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October 27, 2009 | The start of a social media strategy should be the question, “What is it that our audience needs that we can provide?” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. To do that, organizations must find where their audience “hangs out” online and then offer content to delight or inform that audience.

A former reporter with the Dallas Morning News, Benton is now the director of the Lab, a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.  Benton worked in the newspaper industry for 10 years before joining the Lab. He also was a Pew Fellow in International Journalism and a Nieman Fellow.

Faith & Leadership spoke with Joshua Benton to discuss Twitter, blogs, Facebook and the new world of social media.

Q: How would you describe your lab?

The lab launched in October 2008, so we’re still pretty new, but the Nieman Foundation recently had its 71st anniversary. It was founded back in the 1930s, primarily as a fellowship program for journalists.

Over time we’ve also created a number of outreach programs. Journalism is undergoing a lot of changes, some of them hopeful, wonderful and amazing, some of them less so. There are many journalists and news organizations that feel disoriented, that feel there is a lot of change going on for which they may or may not be ready.

The mission of the lab is to try and figure out what the future of journalism is going to look like. That means looking at news organizations that are doing innovative things, looking at startups that are trying new business models, looking at tools that are available to journalists to do a better job in the Internet age. Basically, we’re looking for what works and what doesn’t, and trying to point journalism in a sustainable direction.

Q: There are interesting parallels between mainline Protestant denominations and the newspaper industry -- in both worlds, there’s a lot of concern that the old structures aren’t working well anymore.

Newspapers are designed primarily as print vehicles, and they still get on average 90 percent of their revenues from their print edition. As long as that is the case it's hard to change the news organization to be fundamentally web-focused. You're never going to be able to be as agile and as adaptive as a web-only organization that doesn’t have the benefits of a profitable old legacy. But [the web-only organization] doesn’t have the constraints of having to continue serving that old legacy.

The startups, the aggregators, the bloggers, the very small news organizations have been doing a lot of the innovation. You could look at it and say, “Well, that’s weird, because these news organizations have all this money, and all these resources to be able to do innovation,” but they're tied into that old model.

Clay Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, has written very wisely on these issues. He writes about disruptive innovations and shifts that fundamentally change the way organizations work.

What Christensen ends up saying is that [for organizations experiencing moments] of massive disruptive innovation, the key is to create an entirely separate organization to tackle it, one that isn’t bound by the rules of the old system.

You have to give that new organization permission to destroy the old organization. You can't have that new organization thinking, “Oh, this is what is smart, but we can't do it because it wouldn’t be good for the parent organization.” You have to give them permission to completely innovate and approach things in a new way.

Now that, I think, is a very smart bit of advice for companies. Whether it's a smart bit of advice for an organization that dates back to Martin Luther, I can't really say. That may require a different set of paradigms.

Q: People in church communications feel they should use social media such as Twitter, but they aren’t sure how it can work with their audience. Do you have any thoughts on that?

When you're thinking about your social media strategy, it is important to figure out where your target audience hangs out. If your target audience is on Twitter then it makes sense to invest a lot of time in Twitter. If they're on Facebook, it makes sense to invest there. These are the big ones, but there are so many other places that your people might be.

Let’s say everyone in your congregation is 85 and doesn’t have a computer. You're not going to reach them through social media. You have to think of a second audience, people you might want to reach who aren’t yet in your organization or congregation; figure out who those people are and where they spend their time online.

Q: How do you figure that out?

The first thing I would do is some pretty aggressive Googling. Chances are your church is already being talked about somewhere online; it's useful to figure out where that’s occurring. It may be on a message board that you don’t know anything about. Beyond that, I'd say informal conversation. Ask the web-savvy people in your congregation, “Where do you spend your time online?”

One of our target audiences is web-savvy journalists. Those people are all on Twitter, so we’re on Twitter. Almost all those people are also on Facebook, but they don’t live on Facebook the way they live on Twitter, so we have a much smaller following on Facebook. We figured out ways that we can try and serve both, but Twitter is definitely where our focus is, because that’s where our people are.