An interview with Social Media & Campaigns Editor at The Times, and former Wannabe Hack, Nick Petrie.
Nabeelah: So you’ve just installed a new comment system – Livefire – How’re you finding that? Why did you decide to make the change?
Nick: Two reasons. One, Pluck, which is what we were on, was godawful, and expensive, and our contract was coming to an end.
Nabeelah: Why awful?
Nick: Because it didn’t move with the times. So for instance one of the things we wanted badly but didn’t have was email notifications. So if someone replies to your comment, you get an email. Pluck didn’t have it and they weren’t going to have it. So that was one of the features we were moving towards – so it wasn’t like we moved specifically to Livefire, we were just looking for that feature, among other things.
Nabeelah: One of the great things about Livefire is that it lets you create your own profile. Thinking of how The Guardian‘s built up their community by letting people have their own profiles, avatars, have some ownership over it – the paywall seems to be an issue with trying things like that.
Nick: Well the way that Livefire actually works is if you think of something like discuss, your profile on discuss is your profile on discus. So if you use it on The Telegrah it’s the same as if you use it on anything else. The way Livefire works is each installation is a one-time single installation, so when it runs as a single sign-on system like ours does, you don’t have a Livefire login you just have a Times login that gives you access to the comments. If you went to WannabeHacks and tried to comment with your Livefire login, you can’t because it doesn’t exist.
Nabeelah: But could you create a profile now on The Times website, and in a similar way have a little avatar and personalise it?
Nick: You have a profile as such, it’s just not enabled yet.
Nabeelah: So you can’t click on it and see it?
Nick: No. But we are reintroducing the ability to look at your comment history in a couple of weeks time. It’s more a case of getting these things out the door is quite hard, so you have to go out with a little and then add a little as you go.
Nabeelah: Because people don’t like change.
Nick: They can’t stand it.
Nabeelah: Do you have a long-term community-building strategy for The Times? It sounds like you have to do things very gradually and plan in that way.
Nick: We don’t have a particularly coherent one yet. It’s something that we are collecting data and information on so that we can better articulate where we’re at, and therefore know how far we are away from where we want to be.
Nabeelah: What sort of data and info collecting?
Nick: It’s looking at things like how much of our subscriber base actually comment. So we get 1500-2000 comments a day, but is that a thousand people leaving two comments, or two thousand people leaving one? Anecdotally evidence suggests that when a user engages with us they’re less likely to cancel their subscription. So if that proves to be true, we want more of our subscribers to comment.
Nabeelah: Do you know what kind of percentage of your readers are actually engaging or using the comment system?
Nick: Bleh, Ben does that with numbers.
Nabeelah: A rough idea?
Nick: A rough idea but this is in no way reliable – it’s probably less than 10%.
Nabeelah: How does the paywall affect all this – and does it affect the 89:10:1 ratio of ‘watchers: occasional users: active users’ often bandied about?
Nick: People definitely have a sense of ownership. In the changing over of this system, people have been like, you ruined our comment system…It’s probably still quite atypical in terms of those numbers, but I would say the volume is lower. I think The Telegraph is getting something like 17,000 comments a day at the moment. It’s easier to keep an eye on the good conversations, to encourage them, to guide them, to mould them, and to actually give an individual experience to all of the subscribers as well.
Nabeelah: Because you have that filter there?
Nick: Well also because we can know people. You see the names crop up, we know what they’re like, how to deal with them, what annoys them, what doesn’t, what articles they tend to comment on.
Nabeelah: Is it really a small enough community for that?
Nick: Well if you think about it and it’s less than ten percent of subscribers who are actually commenting, then we’re talking about 1300 people? I susoect The Guardian also recognise their persistent commenters. But yeah the moderators – who are the ones in the comments all day every day – they definitely know people.
Nabeelah: How has the paywall more broadly affected the process of managing communities, bringing them in, engaging with them?
Nick: Um, well it’s always been tough obviously because until about – what was it, 6-8 weeks ago – we didn’t have teaser pages. So when sharing content socially if you clicked a link and you either weren’t a subscriber or you were a subscriber but weren’t logged in, you had this very jarring experience where you just got a login page. And so now you get the first hundred words, the picture, the still of the video, whatever it may be. So I think we’re definitely taking steps in the right direction to tweak that paywall experience so it isn’t jarring, it doesn’t turn people away.
And it’s interesting that sometimes you see non-Times people sharing Times content and their mate comes back at them with “you’ve got to pay for it” and they go, “well, it’s good journalism”, and they go “oh well, maybe I’ll go take a look”. And now they can take a better look without having to pay. So we very much believe the quality of the journalism speaks for itself and we can give people a little sample every now and then to remind them what they’re missing.
