36 MidMAY 2016 The Business Journal

Who’s Who,Said What.

Marketing experts offer tips about achieving engagement on social media platforms.

Your Content Must Be Compelling

ROUNDTABLE social media

Editor’s Note: The May edition of The Business Journal contained the first part of our Social Media Round Table. What follows is the second part of the discussion.

The Business Journal: What makes social media con-tent compelling? Anybody can type 140 characters on Twitter. But telling the story in a compelling way, that’s the trick. What catches people? All of you have a role in helping your clients make their stories more compelling. So let’s talk about this within the limitations of social

Participating in the round table discussion on social media that The Business Journal held April 13 were James Houck, president and owner of The Houck Agency; Holly Fritz, sales manager of IDMI.net; Dennis Schiraldi,

owner of CYO Marketing and Marketing Conference DOYO Live; Evan Sobinovsky, interactive director of the Prodigal Co.; Joe Kuzma, web developer and director of social media at Farris Marketing; Jeff Ryznar, owner of 898 Marketing; William Sherhag, director of social media at iSynergy; Jim Komara, digital director at Palo Creative; Alison Oyler, digital content strategist at Innis Maggiore Group; Tom Delamater, owner

of Delamater Media Group; and Richard Hahn, co-owner of Keynote Media Group.Copy editor Dennis LaRue moderated the discussion, leading the questions, aided by Publisher Andrea Wood, the vice president of market development, Gail Hettrick, and reporter Josh Medore. Cynthia M. Allen, a registered professional reporter with Steno Scribe, provided the verbatim transcript that LaRue condensed and edited. Natasha Clark shot the one-on-one interviews that followed and will run on Busi-nessJournalDaily.com. Tony Mancino took photographs of the participants during the 90-minute round table held at the Holiday Inn-Boardman. The first installment of the discussion appeared in our May edition.

media. People have limited attention spans that seem even more limited with social media. That’s where you come into the picture.

James Houck, The Houck Agency: The emphasis [for good content] is on headlines. You have to make your headlines clickable. It turns the old journal-ism on its ear. Now you start with the headline and then you figure out what the article is going to say. So you want come up with something that’s going to get people to click. There might be seven ways to do this, or 16 new ways. So think of headline first. Make it clickable. And then write the article.

Richard Hahn, co-owner of Keynote Media Group: You have to mix it up, too. You can’t talk about your company all the time. My philosophy, regardless of

the medium, is that it’s about people.We feature salespeople, or we feature the com-

pany president who went fishing last week and caught a big fish – those types of things. People like human-interest stories about the company as well.

We did one a couple weeks ago. The son of the owner of the company became the father of a baby girl. We posted pictures of the baby girl; it went crazy. Everybody’s throwing this sort of thing all over social media. It’s about developing a relationship that becomes very, very personal. Not just hardcore facts, products, services, statistics. You want to develop that personal relationship. Social media is about is that relationship building.

Joe Kuzma, Farris Marketing: We boil it down to

The Business Journal MidMAY 2016 37

See ROUNDTABLE, page 38

three things. You’re going to educate, you’re going to inform or you’re going to entertain. And when you post baby pictures, you’re entertaining.

We’ve all talked about educating our clients. Well, our clients know their business and they need to educate their [customers]. I don’t know anything about, say, roofing systems. But a roofer could educate me. And then as I learn about roofing, it builds that relationship so that you’re talking with someone instead of talking at someone. The entertainment component [encourages] more engagement. You may get more engagement than just comments, and likes, and gets shares and that.

Hahn, Keynote: A cli-ent supplies you with some content. Quite often the language is very esoteric, extremely technical. And our job is to boil that down so the consumer can understand this.

I want to talk about the size of roofing on shingles, or whatever it may be, what it’s made of? Is it going to keep my house dry? Yes, so here’s the benefits I’m going to provide you.

We do a lot of that and it’s about editing to make sense so the consumer can understand.

Dennis Schiraldi, CYO Marketing: Comes back to great storytelling. Good marketing is great story telling.

Social media is a very noisy environment. And to stand out in that crowd, it’s got to be completely compelling.

