Sentinel.com blog

Not sure how Sentinel.com and the newsroom staff will use Quora at this point, but it’s a social network that’s about questions and answers, and any news organization should be a big part of asking and answering questions.

Quora offers far more depth than Twitter, which we use for a wide variety of purposes, and it is more professional and informational than Facebook, which we use for a wide variety of purposes.

With Twitter, we mostly feed headlines automatically as news breaks and is posted to our site, but we also use it for search purposes and to promote web-only content from our blogs (especially the photo blog), as well as multimedia on our site. Our sports reporters are using twitter to text score updates directly to the site.

With Facebook, we typically try to post feature and human interest stories that might not otherwise get a lot of traffic on our site. And with all social media sites (we’re on Buzz, YouTube,  Tumbler among others, and we even had moments when we thought Google Wave was going to change the world) we use them to keep in touch with the community and generate story ideas.

With the huge growth of Quora right now, and its quick, easy integration with Facebook and Twitter, I get the feeling that it will become a big part of the Sentinel’s social media future. We’re accepting good ideas on how best to use Quora.