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There is a Community on Google+, but now Peppe will tell you more about it. It was born on social networks and then moved on Google+.
Good morning everyone and thanks for inviting me. I am one of the founders of the Network of Journalists and Blogger for the Environment. I'm Peppe Croce.
Here today there are other members of the network. What is this network? Is one of the many experiences you were talking about before, actually all separated.
I should point out, not to steal your identity to anyone, that is not the same thing you are going to found today. We are much smaller...
but very good...
This Network of Journalists and bloggers for the Environment was established last year, on the initiative of Marina Perotta, which is the Main Blogger Ecoblog.it, and was born as a group on Facebook.
Facebook is a good tool, we used it for many years, but it shows its limits. Now we moved: in December 2012, we transferred the group from Facebook to Google+.
Why? Because Google+ has unique features that allow us to work in a very powerful way, certainly much more powerful in terms of communication of what you might do on Facebook.
Technically, we are a Google+ Community, which is roughly equivalent to the Facebook groups, we are about 110 participants. Twenty of those assiduously participating and making Hangouts live.
They are not all journalists or bloggers, there are also curious and environmental communicators who come to see and to inquire.
We just born: 100 participants are still few, but we can grow.
To give an example of what kind of participation we have: on average we have 8 comments per posting, 0 shares per posting
We have 3 "+1" per posting and 834 characters per posting and this gives you a measure of how we write and discuss here.
For example, the Community "Google+ Discuss", with 57,000 members, in which users search for information about Google+ and Google U.S. responds, has statistics that in some cases are lower: 5 comments per posting, 1 reshare, 7 "+1" and 321 characters per posting.
These are the numbers of what we do and how we do it.
Who participates? We are all the "small web sites": Ecoblog, Greenstyle (I write for Greenstyle), GreenMe, Qualenergia, Vita.it...
If we add up the page views of all of these sites we arrive to a few million per month. Summing up many small sites we do one big one.
The interesting thing is that it is a completely disconnected from the publishers. We are all present on this network, with our logos and our sites, but on a personal basis.
This is because if we tried to put together even two of these editors said they wouldn't accept. Our editors do not support us, but they bear us.
Because it suits them: we produce quality original content at no cost to them, so do not help us but not hinder us.
What do we do? Mainly we do an in-depth discussion on environmental issues, collective interviews (the so-called Hangout on Air) and original editorial products.
As our first ebook, of which I won't speak to you because Sergio Ferraris will do soon.
There are some intrinsic features of Google+ that allow you to do a "rich post" like this, written by Sergio Ferraris, on the contrast between renewable energy and traditional thermal power generation and the controversy on incentives for renewable that there was a month ago.
In this case there is a formatted text, with title and quotation marks, links to video and then an embedded video.
This is still not an editorial product, is not a real piece. But I think we can consider a great "semi-finished".
Who's not a journalist or blogger, who is not a communicator, who does not know the issue or those who need to know the subject and to understand what is going on in the relationship between renewable and thermoelectric enters in the Community, read this post by Sergio Ferraris and is already half done. And the other half is done by clicking on the links.
This is very powerful, it's good for reflection, it's not a tweet that brings you thousands page views but if we want to deepen and put the knowledge available to others this post is really useful.
I did this other post: is related to the last interview we did, an interview about the Taranto's Ilva envoronmental problem. In this case there is no link and there is only a brief introduction.
But the interesting thing is that there are timings. The reader read the post, click on the minute-second he need and, without leaving the post or the Community, he can watch to that minute-second of the video.
What are the Hangout on Air? The instrument was created as a video chat with 10 participants maximum. One is the respondent, we are the other 9.
While doing the interview, at the same time it is recorded on a YouTube channel. In this case is mine because, for technical issues, I always start and lead the Hangout.
The Hangout may be open to public participation. We do not, we keep it closed to optimize the bandwidth. We are learning the tool...
While doing the interview you can watch it live, but it's also recorded on the YouTube channel, so you can embed it later in any site like a normal YouTube video.
There is also a text chat, invisible in the video, visible only to the participants. It's very useful for ask to speak: the interviewed says one thing and one of the participants can ask to replicate immediately.
You have the possibility to discuss live but outside of what you see and you say in video. It's useful because maybe the interviewee says that it has submitted a bill, but one of the interviewers know that is not true and ask to intervene to stop him immediately.
Managing ten people is a big job. I'm going out with the brain fried from the interviews, I tell you honestly. Consider that are interviews lasting 40-60 minutes.
I wanted to ask: respondents do not feel a bit "in the middle of the arena"? Being interviewed by ten journalists...
It's simple: if I go to Chicco Testa and ask an interview he answers me no. If I ask along with 8-9 other people, and Chicco Testa knows that appears in at least 4-5 web sites, it is different.
And 'that's the concept: I network with others and get what I want. In fact all videos are published under Creative Commons license because the copy right can not be granted to any, it must be of all.
In the private video you can also see other YouTube videos and slides or other material, but it is not possible in live and recorded video. Most likely to avoid breach of copy right.
And it's likely that within a few months it can be done, at least for videos with a Creative Commons license. If this thing were to happen, the tool will completely change because you could do a home made talk show.
I could take a video that I shot, as a testimony to a spill of polluting material in a river, and show it during the interview. And this would give additional tools.
How we organize ourselves? The Hangout is the end result: we organize ourselves in the Community. We launch the subject, who is interested asks a seat. Seats are reserved on the basis of skills, it makes no sense if anyone talks of any argument.
Consider the fact that if there are issues on which we have no specialists, we can call someone from outside the community. It happened in the case of a Hangout on agriculture: we called a journalist who works for Radio CRC Campania, which is one of the few Italian radio that has a news program entirely devoted to agriculture.
Then you seek contacts with the persons to be interviewed via various channels: Facebook, press offices, communications company. The important thing is that it responds.
There are technical tests to be done because the tool is almost unknown in Italy: I call the interview the day before, settle the webcam, I draw the lower third.
We do a private Hangout where I explain how it works and then we go live. The interview is recorded automatically, YouTube does it all.
During the next 24 hours after the interview we spread it on our websites. And this is what gives us strength: we don't pass by the publishers and interviewees go on 4-8-10 sites.
Is it worth it? This is very interesting because up to now we have had a few views, a few thousand: 5-6,000. The most popular video was the interview with Angelo Bonelli who had 700-750 views.
You might say: "With all this work, you do not wanna do it...". There are few views, we must be honest, not very few but a few.
But we were leaving essentially from scratch. And from scratch we created a sort of virtual newsroom, which is a very interesting project. And most importantly, we are interested in audience retention and in new initiatives we are doing.
You can see the average view duration: the video of Chicco Testa has had 450 views, but more than a quarter of the audience has come to an end, at 56 minutes. About 150 people watched an hour of interview
Peppe sorry but we have to cut because there is little time.
As new initiatives want to quote Greenpolitica.it that helps us on Twitter. They are our "Twitter desk": they act as an interface to and from Twitter.
I would also like to say that we are starting to become a journalistic source: when we did the interview with Chicco Testa we received a request from Assosolare to make a reply. Obviously we did it...
A quick word about Google+ Comments: it is a new feature but very important.
It's similar to Facebook comments for websites, but it is two-way: every time you share the article, sharing ends whithin the article. So if that site activates the comment system you can do a bombing of comments and shares.
It's something that I does not yet know quite well, I'm studying it, but that could change everything.
I close here, thank you.