#mobile experiments

Snapchat experiment, continued

By Erica A. Hernandez, Mobile Reporting Specialist for the AJC (@EricaAlyssa)

The seventh-annual Red State Gathering was held in Atlanta Aug. 7-8 and I was a part of a team of more than 10 AJC reporters, photographers and editors who were on hand to cover the event. We were expecting about 10 republican presidential candidates to speak at the event, which began the morning after the first GOP debate. With more than 900 people in attendance, we knew it would be a big engagement moment for us. So in a collaboration with the AJC’s audience and politics team, I snapchatted the event from the AJC’s official Snapchat account (AJCnews).  

Here is the result from day one:

The goal here was to make sure to get every candidate from that day into the story along with behind the scenes peeks and commentary from our talented political team, that was on site, churning out lots of content all day. 

Day 2 we we’re expecting Donald Trump to close out the event but that all changed when the host of the event, Erick Erickson, dis-invited Trump for comments he made about journalist Megyn Kelly on CNN.

This change of plans turned the RedState Gathering into the hub of Trump news, though Trump was nowhere to be found.

Day 2 results:

With the help of the social team sharing updates on various channels (Twitter, Facebook) our Snapchat audience saw a good amount of growth in followers and engagement on both days. 

AJCnews’ Snapcat story from Saturdat July 4, 2015 AJC Peachtree Road Race. 

There’s no arguing Snapchat is here to stay but the question now facing us at the AJC and reporters at media outlets across America is how do we engage our audience on this somewhat mystifying medium?

The AJC has had a Snapchat account for some time (follow us at AJCnews) but no one has really put much effort into pushing content out through it or growing our specific audience on it. With that in mind, I wanted to experiment with live event coverage via Snapchat during one of Atlanta’s biggest events, the AJC Peachtree Road Race.

The Goal

As a mobile reporting specialist, I was already positioned to be at the finish line on race day gather quick hit videos, stories and photos. The idea being this content could be turned around and pushed out on social very quickly to engage our mobile audience whom were either at the race cheering others on, running the race or just following race updates from home.

With that goal in mind it seemed like a very natural progression to add Snapchat to my coverage plan. The audience we were looking to reach would likely be on Snapchat more than they’d be on our homepage (like most mobile visitors to our site).

Snappin’ Away on Race Day 

I set out on race day at 6 am to catch the MARTA to the finish line. Once I got off at midtown, I saw the station was flooded with racers trying to stay dry on their commute to the starting line. I knew I wanted to tell that story but I wanted to show a sense of place since this wasn’t obviously race related.

After a few attempts of getting a shot inside the MARTA stop, I pointed the camera out toward the rainy street scene and got a much better result.

I wanted to show more than just the women’s and men’s winner crossing the finish line. That kind of news is not what Snapchat users would expect on that platform. They are looking for more interesting, sometimes funny photos and videos that show them a little slice of something they’re experiencing or something they wish they were experiencing.

Like Instagram, breaking news on Snapchat isn’t going to perform too well, but compelling images and vibrant scenes will.

My goal for this experiment was not only to test what works and flex my Snapchat muscles, but I also wanted to see if the thirst for Snapchat content was there. Since we aren’t regularly posting content to Snapchat yet we aren’t campaigning hard to grow awareness of our account. But I forwarded a screen shot to our social media manager on-call on race day and asked him to tweet it out to encourage people to follow us.

He did.

It’s important that he included that photo because it gave our audience a peak of the kind of content they’d be signing up for – we were not and would not tweet out a call to action for a blind follow.

The Results

In one day the AJCnews Snapchat account jumped from 19 followers to 34 followers with just that one tweet from the main AJC account.

My final product ended up being less than 200 seconds long and feature five photos and six video clips.

(Watch full Snapchat story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-71dJhbJX4)

In a world where social referrals to mobile rule, any new social connections to our audience can be beneficial and is worth exploring. Here’s hoping Snapchat becomes a natural part of our mobile and visuals daily work flow.

I formatted a blog post, "End chronic homelessness," which were two opinion articles posted on the MyAJC site that were posted on one blog post. My goal was to format this blog post to make the articles look better for a mobile screen. Here is the before and after of what I did.

Before

The text of the story was unedited in terms of formatting. Besides the bolding of the title and byline, not much else seemed to be formatted on this blog post. I thought it should be made obvious to the reader where one opinion piece started and the other ended.

An optimization of AJC's Buzz blog's Honey Boo Boo family now living in metro Atlanta, covering how to organize lots of aggregated content and embeds in a blog post.

While threading and optimizing content for mobile this week, I looked at "Jon Stewart’s top 5 greatest Georgia politics hits" on the AJC politics blog. Jon Stewart had announced he was leaving The Daily Show, so AJC Washington reporter Daniel Malloy did a round-up on the top clips where Georgia was mentioned criticized made complete fun of.

I did some tweaking of the title, experimented with iframes for mobile and played with the power of lists.

The AJC had a series of stories recently on the sudden and fatal pedestrian accident on I-285 that causes massive traffic through much of the city during rush hour. We had a lot of content coming in, from text to video to photos to multimedia pieces. We also had a lot of updates as the story developed.

In "Police look for answers in accident that killed woman, crippled I-285," we had an article with all our most recent updates at the time as well as links to our photo gallery, photo, videos and multimedia pieces. However, when I came across from it, I saw how our CMS put automatically put elements in awkward places and generally gave the mobile reader a bad reading experience.