When the Disneyland Resort reached capacity I joined in to help out our reporting staff by collecting interesting tweets about the crowded park. The reporting was fun to do, showed the value of reporting via social networks and brought our audience’s content into our report.

Link:

During the holiday time I found that several readers were sharing photos of a double rainbow to our shareoc inbox and on Twitter and Flickr.

Our science reporter was out for the holiday, so I filled in and posted reader photos and comments about the double rainbow, along with links to previous rainbow stories.

Two interesting notes. One, once we started a slide show of rainbow photos other readers were quick to submit their own photos. Two, the readers’ whose photos were used are now frequently sending in breaking news tips and interesting photos.

As part of my social work, I am working on reinvigorating the OCRegister’s main Twitter account @OCReggie.

One change is I added two new people to the account’s management crew (we now have eight). This allows for one permanent sub and for one person to be the on-call night and weekends person (alerts are sent by our newsroom editors, but this person jumps in to listen and help people during big off-hours events). The two new people lets us have more people available during disaster times (such as wildfires) and to embed social into the newsroom’s core, rather than just being managed by geeks (like myself) in the corner.

I also sent out my goals and thinking behind the account and I’m following up with staff to make sure the account is less formulaic and more engaging.

Why does OCReggie exist?

• To learn about the community (story ideas, reader-generated content we should include in our publications, topics we should cover, sources)
• To enrich the community (send alerts about breaking news, help people find answers, begin or join in on conversations about o.c.’s daily interesting news and information).

I’d like for us to do more of the following:

• Listening to people
• Talking with people
• Finding story, source, topic and content ideas
• Sending out relevant content – not just OCRegister staff-created content

I compile the information for monthly mobile reports sent to newsroom staff, as well as marketing and advertising employees. The mobile share shows the shift of some segment of our audiences (or attraction of new audiences) to mobile products.

2010 mobile share of all digital traffic:

2.74%    January
3.67%    February
4.08%    March
3.45%    April
4.50%    May
7.64%    June
8.27%    July
9.22%    August
7.59%    September
9.55%    October
10.49%    November

I worked with the Register’s key web and mobile designer, Rick Ho, to create unified branding across the Register’s social media accounts. The first step is the Register’s Facebook pages.

I worked closely with the marketing and advertising departments, OCRegister social media users and our social audiences to use the same branding base for our mobile products and social accounts.

Our mobile group with a few new people added got to work on figuring out our approach for tablets.

Months later, the strategy and funding were approved by management.

Now the fine design details, specific content plans and workflow changes are now being decided based on the strategy our small tablet team (the small working group included myself and three others).

The key to our tablet strategy is that tablets are a true hybrid medium. At the present moment, tablets represent a perfect blend between online and offline, tactile and digital, involved and lean-back, mobile and desktop. Stay tuned on the latest tablet products to emerge based on this strategy.

The tool is built in the newsroom’s online content management system and it lets users send a breaking news alert to audiences on Twitter, on Facebook, via text message and (ultimately) via push notification.

Before this tool was created, editors would use multiple websites and processes to send an alert – such as that a wildfire had broken out in the forest. The tool auto populates with the best information (pulled from the story and headline) in the best format for each medium. A central bit.ly account lets the Register measure how many people click on each attached link. The new tool’s faster workflow implications also lets us created more niche text message streams for our audiences.

I took the lead on building a new OCRegister mobile website soon after the Freedom mobile project was approved.

The first version of our mobile site had these goals: be built by the Freedom IT department (rather than hosted and developed by a third-party), include multiple photos when included with stories, and add full metric tracking so we can learn how people use the site.

The new site may not be flashy, but it has solved numerous problems we experienced with the third-party mobile site and having access to full metrics has been invaluable as mobile traffic grows.

The newsroom’s first large transition during my time was from print-only to web-first. The newsroom’s new movement is to be audience-focused evenly across multiple channels.

The image at left shows the workflow steps for every journalist in delivering to our many audiences (print, web, mobile and social).

Sharing information among media companies is a great way to learn from and inspire others in how to build great experiences for mobile audiences.