Fast forward to last night. Our engineers figured out how to route the audio from one of our computers and share a Google+ hangout conversation live on the air. Here’s what it looked like:

I had a chance to discuss what Google+ is to our viewers and pick up my kids from summer camp without missing the 5pm newscast. How perfect is that?

We have a number of ideas on future uses of the Google Hangout tool:
*Create live panel discussions – Hangout is the new round table
*Create a circle of people we trust and open it up to join in on a conversation we start at the beginning of the broadcast
*Use this as an easier way to allow different sides to debate about a topic live on the air.

What other ideas do you have?

A little sidebar: We already livestream behind the scenes of the newscast on our Facebook page. The Livestream participants were jealous and demanded a mention on the air during last night’s broadcast. I thought that was really interesting.

You can read about Sarah Hill’s experience using Google+ in this MediaShift article.

My invite came through less than 24 hours after the network’s release and I immediately jumped in to share invites with others and figure the space out. The first thing you’ll see when you sign up is the profile in Google+ is the same profile that exists with Google Profiles. I thought that was pretty handy since I had already built mine up a while ago. I was also able to add a link of photos that are my “scrapbook” to personalize things up a bit more.

If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can get ready by adding information to your Google Profiles page (which is available for anyone with a Google account). I’ve found most people who have created a Google Profile are able to easily get into Google+ when a user shares anything to their gmail address. The trick is having that Google Profile ahead of time.

When you arrive inside this new network, I recommend creating circles. This is different from the Facebook lists for a number of reasons. First, when you publish, you pick who listens. Facebook allows you to block certain lists from seeing a post, but you have to pick people individually by name if you want to post something specific. (It’s a four step process.) Second, you can think about Google+ like Twitter. People choose to read your posts and you can choose to add them back into your circles or not. If people don’t like what you post, they can stop following you in a circle. If you don’t like them following you, make sure you only post items specifically to your personal circles and not to the public. I currently have 23. Here’s a look at my growing Google circle (which looks pretty when you roll your mouse over it because it shows the images of the people inside):

Along with Circles, another great G+ (that’s the short, lazy way to say Google+) feature is Google Hangouts. When a person you are following in a circle launches a hangout, you see a notice of it on your stream. If you have a webcam and a microphone, you can jump in. As many as 9 people can be in the hangout at the same time. My first hangout was with Google’s Chief Architect of Social Yonatan Zunger. I had noticed him posting really interesting tips early into the release of G+ and I liked reading his updates. I started a Google circle thanks to him. Many Google employees are openly sharing the developments of the social network and I’m fascinated by the openness of the launch. (Which is COMPLETELY opposite with how Facebook rolls out changes.) I jumped into a public Hangout he had launched and heard many Google fans ask questions and talk about what’s ahead for the project. After that, I launched a few public hangouts. It’s fun when people can get their webcams to work. If you’ve never experienced a Cisco Telepresence Center, a Hangout is a poor man’s version of it. When someone in the Hangout speaks, the video window switches to him or her. It continues to do that until you click on an individual person’s image.

You can choose to have a chat box open on the side (which was handy in the Hangout you can see above here because one person couldn’t get his webcam to work). You can also choose to look through and watch YouTube video with your Hangout. When you hop into YouTube mode, the other members have to choose to join in to watch. When you start playing the video, your audio is automatically muted. You have to press a button to talk over it. I love that! One other pro tip: You can use Google Translate to translate chat and live conversations during a Hangout.
My other tip: Encourage people in your Hangout to share their favorite YouTube video. (Mine is Thumbs up for Rock and Roll)

Not long after I dug into G+ , I started to look for ways this can be used in a news. I’ll write up another post about that soon. In the meantime, feel free to visit the page if you’re a G+ member: gplus.to/komunews

Some additional tips for Google+ users:
*If you’re following someone who posts a lot and there’s a lot of comments that keep pushing the item back to the top of the page, you can click on the little drop down menu (it’s a little triangle to the right of a post) and chose to mute it. You don’t have to remove that person from a circle, you can just quiet him (or her, even though I haven’t found a “loud” G+ female user).

