Interview with Julie Whitaker

Social Media Editor at WNYC

This interview is the sixth in a series in which I talk to people who are currently working on user engagement.

Julie is the Social Media Editor at WNYC. Rather than working on a specific show, she works with journalists on all programs and throughout the organziation. She works on building communities for the entirety of WNYC.

What projects do you work on?

I assist in project planning for shows like the sleep project, election guide, and for crowd-sourced projects, making sure they get the biggest bang for their buck.

Do you do call-outs on social media?

That’s something we do every day. Especially on The Brian Lehrer Show. Even before social media was around, they were getting people to call in.

How do you form your call-outs?

By asking the right questions that’s specific enough and targets the right audience and gets them to call in and answer.

For example, when we asked “What’s a book that changed your mind about something?”—that got a ton of responses. So much of that is just getting the wording right on the questions to get people to respond.

What’s your social media strategy in general?

Be a human being. Say it in a way you would say it to your friend. Don’t use jargon. If it doesn’t need a hashtag, then don’t use a hashtag. If it’s meant be a 10–20 minute conversation, then you don’t mean.

I don’t have a guiding principle, other than knowing what people are talking about on Twitter. So it’s about listening and paying attention to who’s following you, and using a mix of data and your intuition and your familiarity with the audience.

How did the sleep project work out?

On the sleep project, it kind of seemed like people like being on the teams. Letting people find other people that were struggling with the same thing was really helpful.

What are other successful projects you’ve worked on?

We have this podcast called the Longest Shortest Time. That show is run by the host and one producer, which is a pretty slim staff. So they came to me, we talked about their audience and what feedback they were getting already. It’s more moms than dads, but they really want to make friends with more moms. So maybe we can do more than just facilitating the conversation by giving the moms the space to talk to each other. Not always being there, but letting them work it out. There was a moms group (with 4000 moms) and a dads group, and they start the conversation 80% of the time. And the staff have even gotten story ideas from that.

What stories came from this Facebook group?

There was this Tumblr that was making the rounds, It’s Like They Know Us, where moms are finding stock photographs of moms with babies doing things that actually wouldn’t be that easy. This idea actually came from one of these discussions that was prompted by one of the listeners. So then the podcast did a show on the women who started it and did an interview with her.

Is there anything that guides all your engagement work as a whole?

Another thing that I’ve tried to emphasize here is we do crowd-sourcing a lot, led by Brian Lehrer and Studio360. Our role in communities is as curators. One way to engage with that community is to find people who are doing something really well and then featuring that. It helps to curate since we don’t have a ton of photographers to create content. You don’t have to be able to provide the best content to serve a role in a community. You can serve as someone who connects people.

What’s worked for your with social media crowd-sourcing?

Voter Selfie. We try to do it for each election cycle. This year it started for the mayoral and midterm elections. Hopefully it inspires people to vote.

On a smaller scale: it’s not uncommon to throw a question out there or do an Instagram project, and you don’t get a big response. Try again later.

What do you consider success?

Numbers, and the quality of feedback.

What’s your workflow?

I have the reporter who is doing the story tweet from their own account, and then I’ll retweet from the main feed. I have them keep me in the loop. Sometimes I work with them over email to fine tune the messages.

For Mean Streets, we’re tracking the deaths of people by car collisions. We’ve been profiling the families of people who have lost their lives about what happened. So throughout the series, we’ve been doing call-outs. They have always gotten enough responses to write the next story.