Sentinel.com blog

When 15,000-plus runners came to Santa Cruz on Sunday for the 40th annual Wharf to Wharf race, we were ready to meet them. We received more than 40,000 page views on the Sentinel website.

We put to use the following services:

• Twitter – asking any and all to use #wharftowharf hashtag, we added that to the page for continuous updates. Our reporters and photographers also used the tag. Through twitter, we posted photos and video (using the twitvid service) as well as other updates. We were also able to send directly to the Sentinel home page by using another tag, #scsnews. We’ve used an advanced search widget to display tweets from our staff using that tag and always ask reporters to break news on twitter.
• Storify – we gathered photos, video, tweets from our staff, runners and spectators throughout the day, and embedded the collection in the top of our home page. Our collection has received more than 4,000 views. (See below).
• Flickr – We posted staff and contributed photos to the Sentinel Flickr account, where our set has received more than 6,500 views. We took the easily-embedded slideshow and dropped it into coverage and its own article page. We also shared links to the slideshow on Facebook
• Google maps – We updated a map we built long ago to include Panoramio photos from various points along the beautiful race route, shot by Sentinel digital intern Eric Brown.
• Brightcove and YouTube – We shot video along the route. I got to the race early with a smart phone and a Handycam. I tweeted, collected video, sent photos from my phone (DroidX, which went from fully charged to dead in two miles) and then eventually ran most of last four miles of the race (with my daughter in a stroller) while collecting sights and sounds on the Handycam. We posted the video to our site through Brightcove, embedded the video in an article page and have Brightcove set to automatically post to our YouTube channel.
• Instagram (we’re @scsentinel) – we posted just five photos to Instagram, a couple from the race, and a couple of the best from photographer Shmuel Thaler.  We also liked every photo we found for Wharf to Wharf and followed anyone who ran and posted about the race. Our photos received more than 200 likes, we picked up more than 50 followers.
• Digital producer Christina Gullickson orchestrated the show, handling all of the content flowing her way, and she worked to open the doors to user-contributed photos and promoted all our content on the social channels above.
• Sports reporter Andrew Matheson also immediately had final results and compiled his own video, so we had the first stories about the race that were updated in the afternoon
• Two other easy moves added nearly 5,000 views – we posted an early “Wharf to Wharf Information” page and we embedded the results page within our site.

Congrats to all the runners! We probably overdid, but the Sentinel loves the Wharf to Wharf!

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.