5 Ways to Improve Your Use of Twitter

Twitter is a social networking tool that allows us to share short messages (140 characters or less) with the people who 'follow' us; and we can follow them back and receive their messages.

I tend to use Twitter more for gathering information about people in the know and happenings around the city I cover - New Haven, Conn. But I find these five tricks have helped me increase the visibility of the Tweets I share and I hope they are useful for you as well.

1. Include a picture.
When I'm out in the field, I now use my smartphone (Droid X) to send out Tweets that set the scene while my assignment is unfolding. I snap the picture, hit the menu button, click share and then select Twitter. The App allows me to type a message about the photo and off to the network it goes.

This has been big fun and from the feedback I've gotten, people enjoy it.

2. Use hashtags.
Including a hashtag or pound (#) sign, can increase the reach of your Tweets because people who may not be following you, but filter the hashtag, will see your posts. For example, the people and organizations in New Haven who do not follow me but follow the hashtag for the city #NHV see my Tweets and often retweet them or my post will catch their eye and they'll choose to follow me.

3. Tap into a URL shortener with metrics.
I use bit.ly, which is a popular one that can linked with third-party applications that help sort tweets such as TweetDeck. Bit.ly has an "Analyze" tab that tells me how many clicks each link received, who has shared the link (via Twitter name), and the referring sites where people found the link - in other words, the sites where it was posted such as Facebook or TweetDeck or shared by e-mail.

I can also see what countries people were in when they clicked the link. It's great intel.

4. Engage in two-way conversations.
You shouldn't feel obligated to follow everyone who follows you, particularly the spammers, but when someone does, say thank you. When your followers post a query that you have an opinion about or expertise on a topic, chime in.

Too many people use Twitter to spout links and never interact beyond that. Watch for what others are talking about, join the conversation, thank people for retweets and mentions. Engaging with the online community will help grow your network and sphere of influence and crowdsourcing becomes easier.

5. Organize with third-party applications.
I use TweetDeck to filter tweets by topics, organizations and individual followers. It is impossible for me as a working professional to sit in front of the computer all day to watch my Twitter feed. TweetDeck allows me to check in several times a day, see what I've missed and share anything new on my plate.

Hootsuite enables me to schedule Tweets that will go live at a later time.

Scale in newsrooms isn't just about numbers & metrics, it's about IDEAS!

My ideaLab colleagues and I were given 30 days to address a need in our newsrooms. After considering several possible projects, I settled on something in my arsenal of favorite tools: Google maps.
So, the plan was to teach my fellow reporters how to plot sites on a Google map so there always would be someone in the newsroom with that skill, even on nights and weekends when we often have breaking crime, fire, accident and other stories that lend well to using maps.

Simultaneously, I was data mining for a separate ideaLab project and planned on doing an enterprise story about 27 brownfields in New Haven County. These locations are targeted by the state and several municipalities as priority sites for economic development, among dozens of eyesores that are languishing.

As part of the ideaLab, we have semi-monthly teleconferences as a group. On one of these calls my mentor Jon Cooper, vice president of content for our parent company, Journal Register Co. and supervisor of the ideaLab, urged us to work harder at getting the knowledge and skills we're learning into the daily workflow at our newsrooms.

That got me thinkin': Why don't we work as a group to map the brownfields and craft the enterprise story?

It seemed the perfect way to foster skills learning and meet Jon's challenge.

I pitched it to my colleagues who cover the towns on the brownfields list I was working off of and they not only participated in the Google maps training, they did reporting leg work, shot videos and built this map:

View New Haven County Brownfields in a larger map

I'm talking about shoe-leather reporters Amanda Pinto, Abbe Smith, Michelle Tuccitto Sullo, Mark Zaretsky and Ann DeMatteo. I invited reporters who did not have an affected town, as well, so here's a shout out to Alexandra Sanders, who came to the training and subsequently made this map, using satellite view, to go with a daily story about neighborhood reaction to a controversial excavation site:


View Horse Pond Rd & Dairy Hill Rd in a larger map

City Editor Helen Bennett Harvey and Managing Editor Mark Brackenbury came to the training and project planning meeting as well. Everyone made this project better than I envisioned with their feedback and questions.

We've had great conversations about the fact that maps don't apply to everything we file, but we all have more open minds now to new applications. Alexandra had a great idea about using them to map polling places and here's an example of how I now use them to tell people what's happening in New Haven on weekends or upcoming civic events during the week.


View Elm City Happenings in a larger map

A nice feature is that Google tells people how to get there by car, foot, bike or public transportation. It's just an amazing tool.

And participating in the ideaLab has been an amazing process of personal and professional growth for which I am grateful.

I hope this encourages you to think about using Google maps in new and different ways and engaging your colleagues in what can be a fun project for your team and an interactive, informative package for consumers.

Our package went live on Sunday morning, May 8 (Mother's Day) and ranked among "Most Popular" all day on the New Haven Register's website.