*If you’ve ever enjoyed Twitter, Google+ is a similar experience. Think of this as a space where you can say more than 140 characters and interact with people you may have never considered interacting with before. (Back in the day, Twitter let me talk to amazing people because they weren’t getting bombarded like they do now that Twitter is so big.)

*The intro page when you first sign up on G+ is worth the read to see how to get things started. The first thing I did was create circles and that got my stream moving.

*I was so excited when I first jumped into G+, I didn’t consider the number of alerts I’d get in my Gmail. I think I had collected 100 before I noticed. Don’t do what I did. Change your settings early on: https://plus.google.com/settings/plus

But the key tip I hope to share is how to get started in social media. We think this is important because of a little moment I had last week with a large lecture class I’m teaching this semester called Journalism and Democracy. It’s better known as “Journalism for non-journalism majors.” There are 236 students enrolled. All of the students are underclassmen and planning to graduate with a wide range of degrees. There are all kinds of differences until you ask how they got their news of the day. (I took a picture of a portion of the class during our first test of the semester.)

Last week, a class speaker and I asked the class to raise their hands to see who watched television news in the last 24 hours. Four hands went into the air. We asked how many people had read news from a printed material on a newspaper or magazine. Six people put their hand in the air. Then we asked how many people got news from the Internet. All but two people raised their hand. Two people explained they had been so busy with school and work, they had not opened the Internet in the last 24 hours.

Everyone raised their hands when we asked if they learned something new (news or personal, we didn’t differentiate for this question) that day from a social networking tool.

If this class is a peek into the future of news consumption, we better hop into social media and see what the heck is going on here!

But how do you get started?

Let me tell you how I did it. It starts with curiosity.

In 2005, I heard a lot of my students talking about this thing called “Facebook.” They were sharing and distracted and always talking about it. So I hopped in. You just needed an email from .edu account. I had one. So I dug in and created an account. I watched interactions between students. (I had a rule where I would never “friend” a student, but I would accept friend requests. I would only choose to “friend” students after they graduated.) My husband would harass me for using Facebook. But I saw merit in the natural way people interacted with each other. I created a profile for my newsroom and tried to see what kind of interaction I could get in that space. Eventually Facebook created the opportunity to let brands build pages on the site. All of these developments grew while I was already in the space. I understood how it worked because I played with it on a personal level first.

I did the same thing with Twitter. I created a personal account and a newsroom account in June 2006. I had heard some people talking about the tool and I’d seen how easy it was to share information from your phone by just sending a text message. So I signed up. I would text messages and post quick 140 character messages. For my newsroom, I just posted an RSS feed of links. About a month or two into my personal use of Twitter, I realized how searchable the account was on Google and other search tools. I had used the names of my children in many posts and decided to delete the account so my name wouldn’t be linked to their names. But I returned to Twitter with a new account in October of 2006 after watching how Twitter was used to help relay information during a large group of wildfires in Southern California. I still follow the Los Angeles Fire Department thanks to that event. News and emergency officials used Twitter to share information about safety, the size of fires and rescue efforts. I started talking about journalism and mom stuff on a personal level, but I would call my son “the boy” and my daughter “the girl.” The first time I met up with Twitter followers in my town, they were so excited to meet my children and finally learn their real names.

Working with Twitter is a little trickier to understand how to use on a personal level than Facebook. I highly recommend trying Twitter with  a tool called TweetDeck. Most new Twitter users notice how it makes more sense to read and connect with people. You can search by terms, people and conversations called hashtags – these are chats where everyone includes a word with a hashtag in the front. When you follow the hashtag, you can jump in and converse or just peek in on the conversation. Some of my favorite hashtag conversations are #journchat, #wjchat and #smcedu

I didn’t get to this point where I could easily converse immediately. I warmed up to it. But I kept trying. I would @ a person and see if he or she would respond. I have made friends and colleagues through Twitter. I have learned about my community and found new connections to news consumers.

