How we did it: Wearables at Work

Jan 30, 2016

In June 2015, I led an experiment in audience engagement and storytelling on social media at the Financial Times.

The output of this project consisted of

• A Facebook page
• A feature story
• A podcast
• A video report

With this project, we tried to answer two big questions:

• What can we gain from making our reporting process transparent and public?

• How would we tell a story natively on Facebook? (as opposed to just publishing articles onto Facebook)

The story idea came from Sarah O’Connor, the FT’s employment correspondent:

Being tracked at work is already a reality for many people and the trend is likely to spread as wearable smart devices become more popular. Business use of wearables will raise privacy concerns and blur the line between home and office, but they also promise productivity gains and the ability to make workers “happier, healthier and wealthier”.

How we told the story

We fitted Sarah O’Connor with wearable tracking devices for a week while she did her reporting.

But instead of doing this behind close doors and publishing an FT article only at the end of the reporting, we divided it into two stages:

• The ‘live’ stage (May 26-29) — Sarah wore the devices and gave regular updates. These bite-sized content were a mix of text, video, and pictures. We also conducted a reader callout using Reddit during this time.
  This is personal, in the moment, and contains her immediate reaction/reflections.

  • Day 1 The Employee’s perspective: Creepiness/Privacy; Why would some employees welcome it?

  • Day 2 The Employer’s perspective: Do they want the information? Do they know what to do with it?

  • Day 3 Pitfalls: People finding loopholes and gaming the system; lost of trust and other values; cybersecurity; who owns the data?

  • Day 4 Summing up and broadening out: What we learnt; historical context; broader workplace surveillance issues.

• The ‘afterwards’ stage (June 9) — Sarah summarised what we found via a Business Life feature, a podcast, and an FT video. This is more sweeping, analytical, and definitive.

We hoped that this would generate greater interest in the project, encourage readers to share their own stories, and point us towards future stories on this topic.

What was new for the FT

• Publish parts of a story or video, before assembling the best parts into a final, longer piece

• Provide a variety of ways into the story, with different content available depending on how much the viewer wanted to engage with the story

• Use Reddit to solicit stories and leads

• Engage in person with potential audiences at outside events (I spoke about the experiment at Hacks/Hackers London and also at the Wearables London meetup)

How did we measure success?

Inspired by ProPublica’s Amanda Zamora, we set out clear goals and KPIs from the outset:

What are our GOALS?

• ‘Write’ part of the story natively on Facebook using text, photos, videos, etc
• Have a plan, co-ordinate distribution across multiple platforms, and track results so that we can find out what worked and what didn’t, and improve next time
• Report part of the story via social media (i.e. use callouts during the reporting process rather than only after publishing ‘the’ piece)

What are our KPIs (key performance indicators) i.e. How we are executing those goals

• Did we tell a good story? Was the journalism good
• Did we generate interest in this story? Number of followers, comments and views on the Facebook page
• Did building up an audience on an off-FT platform then allow us to guide/direct them to related FT content? Pageviews of FT.com story in the ‘afterwards’ stage, and clickthroughs to those stories from the Facebook page
• Was our audience a useful reporting resource? Number and quality of response to the callout
• Internal reception? Did other people in the newsroom see this as a success

What are our TARGETS i.e. what numbers do we want to hit

• Good story? Qualitative - internal newsroom review
• Did we generate interest? Initial goal: 500 followers, 10000 total reach of all posts on Facebook
• Guided audiences to FT? Initial goal: 200 clickthroughs from Facebook page to Business Life piece. Most-read Business Life piece that week in terms of pageviews
• Number and quality of responses? 100 responses across all our callouts. Review with Sarah: were the responses useful for her story
• Internal response? Qualitative - internal newsroom review

One problem we ran into was that it was difficult to come up with targets because we didn’t have similar past projects to compare this to. In the end we just came up with something that we thought sounded reasonable.

What we found

What are the benefits to making our reporting process transparent and public?

One of the big reasons why we chose to report the wearables at work story this way was because it was still a very nascent phenomenon in June 2015. Not a lot of companies were asking employees to use work-issued wearables, and so we knew it was going to be difficult for Sarah to find sources and report the story in the traditional way.

In that sense, the benefits of doing the reporting ‘out in the open’ was immense. We effectively condensed weeks of contact-building into four days, and found people to interview that we wouldn’t otherwise have known about. But the benefits were less clear in terms of building a bigger audience for our reporting. The main difficulty was that we had to build an audience for a new Facebook page from scratch, and to do so in an exceptionally short period of time (just 4 days during the ‘live’ stage). We had a thousand followers by the end of the live stage. The link to the final feature from our Facebook post reached 1802 people and was clicked on 443 times - an exceptionally high 24.5% conversion rate.

But those are small overall numbers even for the FT, and given the amount of effort we put in to achieve that result, it is not clear that this was a better approach compared to conventional ways of promotion and digital distribution.

How would we tell a story natively on Facebook? (as opposed to just publishing articles onto Facebook)

We found that videos work much better than text. Short text snippets work better than long, considered articles. Overall, Facebook pages are not a great storytelling platform. Besides the pinned post, there is almost no control post curation. Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms and low organic reach for posts make it impossible to rely on any follower ever having seen an earlier post.

Instead, it is probably better used as a place for either journalists or projects to have a digital presence over a much longer period of time than just four days.

What did this project take

About 20 to 25 full person-days of work, split between Robin Kwong, Sarah O’Connor, Nalini Sivathasan, Aleksandra Wisniewska and Kari Ruth-Pedersen.

In addition, we had support from Charlie Bibby, Petros Gioumpasis, Russell Birkett, Sarah Laitner, Maija Palmer, Michael Bruning and Karishma Kothari. Adam Jones’s team edited and produced the Business Life piece. Martin Stabe produced the podcast. Lloyd Thatcher designed the logo.

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