Chicago Tribune gets social

The Chicago Tribune has the best presence I’ve seen of any newspaper on Facebook, Twitter and Digg.

The paper created a persona based on former Tribune owner Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick.

See them here: Twitter | Facebook | Digg

Creating accounts based on Colonel Tribune as opposed to simply creating a “Chicago Tribune” account humanizes the paper. It lets readers know that there is a real person (or maybe four real people) behind the account, not some RSS feed blindly posting stories.

But the most important part of this entire experiment is that Colonel Tribune actually interacts with people on those social networks. It’s not enough to just throw your name out there and expect the general public to participate all on its own. Social media uses are smarter than that.

If your newspaper is serious about using social networks, you have to realize this is not the place for a one-way conversation (that’s what the print newspaper is for).

You probably don’t need a clever name like Colonel Tribune to do this. The Des Moines Register has done fairly well interacting with readers on Twitter (with fewer resources than the Tribune, I am sure) under the boring old name “DMRegister.”

(Full disclosure: We used to have our account simply hooked up to Twitterfeed, but some local Twitter users showed us how we could do it better.)

Many other papers have had success as well (see a list of newspapers on Twitter in Erica Smith’s blog).

Inspired by the Trib, we are currently brainstorming ideas for a human (or perhaps a dog named “Reggie”) persona as we expand into using Digg to share our content.