Traditional publishers must talk with their audience through social media and not to their audience

Business guru Tom Peters has been someone I've looked to for inspiration for a number of years. He wrote that if you want to achieve excellence in your organization, you simply start being excellent. To steal a phrase from Nike, "Just do it!"

Traditional media outlets need to take that advise regarding their digital strategy. If you want to create a digital strategy that helps you grow your audience, revenue and positioning for the future, then you simply start doing it. Unfortunately, all too frequently that is not happening.

Former Patch.com employee, long time friend and now digital publisher Matt Schroeder has shared with me some of the ways he engages audience through social media and how that directly impacts page views on his website. His tactics are far from rocket science, yet the results are quite tangible.

Yet newsroom scoff at the suggestion of social media interaction, and stick with plastering story headlines on Twitter and Facebook feeds. While posting stories to gain interest is a part of the strategy, too many times newsrooms post enough of the story that the person seeing the headline has no need to click on the story and visit the site for full details. This is a headline world, and newsroom gave enough of a story overview that the engagement ends right then.

To harness the power of social media, the newsroom will have to put aside traditional journalism tactics. The key word in social media is SOCIAL. The audience wants to be spoken with, not to. I came across an amazing stat last weekend, saying that 57% of people today talk more to people online that in person. That stat is even higher if you only focus on younger demographics.