Over the weekend I was able to once-again attend the New York Press Association's annual convention at the Gideon Putnam in Saratoga Springs, a meeting of staffers from mostly weekly publications across the state which gathers a number a great presenters each year to talk about a variety of topics in the field.

On Friday I attended a great session on the effective use of Social Media by Regina McCombs of the Poynter Institute (here are all of her links from the presentation) and walked away with some great tips that I hope to soon be able to incorporate into The Record's newsroom.

One of these was that journalists can develop relationships with their audience via their personal Twitter accounts. This was not new information, as I had heard it and tried to stress it to our Record reporters in the past. However, the example she provided - journalist Jason DeRusha (@derushaj on Twitter) - was especially interesting since he posts the stories he’s working on every morning and gets user input, not worrying about other news outlets competing for the story first.
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Cailin Brown and Rhea Drysdale.

We had another great community forum at The Record on Thursday, Mar. 31 which focused on getting the most out of Social Media.

Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media in Troy, talked about the benefits of using social media for personal branding, using tools for two-way conversations, and using tools like TweetDeck and others to manage data feeds.

Cailin Brown, an associate professor who teaches journalism at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, discussed the benefits of social media from a journalism perspective, based on her experience both as a reporter and professor, including some of what she currently teaches as best practices to her students.

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Here are the latest promos for our next set of Community Forums to be hosted by The Record in our Community Media Lab. They will be held next week, on Mar. 29 and 31, focusing on bass fishing tips as well as how to best use Social Media.

If interested, please register using the included links.

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