Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Reuters.com executive editor Dan Colarusso about its social media strategy.
Here is an excerpt of what Colarusso said:
Until four or five months ago, we only had social media for [Reuters.com] out of New York. We hired Jamillah Knowles to be deputy social editor out of London, to keep us starting a conversation earlier around stories and to give us a truly global feel. That’s one part, just expanding how often we’re actually manually active on [social]. We’re pitching stories forward and putting stuff out that’s not on an auto feed. It’s engendering conversation.
The other thing we’ve done — we haven’t done it in hard news yet, but we’ve done it in personal finance here in the States — is Twitter chats with readers and our wealth team. Lauren Youngruns them out of New York, and we do one a month right now. We’re thinking of expanding that to news and other issues.
I think the way [engagement] was being done, the game had passed it by. We’re in a unique position to put a fine point on engagement. I consider us to be in the age of engagement right now, in the sense that our social thrust has a very specific plan behind it. Rebuilding our CMS and tweaking our article-level pages is about engagement.
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