You have to find the human element in the story.We have crossed the chasm. Social media espe-

cially has given us the ability to take an unvarnished look at things. Last week offered a prime example. Jack Nicklaus was pulling up at the Masters [Tourna-ment in Augusta, Ga.] and going through security. This was captured on video. That’s a marketing video. Jack Nicklaus has a brand. He has a company. The Masters has a company.

There were 300,000 views of that video of him going through security at the Masters. As of yester-day, it was around 6.5 million views. Think about that.

We spend all this time varnishing a nice, finalized product. But that [unedited] video was greater testimony for The Masters because you have access you never had before.

Look at The Business Journal’s videos turned out over the past six months on the many restaurants in the area, and the interest gener-ated, not only for its business of selling advertising with the eyeballs that get to it. The businesses should recognize the value of the 100,000 views that you have delivered to White House Fruit Farm. …

Alison Oyler, digital content strategist, Innis

Maggiore: Some of the things we struggle with as advertisers – our clients too on social media – is embracing imperfection. We want to put something out there that is polished, and beautiful and lovely. And that’s not social media.

You don’t want it to look amateurish. You don’t want your high school-aged niece posting something. But you don’t have to post these beautiful, lovely images all the time. It can be a quick photo you snapped with your phone. That’s how you get the timeliness and rel-evance to your audience. If you constantly take the time to polish something until it’s perfect, you’re going to miss out.

Holly Fritz, IDMI: I fol-low [the site of a] rather large TV station that just ignores the people that keep asking them a question. They’re just ignoring it.

Are they ignoring it because they just keep throw-ing the teaser out there? Or are they ignoring it because someone else is doing their content?

[As mentioned] I don’t know your business day to day. I don’t know what’s wrong with that widget you make or sell. But that guy’s very angry about that widget and I don’t know how to re-spond to him. You do.

Just responding to people, whether it’s a negative com-ment or a positive comment, is imperative. To just ignore them is so dangerous.

The Business Journal: What do you do with the negative?

Fritz, IDMI: You respond to it. We had an experience where someone had a negative response to their service. Wasn’t our client.

Her response was to berate this woman on Yelp. She basically said, “We told you, we told you, blah,

blah, blah,” and at the end actually said, “And I hope you change your opinion of us.” And I thought, not with that response she’s not. She’s going to tell 27,000 other people to never shop there.

Just a response of “I’m sorry that you had such a bad experience. Come see me. Give me a call,” would have gone a long way.

The Business Journal: Do you ever advise a client to delete a negative criticism?

Fritz: I would say no.

The Business Journal: Dennis Schiraldi mentioned it’s all about great storytelling, not only what to put in, but what to leave out. What do you find your clients want to put in where inwardly you roll your eyes before saying,

“No, this is not a good idea to include this content”?Kuzma, Farris: We had a client, an industrial

business, that did a testimonial video of their em-ployees. They’re trying to recruit employees to work for them. And they wanted to use Phil Collins’ song “In the Air Tonight” as a lead-in, without under-standing all the ramifications. So we had to gently change their mind on that.

The Business Journal: We don’t understand. What was the problem?

Kuzma: With the video? Aside from licensing and related issues, it just doesn’t fit employee testimoni-als when you’re talking about guys in hardhats. “In the Air Tonight” playing in the background didn’t fit. It didn’t fit whatsoever.

Schiraldi, CYO: I do webinars for clients and I was coaching the CEO of a rather large health care organization through the presentation he was going to give. You have to be authentic. You have to be real on a webinar.

One of my two of my biggest beefs is reading the webinar [script]. When he was reading the webinar, you could hear him shuffle the papers [in his script]. It was that [“Anchorman”] Ron Burgundy moment where there were awkward pauses. A very difficult coaching movement.

You explain that you’re paying me for my advice and how this [should] go well. Those are difficult times when you’re dealing with A-type personalities that are running big businesses. They may not take advice very well.

Hahn: Or they’re the wrong spokesman in the first place. You get into that awk-ward situation where you’re trying to ease [that indi-vidual] out, say [indirectly], “You’re not the right guy.

Maybe this woman over here or that gentleman over here would be better because he knows the story.”

We see that a lot. The CEO or the board director is not necessarily the guy to be on camera.

Jeffrey Ryznar, 898 Marketing LLC: There was a question about negative comments: Should you take them down? Social media channels are the only marketing platform that is a dialogue. Embrace that, the good and the bad.

