Renai LeMay

On Friday I gave a brief speech at the Sydney Media140 conference, along with a number of other presenters. Because I only had 5 minutes to talk, I chose to focus on one message and one social networking platform — the most important one currently — Twitter.

This entry consists of my brief speech notes.

This is what I have learnt after gathering more than 2,600 followers on twitter and after posting 11,000 tweets.

BE HUMAN.

Journalists have been trained to be objective. We write articles usually without our own opinion, unless we’re a senior journalist or an editor. We usually can’t include emotion or our own personal experiences.

Twitter turns all this on its head.

Journalism is ALL ABOUT achieving credibility and authority with an audience. On Twitter, achieving authority with the audience means showing that you are human and building trust relationships with people.

How do you do this?

Show your opinion … for example the National Broadband Network. We cover it obsessively at ZDNet.com.au and people want to know my opinion about it.

Show emotion … if you’re angry, get angry. If you’re sad, be sad. If you’re excited, be excited! Put “colour” into your tweets.

Put your own personal experiences on there. Not just about work. About everything. Hobbies, your holidays, if you’re going for a beer after work. For example, I often post about karate.

One example:

The other day I went on a rant on Twitter about how I really hate self-checkout machines at Coles and Woolworths. I had about 100 people reply and started a massive discussion about the issue which attracted the attention of Woolworths PR.

Now I can’t tell you how this relates to journalistic ethics or so on. And from my experience, ZDNet.com.au’s audience still wants traditional objective news, with opinion separated out into commentary pieces and so on.

But, I can tell you that in practice, when you show the Twitter audience that you’re human, they will open up to you.

They will trust you, share a constant stream of news tips with you, respect your journalist work, and really back your publication.

And that’s what every journalist needs.

Thanks to some cool marketing efforts from our team at CBS Interactive (which publishes the site I work on, ZDNet.com.au), I’m going to be publicly speaking at a couple of upcoming events.

The first is the Sydney leg of the Media140 conference, which investigates the future of journalism in the social media age. The conference blurb states:

Staged at ABC’s Eugene Goossens’ Hall,  Sydney on 5th – 6th of November, bringing together Australia’s leading journalists, broadcasters, social media advocates and media academics. To educate and promote debate within the media industry about Twitter and the plethora of other social media platforms and practices.

I’m going to be on the Social Media Tips and Tools for Journos panel on day 2 of the conference (6 November), a session which runs from 11:45 to 12:45. I’ll be on the panel with fellow journalists and producers Wolf Cocklin (ABC Digital), Queensland-based journalist Dave Earley and Future Tense producer Andrew Davies.

The other event I’m presenting at is the third Ignite Sydney, which will be held on 8 October as part of Sydney Web Week. It’ll be held at the Watershed Hotel in Darling Harbour. I can’t remember my exact pitch, but it’s something like this:

“We’re far from dead and still around and kicking. Find out how zombie journalists can rise up and conquer the internet age. Grrr, argh.”

I’m quite excited about both events as, quite aside from the presenting side of things (which I always enjoy), I’ve got a feeling I’m going to meet a stack of really interesting people. As a news editor I don’t get out of the office as much as I used to when I was just a journalist, so when I do, I try to make sure it’s an interesting event!

Just a quick post to note that Filmink magazine has posted an article about the upcoming Zen film festival in Sydney that I’m helping out with. Dubbed ‘Reel to Real’, it’s being held in Sydney on 21 and 22 August. You can find more info at my previous post here.