Individual Project by Nora-Marie Myers

May 3, 2011

Social Media Communities in the Media

King 5 Seattle

The Huffington Post

King 5 Seattle – Follow: @KING5Seattle

• KING-TV, channel 5, is a television station in Seattle, and is affiliated with the NBC network with its sister station KONG-TV, an independent station

• 21,000 followers on Twitter

With closure of Seattle PI and downsizing of Seattle Times, other traditional media outlet like King 5 Seattle really needed to adopt to new media, and have

By offering online community; social media on homepage, they add great value to their company, and have changed the traditional way of reporting news

How King 5 Seattle Online Community Can add Value

How King 5 Seattle Engages with its Audience

King 5 online community offers links: mobile applications, newsletter sign up, school-closure text alerts, RSS feeds, Twitter links (20+), Facebook page

Features videos Each story is a blog; readers can comment Under video area is a sign up for breaking news (email) They have found many ways to add value to their online

community through homepage Value is added by having various social media links that

connect community even closer to King 5 Seattle—no longer have to watch news at 5, 10, and/or 11 p.m.

How King 5 Seattle Engages with its Audience

How King 5 Seattle Engages with its Audience

King 5 Seattle tweets all breaking news Crowdsourcing is a part of the King 5 Seattle’s Twitter

agenda; frequently they send out requests, mostly for pictures, weather, or traffic updates

Since the requests are small and often lead to user pictures used on the local TV station, the community is eager to contribute

Example question (tweet): if you had snow, let us know; send us photos

On Twitter they include contact information for news tips encouraging users to contribute at all times

They create an online community for interested users

What Kind of Customer Insights Can King 5 Seattle Online Community Provide

Most of the links and story retweets receive comments from others on Twitter, therefore influencing the community to communicate with each other and provide insight

By “converting” to new media, King 5 Seattle has listened to its customers by enhancing its online community with so many social media options and communication tools

Huffington Post – Follow: @HuffingtonPost The Huffington Post is a leading social news and opinion site,

“The Internet Newspaper”

Offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, sustainable “green” living, world news, sports, technology, nonprofits, college life, books, education, religion, travel, arts, food and comedy, and is a top destination for news, blogs, and original content

Wants to serve relevant and timely news content and get customers engaged to respond through blogs and social posts.

On February 7, 2011, AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million

992,000 followers on Twitter

How Huffington Post Online Community Can add Value

Huffington Post is an online community originally created to be an engaging community

The Huffington Post has an active community with over one million comments made on the site each month

“If there’s one thing that The Huffington Post has consistently done better than just about any other traditional or new-media entity, it is to take advantage of social media tools in order to boost its reach and engage with readers in new ways…”

How Huffington Post Engages with its Audience

Comments, comments, comments – on EVERY blog and story

Each Huffington Post blogger page has a social media module – become a fan, get RSS feeds, get email, follow on Twitter, like on Facebook

Each story provides an option to share on Facebook, tweet out, share with someone via email, comment on

At the end of each story there is the option to follow that subject on Twitter (politics, sports, environment, etc.)

Contribute to story by sending a correction to it, sending a related link about it, or contacting them (through a HuffPost Social News)

How Huffington Post Engages with its Audience

How Huffington Post Engages with its Audience

How Huffington Post Engages with its Audience

What Kind of Customer Insights Can Huffington Post Online Community Provide

Community members (bloggers) help make Huffington Post a strong online community

Some community insight is in fact that bloggers want compensation

In April 2011 The Huffington Post became the target of a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed in United States District Court in New York on behalf of thousands of uncompensated bloggers

They want more than to become a part of the Huffington Post community

1. Fancher, M. (2011). Seattle: A New Media Case Study. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of the News Media: An Annual Report on American Journalism 2011. Retrieved from http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/mobile-survey/seattle-a-new-media-case-study/

2. (2011) Case Study: Huffington Post - Reinventing the “Big News” Experience with IE9 Pinned Sites. Retrieved from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg558109

3. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post

4. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. KING-TV. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KING-TV

5. University of Washington (2009).Beyond The Fail Whale: How Twitter Is Changing Organizations. Retrieved from http://twitter09.wordpress.com/the-book/case-study-journalists/

6.King 5 Seattle. Retrieved from http://www.king5.com/

7. Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

References