and information. “Waiting for people to discover your content is not good enough anymore,” Landauer says. “You have to package it in the way they want to consume it, deliver to the places where they are and then learn quickly from how they interact with it. That is a new way of viewing the news.”
Shining Moment:
Instead of just waiting for the content to appear on the website, our Digital Communities Team works with individual journalists to apply marketing best practices to promoting content. When it came to breaking news, focusing our social strategies with targeted language based on different scenarios has yielded both higher reach and higher click count.
