Jim Traynor, Rangers, and the decline of Scottish media

Much as I enjoyed Michael Grant's piece in The Herald this morning on Jim Traynor's move from the Daily Record and BBC to a senior comms role for Rangers, it missed one important piece of insight.  

If Grant is right and Rangers are successful in their media strategy to move away from servicing the needs of Scotland's newspapers and broadcasters in preference to direct channels like Facebook and the Rangers website to communicate with their support, how does this impact on the Scottish mainstream media? If Rangers and their significant supporter base don't need the Record, Sun, The Herald or Radio Clyde to provide the latest news from Ibrox, this can potentially have a huge impact on their numbers of viewers and readers, and consequently their advertising revenues.

 While it's clearly difficult to attract paying subscribers to online news services when free alternatives are easily available, you can definitely see that there might be a market in providing exclusive content direct to supporters when the service provided to external newspapers and broadcasters is restricted. Why should Rangers let others make money from exclusive interviews and stories when the club themselves could be reaping profits from clicks and building closer relationships with their customer base?

 I'm sure a few of Jim Traynor's former colleagues will continue to attempt to have some fun at his expense over the coming days and weeks. I'm also sure that if Michael Grant is right about Rangers' media strategy they'll only have a few months grace before this directly impacts on their own future, and not for the better.

How Third Sector organisations can use social media more effectively

I had the pleasure of running a couple of group sessions at the ACOSVO Annual Conference in Edinburgh earlier this month. 

Here's a Q&As on the main issues raised on the issue of how Third Sector organisations can use social media effectively.

What should we use social media for?

Different organisations and projects use social media for different things, you have to decide what goals will help drive your business. The Social Charity Index should be able to give you a few ideas from organisations already engaged with social media.

Do you need to better connect with your client base to let them know about new and events? Do you want to have a forum for individuals to share experiences and provide support to each other?  Have a look at Facebook and Twitter Pages of other organisations and projects in your area of expertise or sector and replicate good practice.

How do you get buy-in from staff?

The best approach for this is to be open and transparent with your staff and then ask for their help.

Have a session with your team to give them an introduction to social media tools and then ask them how they think Twitter/Facebook etc could help them in their own work.

Be supportive of your staff, and be upfront about your plans. You already trust your staff to speak to customers and clients in person, on the phone, and by email, so using social media is just another communication tool for this.

How can we measure the impact of our work through social media?

There are a number of free tools which can help you measure the impact of your work around social media. The ones I use most are:

           

Facebook’s free analytics tools for Pages. These appear at the top of the screen which you login as a page Admin. They tell you a range of stats, including how many likes you’ve had, how many people have seen your page etc.

Tweetreach.com is a great free tool for Twitter. It has a range of metrics, including how many people have seen your tweets, how many times your tweets have appeared and which tweets and followers have contributed most to your impact.

Should we link our social media channels together, and if so, how?

No!

Different people use Facebook and Twitter for different things, so don’t hook up your Facebook page to automatically update from Twitter (or vice versa). It’s OK to share content or to advertise your Facebook content from a Tweet, but give some thought to this rather than joining everything up.

A good rule of thumb is to update your Facebook page a few times a week, and to Tweet a few times a day.