Role

Director, Social Media: focus on daytime programming and business news

• Responsible for setting the best practices of the network
• Training people on social media changes and the corresponding strategy shifts
• Figure out automation through different products and tools
• Responsible for brand reach and getting CNBC brand out to new audiences
  • Creating content for social: Handles Instagram
  • Putting digital content through social filter (optimize on SocialFlow) and publish on the social platform that makes sense on
• Work closely with the digital teams to make it easy for them to contribute to social media
• Create weekly analytics report for interested parties
  • Can create one in 30 minutes – expert user

Goal

To drive referrals and grow brand reach for CNBC.

Overall, make the business sharable.

Work function in the team

• Herself as Director of Social Media
  • Product analytics
  • Partnerships
  • Handle all roadblocks so that people can produce their content easily
• Senior producer
  • Focuses on day to day editorial
• Associate producer
  • Work day-to-day across 7 different social networks
  • Can be up to 10, but 3 are automated
• Designer
  • Creates Graphics to be used in social media
  • Only designer in the Editorial teams

Experience

A year and 4 months with CNBC

Has minimal experience with Toolbelt

• Used it twice
• She doesn’t create content for digital, mostly helps distributing it
• It’s extremely confusing

Worked at a lot of different news companies with different CMSs:

• CBS: very early CMS, no social capability
• Local station at Austin: Homegrown, very old
• HLN: Drupal CMS. Nice and easy to use, but didn’t have a lot of options
• Worked with a team who developed iReport: ingested user-generated content in CMS – not good

Day-to-Day Work

By function

• Hot Seats
  • Someone is dedicated to understanding exactly what’s happening what’s happening right now and how many information needs to get distributed
• Requests
  • Small: Can you retweet me?
  • Big: We have a documentary coming, so what is our entire social strategy around that documentary going to look like?
  • Most request is to go up on Facebook
• Social Media related
  • Tweet from various accounts
    • Flagship CNBC account
    • Make It account
  • Optimize SocialFlow RSS feeds and distribute the publish times
  • Reoptimize the best performers
  • Check multiple sources to see what to post
    • Slack
    • Hunting on site
    • Check Twitter feed
• Content production
  • Across all the social platforms, pay special attention
• Looking at content and break it up efficiently
  • For video: should they turn it into GIF?
  • What resources they would need
  • Create something completely new based on the text
• Use Toolbelt to grab photos
• Specialties
  • Director
    • Monitor performance and weekly analysis
    • Picks up small tasks for the team
    • Produce for Instagram, produce for other platforms as well when creativity strikes
  • Senior Manager
    • Works with the TV crews or digital producers on any number of projects
    • Produce for Facebook, Make It Flagship
  • Producer
    • Owns brand called Make It, and tweets from Make It account
  • Associate Producer
    • Supports all the production throughout the day
    • Supports Make It accounts
    • Writes stories working with Make It and digital teams
    • Create content for the articles to get more traffic

By time

• Senior Manager in the morning
  • 7 AM – 10 AM
  • Morning sets the tone for the day and what the priorities are
  • Communicating and gathering assets from people on the TV side and on the digital side
  • Looking at what people are talking about, what’s trending, and informing the digital TV team
• Producer
  • Comes in at 8 AM, Hot Seat shift from 10  AM to 2 PM
• Associate Producer
  • Support all day, Hot Seat shift from 2PM to 6 PM
  • At night when the lighter amount of content comes in

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Work in Progress

Pain Points

• Difficult to collaborate without face-to-face meetings and only Slack
  • Trying to figure out how to work with different managers to create more collaborative environment
• Writing a story in Toolbelt in general is difficult
  • Finding how to hyperlink
  • Didn’t understand paragraph breaks – looked like modules
  • How to add photo
• Differences between photos are not clear
  • Thumbnail that shows up in the homepage vs. the picture inside the story
• How to upload graphics is not clear
  • Wanted to put graphics used in social media in Toolbelt
  • People were scared that parts of the infographic might get cut off because of different crop sizes
  • Also scared that somebody would use it as one of the thumbnails, not use it as embed
  • Couldn’t figure out how to solve for that, so the whole thing got scrapped
• RSS feed on SocialFlow does not update in real-time
• Once tried out editors tweeting out without approval – it was as if they forgot how to tweet
  • There would be benefits if they tweeted out immediately
  • They would need to get trained & get used to it
• Tried to send out daily reminders for people to share their content on social