If you want to read some of my other posts about Twitter, feel free to click here to see my a webinar I did on Twitter a while back that still holds true. Also, I keep track of great tools for journalism that are free or really cheap. I have a great list of Twitter tools included!

I would not be linked to my town the way I am without the help of Twitter and Facebook. It is not the end-all-be-all of journalism. But it is a way to connect with many people who are not consuming my newsroom’s material in the traditional ways. And as my class full of 236 underclassmen become professionals, their communication and information collection styles are going to affect us all. It’s great to jump in before you’re playing catch up.

I like checking in. I love the badges. I love being a mayor. (I fluctuate mayorships between 23 and 26 locations.) I am really busy with work in my newsroom, campus and taking my kids all over the place for activities. I rack up the points, the badges and the mayorships. I love it. I also love the simplicity of sharing my location on Twitter or Facebook if I think there’s a reason behind it (to talk about a sale, concert, activity or something else my friends or followers would like). I’ve met people through Foursquare by checking in and finding other people at that location. I’ve met up with people I know by discovering they were in the same spot as I was just by checking in. It’s all a bit self-centered, but I enjoy the fun behind it. I’m obviously competitive and this is a simple competition to play throughout the day. During SXSW 2010, I discovered the joys of Gowalla and blogged my thoughts about it after the conference. I clearly love this stuff.

But I hit a snag last summer when I had knee surgery. I was stuck in a chair with ice on my leg. I couldn’t check in. But that’s when I discovered the point behind tools liks Miso and Get Glue. You have a chance to check into the media you consume (and with Get Glue, you can also check into the wine you drink) and earn badges. I’m a big Get Glue fan and I’ve earned many “stickers.” You can show them off on Twitter and Facebook just like the location-based tools, but Get Glue also encourages you to play with the site and you can earn real stickers. (Although I’ve requested my stickers a couple of times and they’ve never shown up at my house. I do know other Get Glue users who did get their stickers.) I loved the chance to continue with my checking in obsession but with different material. I instantly envisioned opportunities for broadcast news outlets to encourage people to watch the show live by offering stickers.

But rewind a few months earlier and the Huffington Post started offering badges of honor for people who interacted with the site at a certain level. The Type-A Parent site started doing the same thing recently where members can earn “achievements.”

I’m listing all of these earning opportunities because I think I might have an idea to help engage my local audience as we head into the 2012 presidential campaign season. I’ve written before about how I have learned from failure of my Smart Decision ’08 project where I combined newsrooms to deliver an incredibly deep amount of information leading up to the 2008 election. The biggest problem was I never found a way to engage with news consumer and I could not get people who were interested in educating themselves through out site to participate and share. But what if I worked with a community of engaged citizens and used their help to encourage other people in our market to join in with the help of social awards. These would be badges of honor that would prove a person is educating himself or herself leading up to the election. Those badges could be posted on Twitter, Facebook or even their personal websites. I think it could be a really fun way to share, collect and encourage news consumers to participate in an election project. I’m just throwing this idea out there… but I want to find someone who wants to play! This could grow into a really fun project.

It’s a great idea, right? So why don’t I do that more often.

Obviously it’s because life is busy. But I should walk the walk if I’m going to talk the talk to my students.

Right now I’m helping launch a new content management system (CMS) for my newsroom. At the same time, we had one of the greatest engagement experiences with our audience during a major near-blizzard in our area. I blogged about the snow storm engagement on PBS’s MediaShift blog and I plan to write even more later in the week about that experience. But while I build the CMS, I’m thinking about where to go with our Facebook engagement. It’s really grown in the last month and I want to keep it going.

Now I’m pondering my next steps. There are two questions swimming in my head. Do we want to extend our brand into individual fan pages for our on air personalities? Do we want to start holding contests and other opportunities where our Facebook fans can win something if they click the “like” button?

