I Spy With My BrandsEye: First Social Media Editor at the New York Times

We have spotted a delicious story for you this week. Traditional paper company, The New York Times, has been spied getting hip with it and moving with the times by appointing a Social Media editor.

Jennifer Preston, a 25 year veteran of the newspaper industry and now dubbed the Grey Lady, has been appointed the title; a first for the company. The reactions to this have been mixed, with some applauding the NYT and others more hesitant seeing Jen as nothing more than Social Media police destined to stop all employees from tweeting as freely as they have before. Jen opened up her private Twitter account to the ‘tweeple’ and asked her followers in a crowdsourcing attempt “how should the NYT be using Twitter”? A question that got over 1000 responses, not too shabby indeed. But have the NYT done the right thing? Or will the public see this as merely a thinly cloaked attempt to tighten communication?

This week we cast our net wider tracking 5 phrases, including abbreviations such as “Jen Preston” + “NYT”. The volumes were surprisingly overwhelming pulling in 815 mentions over the last week. Let’s have a look at what these mentions are saying.

What are the mentions saying?
 

In terms of sentiment, the mentions can be divided into three very clear groups;
 

• Those against Jen as the social media editor calling her a “Twitter Cop” (-1 Downplay)
• Those sitting on the fence merely reporting on the story (+1 Listing)
• Those for Jen calling the NYT “innovative”  for their “foresight”.

Downplays contributed the least mentions at 15.22%, endorsements were higher at 26.10% while listings dominated the mentions at 58.68%.

Why are there so many listings? Call me crazy but sometimes news needs to be reported on in an unbiased fashion. Surprisingly the majority of the Listings are not coming from Press but rather from Consumer mentions with Press mentions accounting for only 17.86% and Consumer mentions accounting for 53.57%. Enterprise mentions accounted for the remaining 28.57%. Why are Consumers taking such a neutral stance on this? Surely this affects consumers more than anyone else? Even more surprisingly 35.71% of the Listings came from Twitter. Usually outspoken consumers seems to be taking a back seat to this debate, leaving it up to the Press and Enterprise sites to ask the real questions.

The Downplays were evenly spread across Press mentions, 42.85% and Consumer mentions, 57.14%. No Enterprise mentions were rated with a -1 Downplay. The majority of the Endorsements are coming from Consumer mentions (50%), with the rest coming from Press mentions (16.67%) and Enterprise mentions (33.33%). This Tweet commends the NYT on their decision saying: “New York Times hires its first social media editor http://is.gd/JX9N. Good move NYT.”

NYT & Jen Preston’s reputation:

 
The above graph is an illustration of the reputation of the NYT in conjunction with Jen Preston’s appointment as Social Media Editor. Its shows the number of mentions decreasing as the week progressed as Jen became old news to some. It also shows Jen and the NYT’s reputation increasing as the mentions decrease. Their final reputation score sits at 1.31 (out of a possible 5). Not a bad score, but perhaps a bit neutral. As Seth Godin says “safe is risky”, if your users can’t be bothered to take a stance you stand the chance of not being talked about at all.

It will be interesting to see what Jen gets up to in the weeks to come. Will she be a passive voice, listening rather than leading the conversation or will she police the Social Media realm, tightening up all the channels of communication? We will be keeping our BrandsEye eye on it.