Because as authentic it as it could be, it’s raw. It’s you. It’s who you are.

If someone were to come into your brick-and-mortar store and start complaining, would you turn your back on them and walk away? Would you not even acknowledge their presence?

The same principles that you apply to your daily business in your brick-and-mortar should ap-ply here. Acknowledge a complaint. But [respond through] a different channel, one that’s private where you can handle it.

That shows everybody else that you are in tune with your clients, your customers, that you’re willing to respond, that you take social media very seriously.

If, at the end of the day, there is still a real prob-

Jeffrey Ryznar, 898 Marketing

‘The same principles you apply to your daily business in your brick-and-mortar should apply here.’

Alison Oyler, Innis Maggiore Group

‘You don’t want it to look amateurish. You don’t want your high school-aged niece posting something.’

Joe Kuzma, Farris Marketing

‘We boil it down to three things. You’re going to edu-cate, you’re go-ing to inform or you’re going to entertain.’

38 MidMAY 2016 The Business Journal

Roundtable: React to negative posts? From Page 37

lem, take it to a private session. Because you want to control that conversation. If you start getting into posting responses, a thread starts. Two other [unhappy] customers come on board – “Yeah, I had this happen to me, too” – and the train has left the station.

That’s why it comes back to you have to go all in with it. It’s not all good. You will have challenges. But look at those challenges as opportu-nities to showcase a different side of your business.

Maybe someone has never had a problem with your company.

Seeing how you respond-ed to that makes them aware of how you handle their problems, how you take care of your customers.

N i n e t i m e s o u t of 10 – this is what I love about social me-d ia – i f someone pos t s something bad about you and you’re doing your social media strat-egy well, one of your other customers will stick up for you.

They’re your ambassador. Every single “share,” every single “like,” every single “retweet,” every single Snapchat that they share, is an extension of your company.

Oyler, Innis Maggiore: The fear of negative feed-back often prevents clients from wanting to engage on social media and join in the first place.

Avoidance really isn’t an option. Because guess what? If your customer has something negative to say about you, they’re probably already saying it on

social media.By at least participating in

that conversation, you can help to guide it, and stay on message, and eventually the positive will begin to out-weigh that negative feedback.

Tom Delamater, Delama-ter Media Group: You asked whether there’s anything they shouldn’t be posting. The tougher challenge often is getting enough material, enough information to get it out there on social media

and post. That’s all a part of clients becoming comfortable,

businesses becoming comfortable with social media and marketing.

So I just encourage it. I have one client that’s a professional in an industry association. The chair-man of this association figured out how to post on the Facebook page we created. So every now and again, unbeknownst to me, his posts show up that

he puts out there. It may or may not have been what I would have advised, but that’s great. Because now he’s engaging, and he’s learning about it, and he’s using it. As a result, our discussions about it are more fruitful.

More small industries and small retail businesses are getting involved. I encourage their involvement, their ideas. Then we sort them out and see where they go.

Kuzma: As Tom says, just do it. And Alison said avoidance isn’t an option. There is a very good reason for that. We had a client who got one bad review, and it was sticking on the front of their Facebook page. They wanted to take it down, get off Facebook [as well]. Well, you can’t get rid of the review, get rid of Facebook entirely.

That’s silly, because the one thing you have to be set up for is that people are going to say negative things. Only one in seven people shares a positive experience to begin with. Everyone else is just angry, and they get behind their keyboard, and they start typing away.

Avoiding all of that isn’t the best option or best route to go, either, because there are ways – like on Facebook [where] you can check into a location, and then you absolutely have no control.

It’s just an automatically generated page for your business that you have not claimed. You don’t have control of that and people are still going to leave neg-ative feedback. So it’s better that you manage that. You have control and can overcome any objections.

And as Jeff said, take the conversation offline, because one thing you don’t want to put out there

William Sherhag, iSynergy

‘You’re over-saturating if you’re posting a couple times a day and get-ting no engage-ment.’

The Business Journal MidMAY 2016 39

See ROUNDTABLE, page 40

is your argument with someone. No matter how you phrase it, they might spin it back on you and it makes you look like a fool. If you can take it offline, you’re getting that personal, one-on-one interaction.

