I enjoyed today’s panel at Social Media Week, with Paul Murphy of the Financial Times, presenting FT Tilt, followed by a panel on "News Dissemination in a Social Finance World". Howard Lindzon was a highly entertaining moderator.
Twitter tag for discussion: #SMWFT
FT Tilt is a new premium online financial news and analysis service focused exclusively on the emerging world. FT was observing the growth of emerging markets, and decided it needed more coverage there. So here’s what they did:
-redeployed the existing FT network
-Expand FT.com with initiatives like beyond BRICs
-Created new specialist titles like China Confidential and Brazil Confidential.
-Launched FT Tilt (Tilt.ft.com): granular coverage of companies and markets ex-G3. Premium subscription product with complimentary community area, launched Jan. 10. Bases: HK, Dubai, Singapore, HK
All members can write & publish content alongside Tilt’s journalists. Two tiers to Tilt: Tilt Pro, and Tilt Populi (complimentary, but membership is filtered). Our members feel much more comfortable in gated communities, because of compliance, reputational risk, etc.
PANEL
Introduced by Ben Weiss, VP Biz Dev, Stocktwits
Cardiff Garcia, Reporter, FT Alphaville
Herb Greenberg, Senior Stock Commentator at CNBC
Robert Harles, Global Head of Social Media at Bloomberg LP
Paul La Monica, Assistant Managing Editor, CNNMoney
Jaime Punishill, Global Head Wealth Online at Thomson Reuters
Moderator: Howard Lindzon, Founder and CEO of StockTwits (stocktwits.com) and Managing Partner of Social Leverage.
Q: How has the news production/editing process changed?
Greenberg: I once got a Twitter post from someone, and in 10 minutes I was discussing it on TV.
A problem I have is I get a lot of tips from people, and may come with minimal identifying information. It’s my name on the line; I cant discuss publicly their analysis without understanding where their coming from.
Q: Robert, What is it like being hated at Bloomberg?
H: I’m the first hire focused on social media at Bloomberg.
Q: How did it happen?
H: My first objective is to do no harm. If companies like ours get it right, then we do no harm.
Q: What is the typical day at CNN in terms of working with social media?
L: CNNMoney is a separate site, but we’re very sensitive to being part of the broader CNN brand.
Q: What are the pressures on Alphaville?
G: We try to be as insightful as possible. At a mainstream news organization, Paul Murphy was able to start a site where all the journalists ha d to assume the readers knew more than they did. All of our innovations since then have been to enable better communication between readers and journalists. Readers know just as much as we do.
We get a lot of ideas from blogs.
Blogs are good at driving a conversation deeper and sussing out nuances.
Q: Speaking of Ambien, let’s talk about Reuters—the borg.
P: Our API powers Schwab.com and other major finance sites. Our real value is insight and curation.
We put social media experts in every team. It’s a distributed competency.
We don’t have a center that tries to control social media—it’s best suited to be on the edge.
Q: What products do you use the most (other than your own)?
G: RSS Reader, Twitter. Do you want me to say Stocktwits?! I’m a member; I signed up when I found out I was going to be on the panel. (big laugh)
Greenberg: Twitter, then mainstream media.
Harles: Techcrunch, Mashable
LaMonica: ESPN. WSJ. Briefing.com .
P: I open and close the day with Twitter.
P: We’re about to enter stupidland in terms of valuations for Twitter and Facebook. It’s 1997 and we’re debating the value of Amazon.
Stacy-Marie Ishmael: Robert, How do you address the challenge that you’re working for a company that doesn’t allow its journalists to have a social media presence.
Unsolicited question from audience:
How do you deal with people putting stuff on Stocktwits (e.g., Geckler) which is not accurately representing what they’re doing?
Lindzon: We have a timeline . You cant delete messages. There’s a flag button. We’re relying on the community. This is not a new problem.
P: This highlights the health of the community. On general entries on Wikipedia, misleading entries get fixed within 17 minutes. Edge topics have a longer lag time.
Lindzon: 90% of people lurk; they’re there to follow/glean.
H: You’re going to see much better filtration of who gets allowed to post on these online communities.
(Image via CrunchBase)