Contests on Facebook
I talked to one of my favorite Facebook groups about my personal challenge when it comes to Facebook and offering winnings to people who like the page. I’ve seen newsrooms offer the chance for a free iPad and jump 14,000 fans. But I question how many of those fans will actually engage with the page. I realize a huge jump of 14,000 additional people would find at least a couple hundred of those fans engaging. But for some reason I love the organically grown community. You know, the kind that forms naturally because of similar interests and cares. The kind where you build a relationship that is founded on information and communication. I kind of see these prize drawings as a bribery. I’m saying bribery is bad, I just question that it’s the best option for a community’s foundation. In the last year, my newsroom’s Facebook page has grown from less than 500 to more than 5,600 fans. It’s a wonderful natural growth that really bloomed thanks to our snow storm coverage.

Personalities on Facebook
We have a couple of on air personalities who are already finding great interaction with our newsroom’s main Facebook page and their personal pages. I don’t want to fix what isn’t broken, but I wonder if I’m missing anything at this point. We have a strong Facebook news page, but we also have one anchor who is getting even better engagement from viewers who are her Facebook friends. These are people who she friended as viewers instead of viewers who clicked “like” on a fan page. We’re working on security permissions so she feels comfortable asking questions en masse but also posting pictures of her family. I might continue my “organic” feel with this situation. Our hub of Facebook delivery will remain our current fan page while our on air personalities will be asked to use their personal pages with security or create a fan page if they don’t want to use their personal profile. I think as Facebook continues to change, I’ll continue to change how we reach out and connect with our viewers.

I also reached out on Facebook to ask many people who are working in newsrooms… It’s incredible to see the many different ways Facebook is managed (or not managed.) I’ll try to walk my walk and document our successes and failures more often.

I also tried to play with the many items you can collect and trade in the game. All in all, most spots had dozens of Mickey hats. Once you collected a hat, it was tough to find many others. In the end, I collected a Mickey hat, a hitchhiking ghost, a tour bus and a partner statue. I had hoped to find some extra surprises with the park’s Gowalla experience, but maybe because I had a hard time with my AT&T service, I didn’t find it.

Now that I got to enjoy my fun and games, it’s time to get back to work. I’m co-teaching a class on campus that is known as the journalism for non-journalism majors class. My partner in crime, Jake Sherlock, and I plan to bring as many perspectives and views of the industry as possible. I have a great group of students signed up for my capstone class and I’m fleshing out some great projects for the students. My newsroom is also working on launching a new content management system. This is a really exciting change for us!

I’m also planning on attending at least three conferences this year: SXSWi, BlogHer bet and BlogHer ’11. I’m trying to take some of my journalism focus and look at the many new ways I can expand it. I have so many students who are learning their core skills can be used in many non-traditional ways. I hope I can arm myself with more knowledge to help guide them beyond the newsroom experience. So while I’m working on teaching and helping run the KOMU news, I’m hoping to continue to expand my views. It’s challenging to see everything out there if I’m just in the newsroom working with in a more traditional setting. Luckily I work in an environment that allows me to try to innovate.

So, grab your thinking hat and join me while I try to figure out how we can take all this vast knowledge of the changing world and spread the word. My first step towards that goal is helping launch a Social Media Club in our town. I’m looking forward to helping share knowledge in my community and helping grow a more converged alliance of people in my area who understand the growing power of how communication and sharing is changing!

In the last session I attended, I sat near a woman who said she felt this was the first conference she attended where journalists are positive about the industry. One of my friends mentioned “journalism is NOT dead!” when he checked into the conference on Foursquare.

We’re feeling kind of good here.

To add to it, I feel really lucky I get to touch two worlds inside journalism – higher education and professional practice. I get to attend presentations and meet with really smart people while thinking along both of these worlds. What can I share with my students? What can I use in my newsroom? I leaves my brain spinning and with very little room to remember the names of people I’ve met. (Sorry.)