We all know people are a lot more courageous be-hind a keyboard than if they have to pick up a phone or see you in person. So level heads [should] prevail.

The Business Journal: Let’s talk about video and social media. What changes are happening? When you have a client that wants to put video up, what do you tell them? What should be in the video? The numbers say everybody’s watching video on social media. Where’s all this headed? And if you want a good video as opposed to what looks like your niece filmed it, what do you do?

Hahn: Sometimes those niece videos are OK. That’s a very homey, folksy way of approaching it for certain areas that you want to talk about. Could be very personal or something. But not necessarily for your product.

The Business Journal: Like the new baby?Hahn: But when you start talking about your

company and the quality of service you provide, you would need a quality video to do that.

Schiraldi: Context of the conversation is going to be absolutely everything. When you produce a B2B video for an industrial company, there is a certain way that it needs to be branded: look, feel and type of conversation.

But there also is the time where the next creative step in that process is to show the process, and we know that’s going to be a bit unfinished as well. Video is stretching beyond that. It’s that finished product to very highly engaging, high-quality In-stagram that looks like content marketing videos that run a minute or two: super-engaging with some music. You’re shooting it from odd angles; the light-ing’s great when you look at it.

It comes down to the client. It comes down to the context of how you paint that picture and tell that story.

Jim Komara, Palo Cre-ative: One thing to help make the transition: If you’re already spending $3,000 to $10,000 creating a TV spot or a cable TV spot, social media lets you extend the reach of the video you’re already creating by multipli-ers and multipliers. So it can now be a YouTube pre-roll. It can also be put on YouTube and Facebook. You can take a little snippet and shoot it to Instagram. So it really extends the mileage of any video you’re creating.

Hahn: Right. Another great use: you can do a short, like a minute-and-a-half video, and get it on

YouTube. But we’re finding sales departments at a lot of the companies, mostly B2B industrial compa-nies – all they’re doing is putting that little link in their emails to prospective clients. Clients click on it and go right to the video. It’s very, very effective. And it saves a lot of conversation. They see what the company is really all about. That link is important.

The Business Journal: Content obviously is what drives social media. But where do you draw the lines? What is too much content, and what’s too little content?

Komara, Palo: Even if you feel you have too little con-tent, you have to have some. Because having a presence increases your search engine ranking, for example. So if you have nothing on social media, you will also rank lower on Google.

Get something out there. If you have a Twitter account with only 10 tweets – and this is definitely my opinion – it’s better to have 10 tweets out there than to not have claimed your Twitter, have no Twit-ter handle, no presence at all.

That’s controversial. And too much video? Again, this is my opinion: I

like a lot of content. It’s difficult to create too much. [Pause.] I guess we have had some examples of real estate [agents] where they post every time they get a listing, and repost something so much that you see it too much.

If you’re posting a lot of repetitive content, if it’s on your business page, your reach is so small organically anyway.

It’s important to have the content there, but you’re not going to bother me because I’m only going to see it when I go to your page. So I would like to see all of your listings or all of your product, new products coming out on your business page.

Don’t do that on your personal page. Your per-sonal page is where you can really say too much, because the same people see your message over and over again.

It’s really tiring, if you’re my realtor friend, to see every new listing, and every time you showed a house, or every time you have an open house.

Fritz: Think of social me-dia like you would a cocktail party. There’s that person who comes in and just never stops talking about them-

selves, and who everyone’s steering away from. They will be “unfollowed,” “unfriended,” “unliked.” There is a fine line. You have to respect that people are looking at you and if you post too much, people

are just going to “unlike” you, because you have overdone it.

William Sherhag, iSynergy: There is an easy

metric for over-saturation. You’re over-saturating if you’re posting a couple times a day and getting no engagement. Then you have a problem.

It couldn’t be more obvious for Facebook. It’s go-ing to show you zero reach, zero likes, zero engagement. If you pay attention to met-rics, you’re going to find that right balance. Because you’re going to see when people are engaging with you.

The other big thing about engagement: Are you mea-suring what time of day you get your engagement? What time is your audience engag-ing with you on Facebook? It’s one of the most important things.

If you look at Facebook’s metrics, their last study found that Tuesdays and Thursdays are two of the highest days for engagement. I don’t get Tuesday, but I can see Thursday.

