When the recent surprise earthquake jolted Mineral, Virginia – the shock waves rolled out in all directions.  While most of the coverage centered on Washington, DC and New York City, the tremor was also felt in Columbus, Ohio – 444 miles from the epicenter.

WCMH – the Media General NBC affiliate in Ohio’s capital city – quickly jumped on the story when phone calls started rolling into the newsroom.  Within a minute of the earthquake WCMH’s email inbox was filled with people asking what happened.  Before they even put the breaking news story on their traditional TV platform – reporter Tom Brockman created a Twitter hash tag – #Columbusquake, and other news staffers started engaging in conversations with their 33,000 Facebook fans.  Of course, other people in the WCMH newsroom were also answering phone calls and emails from people wanting to relate their earthquake experience.

Denise Yost, WCMH Multimedia Content Manager, says once the hash tag went up – the Twitter traffic immediately took off.  She says on the day of the earthquake WCMH’s Twitter traffic tripled.  The Tweets flowed in – not just from Ohio – but from all over the country as the Twitter users shared their experiences with each other and the TV station.  They also received hundreds of comments on the station’s Facebook page.

WCMH Director of Digital Content Ike Walker says, “When you have a big event like this  email and the phone are still very important, but the best way to immediately react with your customers is to go to social media and establish a beachhead with a hash tag.”  “It is important,” Walker notes, “to establish a beachhead to own the story.”

Of course, the bread and butter of WCMH’s multi-platform news strategy is their own website.  So, even as news staffers were heavily engaged with customers on social media sites – WCMH created a special story about the earthquake on NBC4i.com.  They also constructed a Google map with pinpoints to show how widespread the reports were.  In addition, there were constant updates on the Continuous News section of the station’s website.

The earthquake story generated over 30,000 page views, compared to the second most viewed story of the day – a missing woman – that garnered 4,500 page views.  Overall WCMH’s web site traffic was over 170,000 for the day – an increase of 40,000 over a normal Tuesday.  The special earthquake map had 1,072 page views – an unusually high number.

Here are some important takeaways from the earthquake story coverage from WCMH’s Walker.  “When a big story hits,” he says “you want to dominate the conversation immediately on social media and quickly establish a special hash tag on Twitter.”   It is also important that the entire news staff instantly become part of that conversation on your station website, Twitter and Facebook.  You truly have to fan out your resources onto multiple platforms.

Walker also points out,  “Don’t shy away from using the free tools out there – like google maps – to organize all the info coming in and  build a strata of information to dominate the conversation.”

The WCMH experience is an excellent reminder that when something happens to a community of people these days – they want to share those experiences right away – and your news staff must quickly become part of that conversation on multiple platforms to serve your customers and dominate the most important conversation of that day.

Jim

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2011 at 8:18 am and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.