WSJ Memo to Staffers on Twitter and Facebook Use

By Kyle Austin

Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alix Freedman sent out a memo yesterday to all Wall Street Journal staffers which detailed new social media policies and guidelines for reporters and editors.

The list of guidelines includes some instructions that are meant to cover the Journal with possible legal / source confidentiality issues:

Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.

Others, that are meant to protect their content:

Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.

And some that seem just foolish:

Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.

Not surprisingly, Jeff Jarvis had a field day with the memo:

“This misses the chance to make their reporting collaborative. Of course, they should discuss how an article was made. Of course, they should talk about stories as they in progress. Net natives – as WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch calls them – understand this.”

Jeff continued on his point via twitter in a conversation with WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray. Followed by a conversation (via Twitter again) with Tim O’Brien, the New York Times Sunday Business Editor. In following the conversation I get both sides of the argument. Jeff believes this is a strike against collaborative reporting (i.e. the wisdom of the crowds) and connecting with your readers.  Tim and Alan see it as procedural and legal necessities. I tend to agree more with Jeff.

Yes, I understand that you need to cover yourself, but why do you need to enforce a policy that limits your reporters from sharing how a story was created? Did David Carr get in trouble with Times editors for detailing (within the newspaper) how his colleague Brian Stelter used Twitter to piece together a front page story on viewership of the Olympics? I’m guessing no. They probably applauded him. You see the Times social media policy is a little more open-ended and approving of “Twitter soliciting.” After-all this is an organization that promoted that they reached Steve Jobs for comment through Instant Messenger. The Journal on the other hand appears to be getting a bit too highbrow for its own good with its new guidelines.

Choosing the wisdom of a few over the wisdom of the crowds is certainly a risky proposition in today’s digital age. Especially when competing outlets like BusinessWeek are opening-up more by the day with crowd-sourcing efforts to build reader engagement, and ultimately more advertisers.

Here’s an excerpt from the memo (via Editor & Publisher) that details the Dow Jones and WSJ social media policies in full:

The use of social and business networking sites by reporters and editors of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch is becoming more commonplace. These ground rules should guide all news employees’ actions online, whether on Dow Jones sites or in social-networking, e-mail, personal blogs, or other sites outside Dow Jones.
* Never misrepresent yourself using a false name when you’re acting on behalf of your Dow Jones publication or service. When soliciting information from readers and interview subjects you must identify yourself as a reporter for the Journal, Newswires or MarketWatch and be tonally neutral in your questions.
* Base all comments posted in your role as a Dow Jones employee in the facts, drawing from and citing your reporting when appropriate. Sharing your personal opinions, as well as expressing partisan political views, whether on Dow Jones sites or on the larger Web, could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones.
* Don’t recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work.
* Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.
* Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
* Don’t discuss articles that haven’t been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted.
* Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.
* Don’t engage in any impolite dialogue with those who may challenge your work — no matter how rude or provocative they may seem.
* Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.
* All postings on Dow Jones sites that may be controversial or that deal with sensitive subjects need to be cleared with your editor before posting.
* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

4 comments May 14th, 2009

Marketers Make Connection with LinkedIn

By Kyle Austin

As I mentioned yesterday, a large drop in ad sales at MySpace means that social network ad sales will fall 3% this year. However, according to Blake Boznanski, an Ad Sales Executive at LinkedIn (who visited Racepoint’s San Francisco office yesterday), the “business relationship” social network is still very bullish about ad growth – less than a year after launching its own ad network for the site.

LinkedIn, who officially launched its ad network last September (a year after Facebook), has launched a variety of new paid and non-paid tools for marketers over the last several months (along with a site re-design) in an effort to take advantage of the shift towards social media marketing.

LinkedIn’s key differentiator is its demographic. More than a quarter of which are senior executives. Another quarter of which are “professional networkers” who rank high in social network influence. Compare this with the demographics of Facebook and the masses that visit its site. Sure, LinkedIn is around 1/7 the size of Facebook in terms of users, but I’d make the print analogy that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal to Facebook’s USA Today. Like the Journal, a large group of LinkedIn’s demographic have six-figure salaries and high purchasing power.  In fact, LinkedIn is one of the top destinations on the Web for those with a college degree.

Some of the relatively new features, which LinkedIn has rolled out over the last year to allow marketers to target this demographic of prospective customers, includes: customized applications and appplication sponsorship, Q&A sponsorship, group sponsorship, partnership messages, poll programs and group sponsorships.

LinkedIn currently hosts apps from companies such as SlideShare, Google and Tripit and is open to collaborating on additional customized applications with additional advertisers / brands. In addition, there is an opportunity for marketers to sponsor third party apps and event apps. For instance, the application from Tripit, which lets you see where and when your LinkedIn network is traveling, has created sponsorship opportunities on the site for hotels and airlines. The same sponsorship opportunity exists for the 10,000 plus events that are now listed on LinkedIn.

Poll partnerships have also become a new way for brands to connect with LinkedIn’s demographic. The most widely known partnership being LinkedIn’s deal with CNBC, which has drawn huge engagement from the LinkedIn community. Under the agreement, CNBC has also become LinkedIn’s preferred business media provider and offers CNBC articles, blogs, financial data, and video content to LinkedIn’s user base – in exchange for the community-generated content (LinkedIn / CNBC polls) exclusively provided for CNBC.

Group pages are growing in popularity (nearly 300,000 of them) on LinkedIn and have added recent features that allow group managers to send an announcement via email to their group members. This, combined with applications and RSS feeds pushing content into these group / fan pages has created a rich / vibrant community to advertise within. Brands can sponsor a federation of user created groups or target users of specific groups throughout LinkedIn.

Another feature that is growing in popularity is featured question functionality that can be promoted throughout the LinkedIn community. Featured questions from executive leaders or “brand celebrities” allow brands to engage with the community, create dialogue and gain further insight. For instance, Garry Kelly, Southwest Airline’s CEO, recently used the question feature to ask how an airline can make people more productive and was greeted with numerous responses that he and the community could view.

As for its “basic” display and text ads, Boznanski noted that LinkedIn still handles all of its ad placements, unlike other social networks that have outsourced to other ad networks. This, he says, “allows LinkedIn to target better.” LinkedIn supports text-based ads and display ads (300×250, 150×600, 728×90 and video). It also only allows a limited amount of ads per page, giving advertisers a bigger “share of page.” All of this has led to speculation that LinkedIn has a CPM in the range of $75 for targeted / customized advertising. Comparatively, Facebook CPM rates for display ads on the destination site are rumored to be in the $0.50 – $1 range and advertising within social apps on Facebook are going for CPM’s as low as $0.12.

On the earned media / non-paid side of things, brands can continue to create viral dialogue by using the status update feature, poll creation (not distributed or promoted as widely without advertising investment), group creation, corporate page updates (i.e. adding applications) and participation within the answers feature. All of these features also assist LinkedIn with creating more engagement with its user base.

Although LinkedIn may have been assisted on its current growth pattern by the economic climate and people searching for jobs, Boznanski noted that LinkedIn’s steady growth began in advance of the recession and they expect it to continue beyond the end of the recession – as they look to expand their ad sales business and overall community growth.

12 comments May 14th, 2009