The #KSGoRed experiment
Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 9:06AM 
@farmeditor wears red for a family member. To see all of our user-submitted photos, hit facebook.com/ljworldOver the past five months at the Lawrence Journal-World, it's become quite clear that social media is allowing us to communicate with the Lawrence/Douglas County community in a fresh way.
Previously, we might post a story or blog about National Wear Red Day and talk about heart health until people's eyes glaze over and they reach for the Girl Scout Cookies.
We could personalize a story by getting a quote or focusing on a few survivors, but how much of an impact does that have anymore? You're lucky if the online audience reads past the first two sentences (that being said, thanks for making it this far!)
Sooooo... we decided to let the community do the storytelling for Wear Red Day via our Facebook and Twitter accounts. Health reporter Karrey Britt posted nuts and bolts info on her blog, and I posted the #KSGoRed Photo Contest info on the social media blog. We pre-scheduled some tweets and Facebook status updates using HootSuite to remind people to use the hashtag. Then let our fans and followers post photos telling us why they wore red.
To be clear, the AHA and Wear Red people were not paid advertisers for this project. That's why we didn't use their logo anywhere. However, heart health awareness is news, as it affects such a large percentage of the population, so we felt obligated to cover the campaign. That doesn't mean in the future we couldn't blow it up big with some kind of financially based partnership... because we are NOT a non-profit.
Our efforts generated 27 user-submitted photos and captions. Not bad for a first try - especially in a smaller Kansas community. After people posted photos, we saw a noticeable increase in interactions (likes, comments and wall posts). Because Facebook's Insights feature is lame-ass, we won't see the exact numbers for a week... unless we make our intern count them up.
Social media's growth and the increasing distrust of journalism has forced community participation. I love it. It's making the news interesting and creative again.
Look for this kind of social media storytelling to be a frequent feature from LJW in the very near future.