The Buttry diary reporting:
When you tell the family you have a new job, the initial response, of course, is to congratulate you. If your new title is director of community engagement and social media, the second response is: What does “community engagement” mean?
I’ve been answering that question some since joining the Journal Register Co. (and answered the same question last year when I went to TBD to lead community engagement efforts).
Journalists aren’t as puzzled by the phrase as relatives, but I get
questions from journalists, too. Some are skeptical, as journalists tend
to be (and should be) of any buzzword. Some are enthusiastic about the
general topic, but unsure what all it entails. Some suspect that
community engagement is more about marketing than about journalism. Some
fear that community engagement is one more chore stacked upon the
already heavy workload of journalists in shrinking newsrooms.
My new Journal Register colleagues have been quite supportive of my
new responsibilities. They are asking excellent questions about what we
will be doing together to deepen engagement with the communities we
serve.
I’m going to address all these questions in a series of blog posts
that probably will take several weeks. Today I will provide an overview
of community engagement. In coming weeks, I will dig into the various
engagement techniques that I will cover only briefly here.
Let’s start with a tweet-length definition: Community engagement = News orgs making a top priority to listen, to join & lead conversation to elevate our journalism.
Update: Jeff Jarvis and Matt Terenzio said on Twitter that they thought I should have used “enable”
instead of “lead” in the tweet above. I agree that enabling
conversation is an important aspect of engagement (and I’d say it’s
included in good leadership). But I’m not sure it’s more important than
leadership. The community is pretty well able to converse already and is
already doing so. But I’m pro-conversation, so I welcome this
crowdsourced editing help:
Community engagement = News orgs make top priority to listen, to join, lead & enable conversation to elevate journalism.
I’ll elaborate on some key words there:
Priority. Community engagement doesn’t work as an
afterthought. Engaging is hard work, and won’t get the time and
attention it needs if the organization doesn’t stress its importance.
More important, the community is smart and people will quickly recognize
when engagement is lip service, rather than a priority.
Listen. Engagement is not mere promotion. If your
engagement is all about telling the community what’s important and what
you’re doing, or about gathering cheap content, it’s not engaging. You
need to listen and respond. You need to change direction sometimes
because you value the feedback from the community you’re listening to.
Join. You can’t expect to host all the conversation
on your website or in your newspaper. People are discussing community
news and issues in lots of important physical and digital places in the
community. You need to join those discussions and respect the stature of
others who are leading conversation.
Lead. News organizations need to be leaders in the community conversation...
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/what-does-community-engagement-mean/
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