Socialising Digital Story-telling: Building Community and Sharing Your News
By Julie Posetti (DCI 6.0 speaker)
Social media has delivered new buzzwords – words like authenticity, engagement and community building – concepts that many content creators are still struggling with.
In my DCI presentation, ‘Social Media: The Digital Citizen’s Toolkit for Online Community Building’, I’ll be exploring these ideas in an interactive session designed to help participants develop social media strategies for their stories – from crowdsourcing research to sharing content.
I’m a journalism academic from the University of Canberra in Australia who’s writing a PhD thesis called the Twitterisation of Journalism. And I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues as journalism’s (however you define it) been transformed before our eyes, at the speed of a tweet! I also consult on social strategy and train journalists and other public communicators in social story telling – including those who work for Australia’s oldest newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, the national multicultural broadcaster SBS, and just last week, the overseer of Australia’s access to information, the Commonwealth Ombudsman and his staff.
I draw extensively on my long career as a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and my ongoing role as a reporter on digital media transformation for PBS MediaShift in my social media training and consultancy.
While issues like verification amidst the noise of social media, the blurring of lines between the personal and the public in the social sphere, and implications of constant engagement warrant examination, there’s no doubt in my mind that the future of story-telling is both social and mobile.
My DCI session will explore the role of the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter in crowdsourcing, story-telling and community building. The seminar will highlight the role of ‘audience’ engagement in the development of online communities invested in quality content. During the seminar, I’ll workshop social media strategies for your stories in ‘realtime’.
So, please bring your ideas for current or future stories and campaigns to the seminar and we can collectively devise approaches to take your social media presence from one-way broadcast to story-generating conversation.