But I wanted to share an “aha” moment that I know a lot of other online journalists have already had… But it took me to attend a Google search presentation and then another panel on analytics to convince me to make a change in how I run my news website and how I teach. I need to teach trends.

Trends. Why am I behind on this? Oh, I knew it existed, but hadn’t spent time to think about its potential. I know I can’t use the excuse that I’m busy. All of our newsrooms are busy. I need to think about trends because there are search engines and tools out there that could HAND me access to more engagement with my audience. These are tools that could give my students the tools to get that next job and better engage with their audience when they move to a new community.

It’s a little “aha” moment where I had to wake myself out of the “analytics can tell me what I need to know” attitude.

I walked up to Will Sullivan (aka Journerdism) who is running for the ONA 2011 Board of Directors and is a 2010-11 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow. He was at the St. Louis Post Dispatch before the fellowship and I casually asked if his paper was watching search trends. And of course he said yes. I’m so thankful I attended this event to remind me about tools that are out there that can help! Of course search statistics don’t mean everything. But it is something I should be doing for my newsroom to help move us forward and do our very best in covering our market.

It was a good “aha” moment.

(For those of you who are curious, I plan to spend more time with Google Trends. Also, check out the Google Insights page. That’s how I created the trends grid above. It shows the ebb and flow of search about the Online News Association since 2004 in the United States. It’s not the only tool out there, but it’s pretty fun to play with.)

Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team announced a number of new changes that include being able to download the content you’ve posted to your profile and the development of groups. I asked my new Facebook group on Social Journalism about a link that summarizes the changes, and Craig Kanalley from The Huffington Post shared his explanation. Groups have existed before on Facebook. But this time, it’s alive.

I’m not kidding.

I was going to go to sleep. Instead I jumped in and found a lively, flowing conversation underway. It’s hard to explain, so I took a screen capture. (I asked permission first.)

Let me explain what you’re looking at. This isn’t your normal wall post. When you post, you just hit enter and it pops up. Seconds later, another person’s post pops up. It’s live. And you don’t have to be friends with that person to have the conversation. I’ve always said Facebook is a space where I can communicate with people I know and I’ve met face-to-face while Twitter is a place for me to have great conversations with people I don’t know. Well. This changes it all. For the last hour or so, I’ve had a conversation with people I know on Twitter but the conversation is on Facebook. This conversation is hosted through a tool I played around with during SXSW earlier this year called Hot Potato (I an assuming the live chat function is what makes this new group experience possible). The Hot Potato concept was creating specific online “rooms” where people could have Twitter-like conversations but only people who are interested in the topic would read it. That’s what’s happening with the Facebook group concept. I had envisioned Hot Potato as a great thing for conversations during conferences so my Twitter feed wouldn’t be so loud. Mark Zuckerberg saw it in a wider perspective.

So one person on this new Facebook group asked me if I know what kind of implications this brings to journalism. My initial reaction is this is an enhancement to the current Facebook fan/like pages. It’s an opportunity to talk about topics in real time with people who have similar interests… or a similar newsroom. I immediately created a new group for my newsroom. I run a mommy blog Facebook page and I’m trying to wrap my mind around the pros and cons of adding a group to the page as well.

There are different types of groups. The one I played in tonight is closed – that means I was invited in and you need an invite to participate. There are also open groups and secret groups. The open and closed groups are searchable. The secret groups are only known by those people who are invited. I created an open group for my newsroom and one I might use for current and former students of my #jenclass. The amount of oversight for these groups may be impossible. I’m not saying that is good or bad at this point. I am curious to see what could happen when my “traditional” newsroom hooks up with the general public with the new Facebook group experience. I am hoping we could create a new even more personal interactive experience.

