Social Apps for Working Journalists

Wordpress for iPhone

One of the most delightful – and scary – realities of social media is that the distance between journalist and reader has narrowed to zero. No matter whether you work for a newspaper – where your boss now expects you to blog daily – or syndicate your own column to a paying subscriber base, there is no longer a wall between creator and consumer. Your readers will provide feedback, like it or not. Why not strengthen that bond by keeping your biggest fans coming back to you for more?

When you’re on the road, you’re in an ideal position to share your experiences – live, raw, and exotic – with your readers. These are the free apps I’ve found most effective in keeping a dialogue going with my own audience, and how I’ve used them while traveling.

Facebook: Instant Karma

Nothing gets your Facebook friends buzzing like a few choice images uploaded from a locale they’ll never visit, or a funny find – misspelled signs, weird sculpture, and other roadside kitsch – as you travel. Use the Camera app to seize the moment and the free Facebook app to share it with your peeps.

I find the Facebook app easier to use than Facebook itself. Notifications pop up at the bottom of your Live Feed, so you can see who’s left a comment and follow up on your own comments throughout this social universe.

Do you manage a business or group page on Facebook? Favorite the pages you maintain and they’ll show up on a separate screen where you can get to them quickly and share content on them as well when you travel.

Twitter and TwitPic: Sense of immediacy

Twitter is NOW. How more now can you be when roaming around with an iPhone in hand? This works especially well when you’re in a position to report about a destination while you’re reseaching it for your own purposes. Whether it’s a pre-trip or day trip during an SATW function or just a day when you’re out and about collecting information for your next article, shoot a few bits of travel savvy back to your audience as you’re on the go. See that a restaurant changed hands? Give your followers a heads-up!  Have to do an end-run around a major traffic jam? Fling that out to Twitter, and you’d be surprised how quickly, and virally, tiny bursts of information that are important to enough people keep being passed on.

TwitPic is the visual counterpart to Twitter. Like Facebook, it’s there to let you snap a photo and post it immediately. Unlike Facebook (unless you’ve left your privacy settings wide open), the entire world can see your TwitPic – and your related tweet will drive them to it. Use wisely.

Foursquare: Peek-A-Boo

A growing contingent of smart phone users have gotten into the Foursquare game. Facebook even recently added a Foursquare-like map marker so you can instantly let your followers know exactly where you are. It’s the easiest way to push a virtual pin in an online map and say “Hey, I’m here! Now follow me around!” In their own words, Foursquare is a “social city guide.” Most importantly to travel journalists, it’s quickly becoming a viable source of insider tips for best restaurants, hotels, and more, delivered instantly.

Crowdsourced competition? Yes. But you can use it to your advantage, too, by connecting it to your other social media accounts. When you sign up for Foursquare, you’re automatically prompted to connect it with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Now let’s say you’re talking a walking tour of Leipzig. Use Foursquare to check in at various landmarks, and a map of where you are pops up on Facebook. You can then snap a photo and upload it to Facebook along with a brief comment about the location.

For public relations professionals, Foursquare is a creative way to engage visitors who come to your property or destination. Since the program tracks who visits where, and awards points (and the title of “Mayor”) to people who actively show up at one location over and over again, you can reward loyal customers by offering time-limited specials. Foursquare will provide you with free analytics so you can track how many of their enthusiasts are popping up around your town. Learn more at http://foursquare.com/businesses/

WordPress: The Wrap-Up

One of my favorite uses of my iPhone while on the road is to add posts to my blogs. It beats firing up the laptop just to log in and write a post, since I can sit while I’m waiting for a bus (or on a bus), dig through my photo gallery, and write a short piece around something I saw recently.

If you’re using WordPress as a website, great! You can write new content pages right from your phone, or edit existing pages. The WordPress app enables you to manually approve or deny incoming blog comments, as well.

The downside: no scheduled posts. You can write your blog and keep it on your iPhone until you decide to publish it later, but you must manually publish the post. And it doesn’t carry the bells and whistles of your plug-ins – what you can write and embed is pretty basic, but good enough for bouncing down a dirt road in the back of a van on the way home from Patagonia. It takes practice to master typing on a tiny surface, but once you do, you’ll be hooked. No more waiting to get home (or to the hotel) to file today’s story!

Note: If you’re traveling internationally, be aware that you need to opt into a temporary international data roaming plan with your phone provider before you leave home, lest you accidently run up enormous data charges by blogging and tweeting from the streets of Leipzig. iPhone users, see http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/international/roaming/iphone-travel-tips.jsp for details.

First published in the SATW Traveler,  Summer 2010