Many of you are familiar with the Chicago Tribune, a well respected newspaper. Unfortunately, like many traditional news outlets, the Chicago Tribute is forced to compete with new media, and new media is winning. So what does an old media like the Chicago Tribune do? Well, they join the new media revolution. In March of this year, the Chicago Tribune decided to engage the world through many of the popular social media channels that are out there such as facebook and twitter.
According to an article by The Star :
“The team – consisting of two coordinators, one managing editor and one social media strategist – identified five Web 2.0-type services to target: Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Digg.”
The Chicago Tribune decided to create an online persona and they named him Colonel Tribune. This new online marketing campaign has been running for around 6 months and has reportedly already generated an 8% increase in page views to the Chicago Tribune Site. Colonel Tribune has been so successful that he is even hosting his own tweetups in Chicago!
As social media becomes more pervasive it’s going to become imperative for traditional news sources to evolve and jump on the social media bandwagon. It’s great to see how a traditional news media outlet such as the Chicago Tribune is able to use new media so effectively.
How have you seen other traditional news outlets utilize social media?
What the hell? Don’t you guys have spellcheck?