On Being is a Peabody Award-winning public radio conversation and podcast, a Webby Award-winning website and online exploration, a publisher and public event convener. On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? We explore these questions in their richness and complexity in 21st-century lives and endeavors. We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact.
Wanderway spoke with Digital Editor Mariah Helgeson and CCO/Executive Editor Trent Gilliss to learn about how On Being attentively engages audiences across a range of social media channels.
How did you build audiences on different channels?
Our key product is the public radio show and podcast, On Being. Krista [the program’s host] lets our audience know that social media is a place that we inhabit. It’s not just, “Go to Facebook.” Social media offers a place that extends what we do—directly related to the radio show, yes, but also stuff we’re thinking about that we can’t possibly cover in the radio show. But beyond that I usually try to stay away from cross-promoting one social channel to another. If I’m on Twitter, I wouldn’t send somebody to Facebook or I wouldn’t send them to Instagram. I’d rather have the content native to that channel, or to send them to the space that we caretake, which is onbeing.org.
What I love about social media is that it can really build trust in your project and the personalities behind it. It can also tether people to people, rather than to entities or organizations. I really value social media in that way. It’s a way to introduce those voices and connect them.
What are the differences in how you approach each channel? How do you use channels for different things?
We were early adopters of Tumblr and that started out of pure need. Our parent organization at the time wouldn’t support a blog. I was doing a reporting trip to the rural parts of Alabama and I wanted to share my experiences—not just the reporting, but I wanted to show people what I saw and I wanted to do it knowing that I might not have access to Wi-Fi. At the time, Tumblr was a great way to report live on the ground. That was my inroad in two ways: first, I could start blogging about the experience in real time and second, I could also be very mobile with it. It not only served a utilitarian purpose but it also embraced the spontaneity of the moment and allowed for different kinds of media to come out in very short form, very immediate ways.
If you have a need within your own production process to do something, there is almost always a social platform that will allow you do that in some expedient manner that is not only native to the platform, but also native to you as a content creator or journalist inside a nonprofit or arts organization. That’s what I’ve loved about Tumblr. It allowed a pretty formal journalistic media project (On Being) to express itself differently and for new people.
For me, Tumblr is about discovering new communities that can then inform our journalistic process in very overt ways or in subtle ways. We’ve connected to a lot of different groups there that never listen to public radio, never listen to On Being, but discover some of the audio we’ve produced or some of the content around it.
It also allows our wonderful group of producers a vehicle to participate, to embody our work. They have varied interests. It could be about architecture. It could be somebody who travels a lot and just wants to show bits of the world and the people in it. It could just be beautiful quotes. Tumblr is a place for this and for us it doesn’t need to be vetted in the same way that a blog for our website or for our radio episodes would be. It can be more spontaneous or more personal. Something that goes up on Tumblr might be more in the vernacular or not so formalized. Or it won’t even be written into at all. It will just be posted; it won’t have to be explained. That’s what’s kind-of beautiful about these little vignettes. You don’t have to say much, you just post it.
I think Twitter is something like this, as well, but in much shorter form, and Twitter is a very public experience. For instance, we’ll have conversations on Twitter with people who might be tweeting about a show they listened to via podcast. Or they might be asking a question of Krista or they might be spreading the love about our weekly newsletter. So we engage in that dialogue on Twitter. It’s much more of an interactive space in that way.
We live-tweet Krista’s interviews for On Being in real time. We are selective in curating the nuggets of wisdom that come out of each interview. We’ve found that direct quotes are much more effective than reporting or paraphrasing the interview. If we were to just talk about it, not document it, we find it will not be as responded to. It won’t be liked as much or retweeted as much as direct quotes.
Tumblr and Twitter are not drivers; they don’t drive traffic to the website.
On the other hand, Facebook is a huge driver of traffic. I know that people are wary because of how Facebook’s algorithms change and then the changes shift what fans see in their personal feeds. On the other hand Facebook remains a powerful medium. We’re trying to cultivate a brand that asks deeper questions of meaning and offers a space where you can feel intimate and comfortable and safe. That’s what matters to us. Within our Facebook community there is a panoply of highly curated voices and a comment community that is original in thought, rather than acerbic and caustic. Our Facebook page has been a wonderful way for that to happen. A lot of times the comments happen in a way that is much more native on Facebook than they ever would be on our website. I love that robustness. People are more likely to share within those rhythms and that’s powerful because instead of 10,000 people, we can reach half a million—that just happened with one simple article.
“Likes” on Facebook are nice, but I think they’re just an indicator of people paying attention. I pay more attention to people sharing articles—I think that’s an important measure—and how they share them (do they write in and out of them?) That is another way for us to introduce people to On Being who’ve never listened to public radio, who may not be aware of our website, who may have adjacent interests but just don’t know we exist. Through those circles of friendships and tribes, people encounter us, and that’s why I think it’s most important to be on Facebook.
On Facebook what we’ve found to be effective is we do at least a daily post, but we don’t post on Facebook more than 3 times a day. We don’t want people to start tuning out because we’re white noise. We want to post stuff that is meaningful and makes them pause. They may not always click through or read everything, but they see it. My sense is that people that post too much drown out their own voice. We try to be very disciplined about that.
