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The Danish newspaper Urban recently launched a facebook page to start a dialogue with users and readers in a new way. The page “Det må du (heller) ikke” (You’re not allowed to do that (either)) relates to a series of articles about the increasing number of rules and regulations in Denmark.
Urban already has an active blog universe (www.urbanblog.dk) from where a great deal of content is used in the newspaper, but in this case Urban wanted users to relate to the issues before, and when, writing the articles. The existing blog universe wasn’t suited for this kind of dialogue, because the users in the blogosphere usually relate to texts written by others.
By embracing a social media platform as Facebook, Urban has furthermore tapped into a much larger crowd of people than in their own blog universe.
“Instead of insisting that dialogue must take place on our own website, it is obviously easier to meet readers where they already are. So in this context we think of Facebook as an opportunity rather than as a competitor,” explains Henrik Bay, Editor in Chief at Urban.
“People apparently like our Facebook-page because they care for the topic (too many rules and regulations) and really want to discuss and comment on it, and the result has been a lively debate that we could lift from Facebook directly, almost unedited, into the newspaper.”
One of the newspaper’s young and tech-savvy journalists Sara Zankel has updated the page daily and responded to the questions and comments. While monitoring the dialogue she hasn’t hesitated to delete comments that were offensive towards others. Her style has been very direct and personal, which has made a lot of people contribute with opinions and stories from their own life, e.g. with examples on how people have broken the law (crossing a red light, driving with a knife in the car etc). Besides the chance to draw on the contributions, Sara Zankel has also enjoyed this extended opportunity for direct feedback from the people reading her articles.
Because of the great response to the Facebook page, Henrik Bay believes that the experiment has succeeded quite well. The goal was to reach 1,000 followers within four weeks and now the page has attracted more than 1,900 from a diverse age group.
For Urban the Facebook page has brought enlightened views in an entertaining way. Especially because of the “One-liner culture” that has developed on Facebook. “It is working well in the newspaper and in the future we will definitely focus on integrating social media further in our journalism,” says Henrik Bay.
For other business, Urban’s facebook experiment might raise some interesting questions:
- Why struggle to get people to your own site when you can easily interact with them on facebook?
- Why not engage your users/readers/clients in the production of content?
- How can online interaction with clients bring value to your employees?
Picture sources: The picture in the beginning of the post is one of the pictures posted by users on the Facebook page
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