NAA Community

The NAA Community blog explores a range of beneficial Community features, offering tips, tricks and expert advice to help you -- and your business -- get the most out of your Community. Visit us weekly to get the latest advice on navigating the Community and discovering all it has to offer. If you need additional help, you can always visit the NAA Community Help Page or call 571-366-1200. If you have a topic you'd like to see discussed in this blog, please submit it to feedback@naa.org

As promised in our first blog post, the NAA Community blog is the place to come for tips and tricks on using the Community to the fullest advantage. In addition to the technical help I've provided thus far, I'd like to discuss the many ways in which you can use Social Networking to enhance your business. NAA Community is a new Social Network designed as a tool for you to connect with colleagues and industry experts in new ways.

It's no secret that the world has gone digital, or that the news media business has been swept up in the whirlwind of expanding technological opportunities. And newspapers -- sometimes grudgingly, and sometimes with open arms -- have worked hard to adapt to the evolving media landscape.

No doubt your business has laid the necessary groundwork: your newspaper created a Web site, giving readers the option to access your content via the Internet; you've created avenues for interactivity, allowing readers to comment on stories or even contribute photos and eye-witness accounts of local events; maybe your newspaper has begun creating podcasts, or you have reporters who blog from the newspaper Web site; and many of your newsrooms have likely been reorganized to reflect the changing structure and hierarchy of the news media world. But these examples are only a small sample of what "going digital" really means.

Much of what it means to go digital revolves around increasing your outreach and accessibility to your readership; but there are a lot of opportunities for enhancing your business internally using the Web and other evolving technologies. Social Networking, for example, has taken the digital world by storm in recent years, with sites such as MySpace and Facebook drawing worldwide usership and becoming a new form of communication between friends, coworkers, organizations and other groups of people. This trend is part of what Forrester Research, and independent business and technology research firm, calls "the groundswell." Forrester's Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li authored a book, Groundswell, in which they discuss the phenomenon and suggest methods for businesses to take advantage of the powerful opportunities it creates. The authors describe the groundswell as a "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations." Listen to Bernoff and Li further define the groundswell, and discuss what it means for your business:

Social Networking sites are more than just another way to keep in touch with people, reconnect with old friends and post photos to the Web. Social Networking is a tool that allows people, regardless of physical location, to connect over shared interests, discuss relevant issues and share information in a faster, and often more efficient way than ever before.

Some of the business perks of Social Networking can be obvious. Using these types of sites, job seekers can explore employment opportunities and connect with people who can help to give them a leg-up in the job-search process. On the other side of that, user profiles and the wealth of information available about people in many Social Networks can provide employers with a great tool for searching and evaluating job candidates during the interview process. But Social Networking can also be a great tool for communicating with colleagues and sharing business practices with others in your company or industry.

NAA Community seeks to provide users with such a tool, offering features such as forums and file sharing to allow you to collaborate with your colleagues and share your experiences -- good and bad -- to enhance your businesses. But Social Networking offers the opportunity to take e-forums to the next level, giving you all the same benefits plus a whole lot more. The Community also features a number of blogs, focusing on issues such as marketing, advertising, digital media, technology, audience, education and more. Blogs offer you the chance to hear from industry experts about the topics that are relevant to the newspaper business today. Photo Galleries offer users the chance to post images from conferences and conventions, to provide greater coverage of NAA events. There is also the ability to connect to other people in your industry, by adding them to your profile as a Colleague, and staying connected to them via Private Messaging.

Participating in a Social Network can open up a world of opportunity for you and your business. Check back here throughout the month of October as I seek to introduce you to NAA Community and the way our networking capabilities can be used as a business opportunity for you.

Please come back to the NAA Community Blog next week for more tips and tricks on using your new Community. And, if you have a topic you'd like to see featured in the coming weeks, please submit it to feedback@naa.org.

As always, if you need additional help you can visit the NAA Community Help Page, or call 517-366-1200.

Comments

NAA Community said: As you've begun exploring the NAA Community, we hope you've discovered some of the great features November 13, 2008 12:52 PM

About Amanda Knowles