Hindustan Times Jumps on the Twitter Bandwagon. Does not create a Conversation!
HT Media has a reasonably big section on the front page of its Mumbai Editions advertising that they are now on Twitter.
Its interesting from the perspective that an offline media powerhouse (which has been treading into online heavily, read: the launch of Shine and Desimartini) is looking to build a presence online as well and readying itself to create a captive audience online, add value, and be more future ready.
Lets also not forget that according to ComScore, the traffic to Twitter grew to reach 0.12Million visitors in February. Neilsen on the other hand says that 60% of Twitter users fail to return to the microblogging network. No clear numbers for India.
Their twitter page however, at this point is fairly disappointing. The page is being used to distribute links to their content rather than create conversations. They are simply passing on links to stories from the main website.
In the long run this is very close to spam. It does not effectively capture the utility of Twitter’s conversational capability. Its an RSS Feed in another form.
Further, the number of followers they have able to attract is largely disappointing given the prime real estate that they have (an advertisement on Mumbai’s 2nd largest daily – not sure if they have this on the editions in other cities as well).
There are some great posts on how media houses can use Twitter on Search Engine Guide. Mashable has a good post on how social media is using Twitter.
In my opinion, HT Media can start off by:
Ensuring that they create conversations with people who are mentioning keywords related to their articles using Twitter Search. For example they have an article on Bipasha Basu. Here are Twitter users who have mentioned the actress. There’s a chance to strike up a friendship!
Actually Following Key Newsmakers to listen in on current news. For example profiles such as India Today, WATBlog, Labnol etc. are great sources of generating news stories and leads. Building relationships with these influencers also ensures that HT gets linked more often through their posts.
Finding out HT users on Twitter and following them (they have email databases arising from sign ups and also from people who may have commented on the HT website). In order to refrain from seeming as spam they should regularly unfollow those who do not follow them back by using FriendorFollow. They can then be encouraged to Tweet and ReTweet HT stories.
Twitter can also be used as a medium to add value to editorials by giving 1 line insights and quotes from their top journalists.
Over time, the main twitter profile can be used to pass on voice love and link love to the blogs and twitter profiles of their top journlists as well. This brings to the fore another thought. Will social media profiles built by media companies for individuals using company resources be bound by contract?
Once they have a few followers they can also try and generate polls through Twitter. A page in the main paper with opinions from Twitter perhaps.
They can also have a citizen journalism section through Twitter where users can either send pictures or news updates and the paper can provide hat tips to Twitter users who generate leads (eg. written by Vir Sanghvi tipped off by Harshil Karia)
The last obvious thing that they can do is try and create a process for feedback on articles.
Its pretty clear that so far, HT is just feeling the waters. Im pretty sure that they will get up to speed on these development. If not, they can always find FoxyMoron 
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