Evan Sobinovsky, Prodigal Co. Inc.: You don’t want to inflate the feed. You don’t want to see the same redundant content over and over. …

You can share content. Share it on one network on this day, and then two days later share it on Twitter. But make sure it’s branded content.

What most people don’t take advantage of is, when you are sharing or publishing posts, that you have the opportunity to re-brand the same content. You could change the headline or the video thumbnail so people don’t think it’s the same video.

YouTube gives you the option to start that video at different segments. So if you have a three-minute video, and you’re trying to reach them with a demo, you want the start time to be two minutes or two minutes and 30 seconds into the video. You can publish that post and that link will automatically

James Houck, The Houck Agency

‘The empha-sis [for good content] is on headlines. You have to make your headlines clickable.’

Holly Fritz, IDMI

‘Just respond-ing to people, whether it’s a negative comment or a positive comment, is imperative.’

Richard Hahn, Keynote Media

‘[Social media] is about developing a relationship that becomes very, very per-sonal.’

William Sherhag, Jeffrey Ryznar and Tom Delamater react to an observation.

40 MidMAY 2016 The Business Journal

Roundtable: New social media platforms? From Page 39start that video at that time.

Kuzma: If you think about it in the terms of go-ing for a job interview, those persons interviewing you are going to look for you on your social media. They’re going to search for you.

When you search for a business, you might not get to their website necessarily first [because of its] search rankings. You may arrive [first] at their Facebook or Twitter.

You don’t want that to look like a barren waste-land of no information, because then they may get the impression that you’re out of business. It goes back to the poorly set up Facebook page that doesn’t even have your phone number or list your address. So having some presence versus absolutely no pres-ence whatsoever [is deadly].

Sobinovsky, Prodigal: And these networks for SEO [search-engine optimization] or organic pur-poses are actually monitoring user-owner activity throughout the social networks. You could go under the hood, try to do the keywords to get your SEO up. But really, if you do get a bad review, or any review, you’re branded for that, and you’re going to bump up organically the more interaction you have among these networks. So create that cross interaction between Twitter and Facebook, or Facebook and Instagram, sharing links. If you’re blogging, make sure you curate your blog post, and then share it from your website to your Facebook page so people

see that in their feed. They’re opening up a new tab in a browser window that takes you to the full article on your website. Creating cross interaction is going to benefit you in an organic search.

The Business Journal: Most people in business have at least heard of Facebook, Google Plus, YouTube, Flickr and others. But what social media are you aware of that most adults are unaware of, social media popular with teens and young people who communicate through social media. Are there media that older adults should be aware of and younger people should be more sensitive about in what they post on these platforms?

Kuzma: We’re talking a lot about video here, and Periscope is one of the new-est [platforms] out there that allows you to stream live video. So if you have an event, it may give someone [who wasn’t there] an opportunity to see it and you get to engage with other people. That’s one of the least obvious.

And even Facebook now is trying to get into the live video streaming.

Schiraldi: I teach social media, communication marketing classes at Youngstown State University,

and it gives me access to people in the demographic 18 to 22 on the cutting edge of this movement.

To build off what Joe [Kuzma] said: The estab-lished social media platforms recognize it’s a product as you use a Facebook page to build engagement. Facebook has released 10 products in the past three, four months. The reactions button is something that seems very small, but it’s huge from a marketing perspective in that you can now get an emotional button on there.

Twitter is trying to figure out where they’re going. You now have applications within Twitter that give you advanced capabilities, but from a younger demographic where the kids are hanging out. Facebook is wildly ad-opted by the 45-plus crowd.

The Business Journal: And the kids left.

Schiraldi: And the kids don’t want to hang out with their parents on Friday night on Facebook – or in person.

Most working adults should have mastered Linke-dIn.

Snapchat is absolutely beyond huge. I communi-cate with the 50 students in my social media literacy class regularly through Snapchat.

I generally view their Snapchat Monday through Thursday. Come the weekend, I don’t view their Snapchat. Instagram is absolutely wildly huge as

Dennis Schiraldi, CYO Marketing

‘Snapchat is absolutely beyond huge ... Instagram is absolutely wildly huge as well.’