*One quick warning - if you get invited to a new group, you’re immediately in the group. You can remove yourself or change the permissions of the group. I immediately turned off email notifications. That helped save an incredible mess inside my inbox as the conversations got really rolling online tonight.*

First, I own an iPhone ,an iPad and a Mac Powerbook. I subscribe to MobileMe so all of my calendar items match up no matter what tool I’m using to enter an event or responsibility. I do everything I can to not double book meetings. Using a $100 subscription to MobileMe seems a bit expensive, but it has saved me many, many times from overbooking or double booking my world. My calendar is organized by work, work outs, personal events, my children and specific roles I hold (events based on the classes I teach and my web responsibilities are examples). I haven’t merged my husband’s schedule into my calendar, but I’ve considered doing that as well. I recently added a category where I can put assignment desk story ideas into my own calendar because I’ve noticed my newsroom tends to lose news releases and scheduled events when I’m not tightly babysitting the paper version of our assignment files. The calendar system isn’t perfect, but I can easily see my busy schedule and try to keep up with it. (Of course everything I schedule can change at the drop of a hat if breaking news happens in our newsroom.)

My phone allows me to keep up with email as best I can. I also use Google Voice to get transcribed voicemails sent to me as a text message and as an email. This helps me respond to voicemails since I’m famously terrible at responding to them. This change in my life workflow has made me a better communicator with people who are phone communicators.

I tend to be more of a text-based communicator. I get swamped with email, so I don’t always respond fast enough for email senders’ liking. Quick conversations are better accomplished as text messages or Twitter direct messages. That’s because I am running around a lot during the day. I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and focus on an inbox. I usually have time in the morning to really respond to email and time after my kids are in bed at night. That means there’s a big chunk in the middle of the day when I’m not glued to my inbox. I’m glued to my phone, just not my inbox.

I’ve tried to fix my email problem by creating a specific semester-based email account for my students (I’ve created one for the fall, spring and summer semesters). That way I can notice email alerts from them and respond quicker. Since I look at my email on my phone the most, I have all of my inboxes open at the same time so it’s easily to see when there’s a new email in my class inbox. I’m not responding quickly to every person who sends me mail, but I want my students to get priority, and I don’t really want to create folders during each semester… I guess I’m lazy like that.

While I’m juggling all of the information coming in via email, text and social media (I mainly follow chatter on Twitter and Facebook), I try to keep up with industry discussions so I can stay up to date and help my students follow the many developments in this changing media world. I have “liked” newsrooms, blogs and other organizations across the country so I can see the updates in my Facebook news feed. I also keep track of the latest posts on Twitter along with specific topics I can follow thanks to Twitter lists. I’m working on a quick post on how I share all of those links I read and peruse with my students. I promise to share a link here when that happens.

As for keeping up with a list of to do’s… I’m still working on making that work. I have tried Things, Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, iCal To Do lists… But so far, I haven’t found the right way to really encorporate a list into my current life workflow. I’m hoping I find that perfect solution soon!

Do I keep up with everything? No. Are my eyes and ears open to a lot of conversations and activities at the same time? Yes! And I know the constant juggle of life and work that I can do with the help of technology helps make that possible.

I enjoyed the discussion during the event, but I think I’m even more interested in the aftermath. Many of the attendees and journalism organizations are still talking about the meaningful weekend. Small journalism organizations don’t often have a chance to see so many people who understand each other. Small journalism organizations don’t often have a chance to discuss the challenges of funding and the future of funding whatever we consider the future of journalism.

Here is a list of some of the great blog posts and discussions I’ve followed today:
Howard Owens: For -profit, non-profit and ???
Susan Mernit: Block by Block 2010: Time for the next steps
Nonprofit Communicator Blog: Online news experts descend on Chicago
Megan Garber (Nieman Journalism Lab): Block by Block: Once you’ve launched, what’s Phase 2 of a community startup?
Anne Galloway: Bit by bit, “Block by Block,” small online news publishers find their way

I realize there are many more posts and talks in the days to come, I’ll try to continue to add links here.