Using social media, personality and passion

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about how using personality and passion, as well as a dash of social media, can make business journalism thrive.

Dvorkin writes, “I was struck last week by one particular post on Forbes.com that had personality and passion with a difference — the extra kick of a key social ingredient. Contributor Jessica Hagy’s The Six Enemies of Greatness (and Happiness) was quite unique in its own right: a series of six Venn, or indexed, diagrams each accompanied by just a little bit of text. Jessica publishes similar content on her own site (not recognized as a place for journalism) but posted this exclusively on our site (definitely a place for journalism).

“‘I can reach an audience my blog might not have found,’ Jessica told me in an email exchange. ‘Just checking my dashboard now (FORBES provides every contributor with a personalized data scoreboard), I think my stuff has nearly 2,000,000 views so far.’  One of Jessica’s earlier posts, a series of her indexed diagrams titled How to Be More Interesting (In 10 Simple Steps), racked up more than one million page views. Her book proposal based on the post attracted so much interest that her agent is holding an auction tomorrow to sell the publishing rights (Contributor David DiSalvo also sold a book based on his work on Forbes.com).

“Jessica, like all FORBES reporters and contributors, uses our tools to publish on our platform. Each writer interacts with our New Newsroom, but not in the traditional way. FORBES editors and producers don’t play the role of a gatekeeper, but work to support the efforts of content creators.”

Read more here.