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The Business Journal MidMAY 2016 41

See ROUNDTABLE, page 42

well. I have a 15-year-old nephew who will post something on Instagram, and within 15 minutes he will have 500 likes of that picture. That’s visibility. That’s reach. He doesn’t have a Facebook account. He doesn’t care.

Don’t underest imate those. There are others like Yik Yak and private chat mes-saging platforms.

Ryznar, 898 Marketing: Yeah. I was talking to a 19-year old, and I asked him, “Why aren’t you on Face-book?”

And he tells me, “Because my mom ruined Facebook for me.” That’s where it’s go-ing with the millennials. But Snapchat is definitely huge. And the whole live video streaming, that’s that paradigm shift that is going to happen: at any moment someone can deliver content via televised video, live streaming video.

We talk about how in social media everybody is a journalist and everybody has an opinion. Now everybody can be their own television station. That’s going to start shaping up into a huge opportunity not only for content, but for businesses as well. Snapchat is great with millennials because poof it’s gone. There is no proof; you don’t know what I did on Thursday night, Mr. Schiraldi, so I’m good.

The challenge with Snapchat is it’s short incre-ments.

Now you see Facebook Live coming out. And what you’re going to see is a rebirth of these micro targeted efforts, because everybody is going to be doing this. And you’re going to see people shifting from a macro environment to a micro environment.

I just want stuff about education, so I’m going to go to this education-type social media platform that has all of these capabilities, that gives me exactly what I want, and I don’t have to deal with all the other stuff out there.

I always link it back to the music industry, be-cause the music industry is such a great example of how social media works and how businesses can make money and be popular on social media. There is content that people want and will pay for.

You even have musicians creating their own mu-sic sites with titles to combat this free music – Rhap-sody and Pandora. So Yik Yak is one that I love. …

It is phenomenal for the millennials. It basically is geo-targeted, and it has only the hash tags that you want. So you set up what you want, and it tells you what you are, and you have conversations with everybody in your proximity, not everywhere around

the world.You can talk to people

on campus. You can talk to people in your business. You can talk to people within your home, within your school. Hyper is another one taking off like Reddit and Instagram, and combining it. It’s going to shift from a 140-character mentality to a visual mentality very quickly.

Delamater, Delamater Media: From the research I’ve seen most recently, the

13- to 19-year-old crowd, Instagram is king. Twitter is still very strong and Snapchat is moving up fast. But Snapchat is around a hundred million, so we’re looking at still a fraction of what Facebook’s impact is. Sometimes I wonder what the future is going to be with the social media that are popular with the younger crowd.

When I was in high school, we wore bell-bottoms and our hair was long, and we wore goofy, shiny shirts like “Saturday Night Fever.” And now I dress like my dad did.

Are the kids going to stay with these platforms for a specific reason? Or as they become adults, will they start to adapt to the more power-ful social media? We don’t know the answer yet.

But what you see is a lot of young people come out of high school and college and join companies. Do they necessarily take those com-panies into Snapchat and Instagram? Or do they adapt what the companies are doing [in] the more established Facebook and Twitter and those platforms? We’re learning as we go.

The Business Journal: You’re talking about advertising budgets and what was spent on television. Now you want

to put some into video. Get out your crystal ball. And not just in terms of advertising budgets, but news. Those of us in the news business are always trying to figure out, “What are we going to do if people get their news on Facebook?” How will this play out?

Sherhag, iSynergy: It already has. I was in Boston right before the bombing at the marathon [April 15, 2013]. Remember how it broke? Not by traditional media. It broke by everyone uploading to YouTube, uploading their Facebook pages.

It already has started to make that transition. With the live stream platforms, especially YouTube’s, you can set up a studio in your house for under $500 and look almost as good as WYTV. So it goes back to the video. Live video is going to become more compelling. We’re going to be moved more to video in the next three to five years. You’ve got to get good video now if want to be an early adapter.

Fritz: There are still people that want to read and not watch a video. You mentioned the F8 conference with Facebook, and they were talking about the original threads. [The number of] people making a comment or a status update is ridiculously low. It has dropped considerably, because of what people are just sharing. We’re just sharing stories. The Busi-ness Journal writes an interesting story; I’m going to share that, like that. That’s what’s happening, whether it’s text or a video. [Most bloggers are] not doing original content anymore. They’re just sharing

what they see.

