GOING VIRAL WITH A JOB POSTING

By Cindy Allen
Editor, Enid (Okla.) News & Eagle

You may not know his name, but if you're a creature of the Internet blog world – or perhaps looking for an editor position – it's just possible you've seen his face. He's the guy knocking on your computer screen in a new interactive Internet advertisement The Roanoke Times recently produced to hire a editor. Seth Gitner, multimedia editor at The Roanoke Times, led a team of newspaper employees tasked by their publisher to come up with something different to advertise the paper's top editor position. The ad, which was produced in February, has become an Internet sensation due to what Gitner calls "viral marketing."

"The publisher picked a team of me, the presentation editor, a reporter, a marketing person and a designer in our ad department," Gitner explained about the challenge. "We all sat down and figured out what we wanted to do. We wanted a print component and an online component."

The online ad has certainly gotten a lot of attention. Since its February launch, the ad has received 9,400 visits and 11,670 page views, reports Camille Wright Miller, the human resources director for The Roanoke Times. "Most of the visits (7,004) have come from the United States, with California, Virginia, Illinois and Florida as the top four geographic areas," she said. More than 2,000 individuals followed the link to the online application, she said. The search remained open through the end of March, and Wright Miller expects to have at least 100 resumes to sort through after the search is closed.

This is all due to the viral marketing Gitner believes is key for the Internet world and for newspapers to become a bigger player in that world. How did viral marketing work in this case? Well, the only way to originally find the advertisement was on JournalismJobs.com and through a URL listed in the print ad. However, Gitner also disbursed the ad to his own online sphere. He sent personal e-mails about the ad to many of the contacts he's collected since becoming multimedia editor at the newspaper.

"It took off like wildfire," he said. "It got posted on different blogs. That's how the Web is working. We learned a lot about viral marketing." It's a lesson he said more newspapers need to learn. Newspapers can get their news out to more people through seeding blogs and getting into Internet conversations about topics.

Another good source to utilize viral marketing is through social networks like Myspace and Facebook. Gitner sees these as opportunities for newspapers to build more audience for their news. "You want to build an audience by sending a chain e-mail, get people to your site," he said. "That's the key. People see something cool, and they send it to their friends. That's what happened with the editor job."

The ad has been featured or mentioned on online industry blogs such as robcurley.com, lostremote.com and multimediashooter.com, as well as discussed on blogs for USA Today, the Poynter Institute and CyberJournalist.net.

All the attention has made Gitner somewhat famous in the online newspaper world. He was at a conference recently, and during some social time, he was told by members of the group they thought they'd seen him before. "Then they said, 'Oh yeah, you're that guy that knocks on the screen.'"

(The Roanoke Times is a daily newspaper located in Roanoke, Va., with a circulation of 97,000. The interactive advertisement can be found at www.roanoke.com/editorjob/interactive.html)

APME JOURNALISM EXCELLENCE AWARDS

The deadline for entering the competition for APME's journalism excellence awards is Friday, July 6. APME will again give awards for Public Service, First Amendment, Online Convergence and International Perspective. And we'll again be joined by the Freedom Forum in presenting the Robert G. McGruder Diversity Leadership Awards.

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