Nabeelah: In that spirit, would you like The Times to move towards a freemium system?
Nick: Not particularly. I think it’s very important that we’ve put a value on what we do in the same way that an apple computer costs more because it’s a high quality product that will last for a long time. Apple say, “yeah we make a thirty percent profit on each laptop we sell, because it’s a great product.” I think it’s the same idea here. We have very hardworking journalists with a lot of experience who produce award winning journalism and it doesn’t come cheap.
Nabeelah: At the same time, people are becoming less willing to pay for stuff.The New York Times pioneered, which does seem similar to the kind of thing you’re suggesting in a way, give them a little teaser and if they want more…
Nick: Yeah but that’s quite a big teaser. Like ten articles per month plus whatever you want because all you’ve really got to do is put the headline into google and come via google. Same with the FT to some degree.
Nabeelah: Or switch to a new browser.
Nick: Or switch to a new browser, or clear your browsing history…any number of workarounds. I think that devalues it because it says we’d kind of like you to pay, but we’re really not that bothered. Because we’re not stopping you – it’s not that we can’t stop you, it’s that we’re not. No I think honestly if you sit down and you believe your journalism is worth being paid for, then it’s worth being paid for.
Nabeelah: What do you find are best social media tools for engaging people and also for social media campaigns. What platforms use most.
Nick: It really depends on what you’re up to – there’s not one platform that rules all. Different audiences are in different places. So twitter has been particularly good for us for the cycling campaign. It’s allowed us to reach out to a community that we don’t have access to – cyclists are not necessarily traditionally times readers. But that’s not necessarily the best place for the next campaign. it might be that we’re far more likely to get more response out of a Facebook group where people can have conversations, or a Pinterest board where people can share their favourite photographs. So I think you have to sit back and analyse what you’re setting out to do – you have to think about where you want to be and work backwards. Don’t go, “I’d really like to use twitter to do this”, go, “I’d like to do this, what shall I use for it?”.
Nabeelah: How many social media tools platforms that you have your eye on do you think are particularly going to grow in the future? Some people are backing Google Plus, some people are looking at other things.
Nick: Google Plus is interesting because of – you know Cadbury’s experience? So Cadbury’s have got a couple of case studies around Google lus leading up to the Olympics. So they were seeing a 17% increase in clickthroughs on Googl,e because when you’re logged into Google and you follow or like their page on Google Plus it bumps them up as a search result, (because they go oh you like Cadbury’s so therefore you’re going to be interested in their content related to your search terms). So I think they were jumping from page three to the second result when you searched for “London 2012” if you’d liked them in Google Plus – that’s huge. So that’s not the be all and end all but it’s certainly interesting.
And we’re looking at how being on Google and search engines in general are starting to include people’s social signifiers in their search results – because search is all about making sure you get the highest quality and more relevant information. Quality, they’ve got to define that in some way, but relevant is different for different people obviously. So being able to pull in their social signals to assign relevancy…
But again it’s sort of, it’s about what’s right at the time and for, pictures do better on Facebook you know and all of these things, so it’s just not doing things willy nilly it’s analysing and looking at how how your journalism best performs and figuring out what is actually the best way to tell this story. So sometimes audio is better than video because people don’t have the time to sit and watch but they can listen whilst they do other things.
Nabeelah: Do you think community management, working on social media campaigns – is it a different kind of journalism, not journalism at all, something separate to or related to traditional journalism?
Nick: Well journalism to me is two things, and it fundamentally boils down to one which is that it’s telling stories. So they may be stories of human interest, they may be stories of corruption, they may be stories of mass national importance. But ultimately what you’re trying to do is to take some information and boil it down, simplify it, contextualise it and give it to people in a manner that they can use in their lives – either to have a great conversation in the pub, to make a better decision in their work, and so that’s fundamentally what we’re doing. And the tools change in terms of how we get the information and the tools change in how we present that information, but the process of journalism is still taking information, giving it a narrative, and helping people understand what’s going on.
Nabeelah: We were talking about how given the paywall, there’s a smaller group of people commenting and more of a chance to get to know the commenters. I’m guessing it also means less trolling – what sort of engagement do you usually get with readers, and how wold you deal with the less positive ones, how active is the moderating etc?
Nick: So, everything is pre-moderated on the site, so none of the comments appear until they have been viewed by a moderator. And we’ve got some very clear comment guidelines in terms of what we consider to be inappropriate. But I mean the way we try to manage threads if we feel they’re getting a little off topic or people are going around in circles, is getting journalists to get involved. So sometimes they come in and thank people for their contributions, sometimes they come back and expand on a point that maybe they didn’t fully explain in their article.