We’re finding that early morning is a wonderful space for our kind of content on Facebook. 5, 5:30 a.m. 8 or 9 at night also seems to be a good time for us—a few hours after supper, after the kids go to bed, when you settle in, because our work tends to be more thoughtful and contemplative and reflective. We want people to sink into that. When we post to Facebook we often start with a quotation rather than just a description.
We do some paid advertising, boosting posts. I’ve found that to be very valuable. In my key metric on what makes those successful or not, is not necessarily the number of likes or reach of that paid advertising. It’s the number of people who then like our page. Once they like our page, they’ve subscribed to our feed directly. Now we have a higher likelihood of our content showing up in their regular Facebook personal feeds.
We’re on Instagram and that’s something that we’re still playing with. How do we find our style in there? We sometimes do behind-the-scenes posts or Instagram postcards where there is a lovely image that might be curated from one of our readers or listeners, or someone we admire, along with a saying or a quote or a poem. It’s a way of resharing the community that has invested in us. There are some wonderful creative people out there. And we have some people who aren’t on Facebook, but they’re on Instagram, and vice-versa.
For LinkedIn, where we’re a little newer to it, we’re kind-of dancing slowly. LinkedIn is a particular group that is coming in for particular things. One thing about our content is that it’s about inner life and outer change and how those two work together. For LinkedIn, there is a focus on vocation, so things that have to do with being a better person that might weave into one’s work life are important there. There might be leadership sensibilities in the content. We may not feature stuff that doesn’t have a bit about lessons—about how to be a better manager, how to be a better colleague, how to lead a better life between work and personal life.
Soundcloud is an interesting example for a podcast and radio program. We first created a relationship with Soundcloud to have a place to store all of our audio when we split off from our parent organization. That was a great way to defray costs because it was in-line with their strategy of being a place where people come for content as well as music. It was a zero-cost transfer for us. So they were going to host all our audio, which then streams to our website, to our mobile apps, to Tumblr, and that was all for free. So there was a very practical business decision about that. What I’ve loved about that space is that it’s also a listening community. It’s a social space that responds whether in audio comments or they start to pay attention. The users there never listen to public radio; they’re more international. They tend to skew younger than traditional public radio audiences. That has been a space for new types of listeners and a different encounter with On Being.
How do you know where to put more energy and attention versus maintaining an account with low-level effort?
Google+ for example, no matter what we post, the number of people commenting, or liking, or sharing stays the same. It has plateaued. It has plateaued for a long time. Something I’ve learned about these media channels—and this is social, website, or audio channels—if they don’t plateau and then spike a little bit, plateau, and spike, then that’s probably a community that either we’re not cultivating properly or that’s not a robust community to begin with.
After a few months of plateauing like that and trying some experimentation, I’ll say let’s back off it. Let’s focus on the ones we know are doing well. That can manifest itself in very mundane ways. I think a lot of times media projects like ours respond to criticism—negative criticism—rather than positive feedback. We get a lot of people that say, “What you’ve done has made a difference in this way…” It’s part of the spirit of this project to be hospitable. Which would mean we should say thank you to them. If “this is wrong,” we’ll respond because we want to either balance or correct the record, or give a response that is thoughtful.
Sometimes we neglect our strongest audience, the people who thank us. Which is 95%! So I’ll redirect energy in those very nondescript ways. Let’s make sure that we say thank you or acknowledge it, even with a like. Or let’s focus on Tumblr where it’s not just about posting our own stuff, but also about reblogging stuff we find valuable, using our media platform to elevate other people’s curatorial sensibilities. So I’ll redirect that way because we know we have a robust Tumblr community. Which means paying attention as much as just hitting the reblog button.
Do you have any advice for someone just starting out in digital engagement and thinking about where to put energy across different channels?
I think what I’ve learned about all of these channels is these are very particular communities and if you don’t have human touch points with them—you’re just using them as a forum to push your content without personalization or a human hand that provides that touch point—it will fall flat. You will work really hard and people won’t attach to you. It won’t be an emotional experience. I think with good marketing, good experiences, there’s an emotional experience—“Man, I really relate to what they’re doing.” It doesn’t have to be this first-person voice that feels like a blogger, but it does have to have a first-person sensibility behind it. A quality that feels like, “Hey this is somebody that is caretaking and nurturing this.” I’d say, do fewer channels, but really pay attention to them. Also align it to your goals.
One of the things I’ve realized, especially in the nonprofit world, is that there’s this double or triple bottom line, but sometimes people are afraid to say it out loud. I’ll give an example, at my previous organization there was the idea that we don’t care about page views and unique visitors; we really want to cultivate conversation and community, we want deep engagement. But, on the other hand, at the end of the month, there was a PDF that was shared company-wide that basically presented quantitative numbers for number of page views, unique visitors, downloads. It was all about the quantitative. If those numbers do matter then chose your social media and where you put your efforts in-line with that really matters to you.
Also, what kind of community do you want to build? Is it really a demographic you want to build for push reasons, or do you want to build a self-correcting community or a community that connects with itself through you as that organization or that media project? What do you want to cultivate there? How do you want to empower those people that come to you? And how much effort do you have toward that?
And consider how different it is to use Twitter on your phone versus on the website, and that comes right down to the icon that you choose. I think that’s an important part of social. We’ve designed icons and logos that are about the mobile first experience. That’s part of your social stream, too.
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