The Business Journal: But it has an impact on journalism, and journalists are concerned because of Facebook Instant Articles and everything else coming out that this idea that anybody can become a journal-ist. What happens to the filter [of editors]?

Houck, The Houck Agen-cy: That’s the downside. Be-cause businesses have their own network of followers, so they’re pumping out content,

but it only has one perspective, one source. The value a traditional publication offers is the ability to be objective in your news coverage. So when companies produce their own content, they offer only one perspective.

Jim Komara, Palo Creative

‘Periscope is one of the new-est [platforms] out there that allows you to s t ream l i ve video.’

Evan Sobinovsky, Prodigal Media

‘ Yo u d o n ’t want to inflate the feed. You don’t want to see the same re-dundant content over and over.’

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42 MidMAY 2016 The Business Journal

Roundtable: Journalism on social media? From Page 41

Tom Delamater, Delamater Media

‘ S n a p c h a t is around 100 m i l l i o n , s o we’re looking at still a fraction of what Face-book’s impact is.’

Komara: It’s important that traditional media companies make an aggressive effort to participate in the new media, like National Geographic. It has a Snapchat channel or site where you can see what they’re posting. I’m reading a lot of my news, because as a professional, if you’re marketing B2B, you’re still going to be looking for industry news that’s not just some random blog post written by anybody. I’m still looking for an authority, but I need to be able to find it on Twitter, and on my phone.

I still run into websites that aren’t even mobile-friendly, so when you click on it, I still can’t read it on my phone. Being aggressive and adopting the platform, making your content platform-friendly, and look good on the phone is really important.

Quick piggyback on what Bill was saying, break-ing news really does break on Twitter, first as to what I see happening. And as much as I don’t like reading all the political posts, the presidential candidates are taking full advantage of them.

So it was funny when you said, “Have you ever heard anything mentioned more than Twitter?” So many of us might not be using Twitter for business advertising as much as news, so some channels really lend themselves well to that.

Schiraldi: I’m hosting a digital marketing confer-ence on August 4th, DOYO Live, and our keynote speaker is Joe Pulizzi, one of the foremost authori-ties on concept marketing in the world. His book [The Seductive Power of the Dark Side (Rented Land)]

makes a lot of sense to me, that we all live in the digital world [but] you can still be very compelling with a traditional publication, as long as the quality is high. …

I had a meeting with a guy from WKBN who was talking about how he was in the newspaper busi-ness 10 years ago and nobody saw this: newspapers were too big to fail and they didn’t see this coming. But then Craigslist came out and said, You can run a free classified ad. Newspapers [asked themselves], what are we going to do?

The TV industry is prob-ably too big to fail because they’re buying up media companies.

They still have to address, how do you deliver [eyeballs to] advertising when people are [binge] watching an en-tire season of “Flaked,” or “Orange Is the New Black”? The TV industry is not naive but they have to be scared about selling really ex-pensive advertising at the national level.

Oyler: I hope that traditional media outlets see the value of social media and understand that you don’t just focus on building the brand of your own outlet, but build a brand of your staff, your reporters.

People are more inclined to follow individuals on

social media rather than brands. If WKSU is going to be covering something, for example, they should be padding the fact that M.L. Schultze is going to be there live tweeting it. Something like that. They should be focusing on their individuals.

Delamater: You ask about the future of social media as journalism. I wonder about it, too, be-cause the types of messages I get, whether they’re texts or a Facebook message, from my kids and my

son-in-law, who is in his late 20s, it’s funny stuff. It’s these viral videos. They send me links to these things just for a laugh.

I watch them, and I get most of them, I guess. But then I oftentimes send some-thing to them that’s a link to a story. I see them later, and ask, “Hey, you see that link I sent?”

“Yeah, I saw it. I didn’t read it.”

I find that more and more. I don’t know what that

means. But I do know that when it comes to their use of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and so on, it’s all about this viral stuff that is largely entertaining.

I have a sense that [younger people] will transi-tion to certain traditional things as they get older. But then again, they’re bumping 30 years old, and they’re still forwarding all this viral stuff. They’re not unintelligent people. That’s just their habit.

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