Nabeelah: So a real policy of getting journalists to use the comments as well?
Nick: Yeah, but it’s something Ben and I are doing our best to encourage. The comments is specifically Ben’s responsibility.
Nabeelah: It’s sort of rewarding people for having good discussions.
Nick: Yeah. Ben has a fantastic example that he uses in presentations where two of our journalists ended up having a discussion in the comments and their comments are marked up differently so you can tell that they’re times journalists, and one commenter left a little comment going: “This is amazing” and then “*sits back, puts popcorn on*”.
Nabeelah: Because it’s free, extra content for them?
Nick: Well yeah but it’s not even just that. It’s seeing that these are real people who have their opinions and are prepared to defend their opinions. And prepared to actually engage and discuss things with our readers rather than going “here it is, take it or leave it.”
Nabeelah: Given the move to online only that seems to be a trend what with Newsweek, The Guardian new renewing their print presses. Do you think it will continue and if so how will it affect things like the use of social media, community management?
Nick: I mean I have a personal long term belief that the print decline will continue and continue significantly, possibly to the point where the Sunday’s are the only really viable print experience because of the nature of spreading it over your breakfast table with coffee and things. Print’s going to be around for a while yet. But it’s about age and digital literacy for me. So as more people come up not buying newspapers, never having bought a newspaper, not understanding this idea of sort of an edition, of here’s your home news, your foreign news, your comment, you’re just going “Well, you know, I like news about One Direction and I can go to eight different sites and read all the One Direction news and then I’m happy.” They don’t understand this idea of a package put together for them. So yes it will continue to change, but print will be around for a while.
Community management – and it’s long term because we’ve always managed our communities we’ve always had people write letters in – sometimes they were addressed in the paper.
Nabeelah: It’s a very different level of community management to the letters page though.
Nick: Yes, it’s bigger and much more in your face, but also the difference is just that sometimes the conversation that two people would have in the pub – oh did you read that piece in the times today – now they have it on twitter, and the difference is that we can see that, and hear it. And so nothing has fundamentally changed, it’s just the way we do it has changed.
Nabeelah: That’s a good way of putting it. On the subject of people people wanting a type of news, do you think there’s going to be more tailoring, a more individualised approach?
Nick: Well there already is in that with most sites you can subscribe to an RSS feed for a particular section or follow a section account rather than a whole account. It’s interesting because when you give readers lots of personalisation options – like the BBC’s previous homepage where you could choose the module that you had on it and where they were, so you could have a TV module or a sport module – and something crazy like only 2.5 percent of users actually chose where they wanted it. And that’s because they don’t want to have to spend the time doing it. It’s much faster to go to Google and put in the search term that you want, than it is to have to spend the time customising the BBC’s homepage.
So I think it’s slightly foolish to pursue too much personalisation because users always find ways to personalise it for themselves anyway. I bet if you asked ten Times readers to either open our iPad app or visit our website and said show us how you use it, some people will open it and go to business, some people will open it and have a bookmark for the music homepage and that’s how they’re going to come into the website, straight to music. So I don’t think any ten people would use our products in the same manner.
Nabeelah: Finally, what’s been your career path?
Nick: So I graduated from the university of Birmingham, two and a half years ago and went straight into an internship with the New Statesman. At the same time we launched Wannabe Hacks. Hacks led to a job at the guardian on their professional networks, so that was, I was working on the guardian voluntary network and The Guardian social enterprise network. From there I moved to The Telegraph where I worked with Kate Day as a community manager for her. And then I moved here to work with Ben, so Ben is communities editor and I am social media and campaigns editor. Yeah that’s a very simplified.
Nabeelah: What’s been most useful thing/best bit of advice for people looking to get into the same?
Nick: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. SO that doesn’t mean do a bad job and then go oh well it was a mistake I’ll learn from it, but you’ve got to be prepared to take risks. Try something that hasn’t been done before. it probably won’t work but learn from it. Don’t back yourself for no good reason but if you think something’s worth trying, argue your case. Lots of people are v quick to dismiss new ideas because they can’t see the value in them or they’re afraid of them. And i think a lot of opportunities get missed in that way.
Nabeelah: Any examples?
Nick: I can’t call anything to mind…I mean probably, things like with my university paper, we made a point of pursuing some investigative journalism in my year as editor and we had a really fantastic story about letting agents abusing students. Even though it was cast iron and we had photos and so on, the university’s lawyers said we were exposing ourselves to up to £250,000 worth of damages if they took us to court and we lost, even though it was a brilliant story. We’d done the groundwork, done the research, we knew it was right and everybody felt it was important enough to go for. And we did and they didn’t come after us because it was good.