Wants

• Have more collaboration with other teams, face-to-face
• Have digital producers and staff more involved
  • Educate them what works on social
  • Giving them feedback on how the article did
• People to communicate with the Social team when things are getting published
  • Appreciates Slack requests
• Latest Stories page in Toolbelt
  • To see all the stories that are published but the Social team didn’t get notified on
• RSS feed that pulls photos
  • To set up automated feed on LinkedIn, which does better for photos
• Clear, use-case-base labels on fields
  • Gets questions about which description fields will show up on Facebook, etc.
• Easy way to integrate social media on articles, e.g. embed
  • Currently, there’s a guideline on how to embed that someone else wrote
• Wants people to easily share their own content out to social
• Interested in the ability to tweet from CMS
  • Reminder for the editors to share after they publish
  • Pre-written Twitter or Facebook Headline that gets shared instead of article headline
    • both from front and back ends
    • How different the headlines would be, platform by platform?
  • Not sure how the social teams workflow shift would be – RSS feeds are working well currently
  • Thinks that can be done in the front-end
  • Thinks that writers know best which part is interesting – social team can give feedback and train them on how to write the social facing contents
• Interested in the ability to see statistics within CMS
  • Wants someone to easily check the stats of the story that one wrote
  • Relevant stats
    • Who’s linking the story
    • Who shared the story
    • How many shares did the story get
    • Which platform the story is popular on
    • Is the SEO effective
    • How many actual referrals
    • How much time people are spending on the story
  • The stats will help CNBC to learn:
    • Overall trends
    • How are those trends impacting what they’re doing
    • What kinds of stories are best for specific verticals
• Interested in predictive technology
  • Recommends based on the formula
    • e.g. This article might do well on the homepage, because it’s getting a lot of shares and have good SEO

Tools & Software

• SocialFlow
  • Takes all the 20 different RSS feeds and bring them into a queue
  • The social team manipulates the content, and schedules it to go out, optimizes it, or sends it out immediately
    • Manipulate the publishing time so that articles are spread out in publish time
  • Sometimes the content doesn’t get pulled real-time – looking into the issue
• RSS feeds
  • Set up to automatically tweet
• Slack
  • Communication with Digital team
  • Efficient when it doesn’t need a lot of back and forth, just for dropping requests
  • Different channels/groups help the communiation
    • Social team: talk about what they’re going to do and how they’re doing it
    • Graphics: Reviewing images before they go out
    • CNBC Social channel: post requests with links
    • Share industry information
    • Video: social video
  • Thinks that it doesn’t give a sense of camaraderie. Sometimes it’s hard to describe an idea or hard to understand what someone is saying
•  Email
  • Getting fewer and fewer
  • TV teams still email
• Chartbeat & CrowdTangle
  • Post through the channel
• Analytics tools
  • Domo
    • Referrals pacing overall from social
    • Engagement
  • Facebook Insights
    • Reach, follower counts
  • Spredfast
    • Engagement rates
    • Variation of contents
  • Omniture
    • Facebook stories with the highest referrals
    • Compare with 12 weeks before, 52 weeks before

Work Behaviors & Rules

• Don’t break it down by social network
  • Everybody produces for all social networks
• Publish everything in real-time
• If a team member is in a really good groove on one social platform, let that member handle the platform.
• Contents have to be on brand & about business news, not general news
• High-quality images to be used, especially on Instagram

Miscellaneous

Heard about CMSs that has sharing capabilities within

• CNN
• Business Insider from Jay