Green Transportation Examiner - my main social media for social good project

For a year and a half I’ve been privileged with the role of Journalist, covering the greening of our transportation system. My main gig is on examiner.com with the title Green Transportation Examiner. Examiner.com operates a “citizen journalist” organization with 10’s of thousands of people writing on whatever special topic ﬂoats their own boat, and I am one of them. I’m currently learning how to utilize social media networks in promoting the journalist work I’m doing with examiner.com.

The opportunity offered by examiner.com is writing articles covering your topic of choice, and the more newsworthy of the articles will get syndicated out to news websites like news.google.com. Examiner’s (as we’re known) are asked to operate as a journalist and write newsworthy articles with a local focus.

Being an Examiner is great way to encourage social change. For example if one see’s a topic that’s under-served by the main-stream media, being an Examiner lets you take direct action to increase news coverage of that topic. In my case, I’m an electric vehicle owner with over 10 years of research and ownership experience. That informs my coverage of “green transportation” in a way that other journalists, who don’t have this ownership/research knowledge, simply cannot match. In theory I can do a better job of informing the public than those other journalists.

Recently examiner.com enabled things so we can use Google Analytics to study our trafﬁc, and I’ve gotten surprised how much trafﬁc is coming via social media networks like twitter and facebook.

Those percentages are quite different from my other websites where the measure for “referring sites” is much lower. But which sites are sending these referrals? The top two are twitter.com and facebook.com. Linkedin.com is ﬁfth and some other sites show up further down the list. Other referrals come from discussion forums that I either participate in directly, or am friendly with. That’s pretty good, with a large percentage of referring sites due to social media connections.

More.. more… more…!! ;-)

How did this happen?

The linkedin trafﬁc comes from links I post in related linked-in groups. The facebook trafﬁc comes because I’ve connected the RSS feed for my articles so they auto-post onto my facebook account. The twitter trafﬁc comes because every article gets tweeted.

In following postings I’ll be writing about experiments with the social media systems to promote these articles.

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