Meg Pickard: Getting your journalists engaging with your online community

“It’s quite difficult to persuade anybody to do things that they don’t want to do or that they don’t see value in”, says Meg Pickard, the Guardian‘s Head of Digital Engagement.

Persuading journalists to engage in online communities is easiest when you can explain where and why there is value in doing those activities. This could be:

• Finding new audiences
• Talking in new spaces
• Developing new skills
• Broadening  stories: growing insight, additional perspectives and adding ‘texture’

Meg believes that once this is explained, it becomes a compelling reason for engagement: “Most of the challenge is helping people to understand the proposition rather than getting them to do something they don’t want to do.”

Sceptics

Forcing someone to get involved in online communities is never an option. Meg says: “In the social media world, the worst person to be on Twitter is someone who doesn’t want to be on Twitter”. If you’re having problems with some of your team keep two key points in mind:

• It takes time to work out the best way to use all this technology
• If there’s no way that it can be used where the journalists are comfortable, don’t do it

Of course some people “don’t want to learn skills and don’t want to move on in the ways we publish and the kinds of audiences that we speak to.”

Organisational change

This can be an organisational change, something that individuals shouldn’t feel responsible for. Meg believes that organisations must try to collectively recognise:

• The world is changing
• We need to work out how we can embrace that.
• Because the alternative is running away from it screaming saying we dont want to play and we don’t want to be involved. And that’s not really an option is it?

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