Sunday evening Pam McLoughlin and Jordan Fenster got a Google Form loaded into the package, using the story itself as an engagement tool. It was posted later than the full package, so I'm still collecting data on that for a separate post.

Hold the faith that people will read content other than crime, accidents and news of the weird if it is engaging, interactive and speaks to their quality of life (Digital First). Thanks, again, everybody!

So, let's keep the ideas flowing - how are you using Google or other mapping programs in your news organization?

'East Coast Rapist' Revealed: Covering breaking news with elbow grease, teamwork and digital tools

 I can't say enough about my city editor, colleagues and the corporate team that gave us tools to hit the pavement on this story in ways we could not have done only a year ago.

Let's go back to Monday, Feb. 28. That's when the FBI and local law enforcement officials launched billboard campaigns to draw out tips throughout the footprint of Aaron Thomas, 39, the so-called 'East Coast Rapist.' He has been linked by DNA to 17 rapes in Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island and the New Haven Register's anchor city, New Haven, Conn.

I covered a press conference announcing the campaign and my colleague Chris March and I built this map to give the public a visual representation of the trail of devastation left across four states by Thomas, an unemployed trucker.


View 'East Coast Rapist' Attack Area in a larger map

Four days later, our ace police reporter William Kaempffer and our standout city editor Helen Bennett Harvey got word that a suspect had been arrested. In a mix of the old and new when it comes to reporting, all three of us hit the phones calling sources and we jumped on that superhighway of digital information - the Internet.

Bill is trusted by his sources and has a solid reputation for honoring the journalism industry's standards on fairness. He scored the suspect's name, Helen used public records online to confirm a tip that Thomas had a court appearance the day before his arrest and our very bright, well-known court reporter/columnist Randall Beach scrambled over to the courthouse and found Thomas' address of record. But there were two, so I looked up real estate assessment records online using the HP Mini netbook that our parent company, the Journal Register Co., provided to those of us participating in the ideaLab project, supervised by Jonathan Cooper, vice president of content.

Chris and I are part of this year-long experiment to discover ways of improving our performance as journalists and to better engage the communities we serve; as well as identify tools, in both hardware and digital form, that can advance our Digital First approach to delivering news accurately as it unfolds.

Our CEO John Paton (@jxpaton) gave all reporters in the company Flip video recorders and those in the ideaLab also have netbooks, iPhones or Droids and iPads. Additionally, Verizon Wireless is allowing me to test the Samsung Galaxy Tablet alongside its Apple counterpart.

Getting back to last Friday, I grabbed my tablets and used the map programs to get me to the houses we had to visit in order to nail down where Thomas actually had been living. I knocked on doors in the neighborhood and Bill used an online directory to call people who had publicly listed telephone numbers.

Helen kept updating the story at http://www.nhregister.com/ as Bill, Randy and I came up with new information and we made sure to have fresh content for the paper the next morning. She is masterful in the use of social media and uses Twitter and Facebook to alert followers, friends and readers about up-to-the-minute developments. Follow Helen's posts @newsgirlct or @nhregister. You can also see an example here of how she uses Scribd to upload documents to enhance our story packages.

Our stellar photographers are using cameras, video cameras and MacBook Pros out in the field and getting pictures and video clips online so fast, Melanie Stengel and Peter Hvizdak had the only available photographs and video of Thomas arriving in court for a brief arraignment on March 7. Other news organizations made the appropriate arrangements to use them as well.

I sent out Tweets from court using our account for live coverage set up by Helen @nhrlive. As this case moves through the court system you can follow our updates using the Twitter hashtag #eastcoastrapist.

Chris, Helen, Managing Editor Mark Brackenbury, online producer Shawn Rychling, Valley Bureau Chief Michelle Tuccitto Sullo and several photoraphers have all tracked down records and information or kept our Web site rich with multi-media elements on this story.

I must give a shout-out to Andria Carter and Joe Kulkin at our sister paper, The Trentonian, for their support and sharing resources in coverage of both the 2010 Census and the East Coast Rapist case.
Well, I must sign off for now. I'm headed back out into the field for a community angle on this story. Stay tuned...

How to add Web clips to iPhone/iPad homepages

If we share the same habit, there are Web pages that you visit daily. I thought I'd share this feature with you, because the fact that it saves time makes it one of my favorites for the iPad and iPhone.

Adding web clips to a home page is even faster than reaching websites through the Safari browser.

Click here for a short tutorial, but I've also written out the steps below the clip:




Here are the steps saving a web clip:

1. Open the Safari browser and navigate to the Web page you want to save.
2. Find the spot on the page you want visible in the icon and use your fingers to get it to the right size.
3. Hit the + sign at the top of the screen on the iPad, bottom of the screen on the iPhone.
4. From the list of prompts, select "Add to Home Screen."
5. Use the suggested name that appears or create your own.
6. Hit add and you're done.