NPR Gets Social
September 29, 2008
NPR is in touch with its customers, online and offline, better than most institutions. So it makes since that they are integrated pretty well within the social web compared to most institutions, from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter. However, they have been lagging behind when it comes their own website. Today, NPR.org stepped it up a notch by launching an integration of more robust social media tools within their existing site.
- Profile pages for users
- New community page
- Improved commenting for all content
- Section for most commented, emailed, and viewed stories
- Profile recommendations (very subtle but cool feature)
- Name your favorite NPR programs on your profile
- Forums with increased interaction in between users
- Ability to interact with NPR staff
A lot of these updated to NPR.org are not over the top social media tools. Many have been around on big media sites for a little while. NPR admits it is late to the game here, but they have still done a great job of making the transition. And they seem to be ready improve as they go.
We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative. This is important for the NPR community. - Inside NPR.org
They have not titled the social media aspect of the site anything special, it truly is integrated and clean with no fuss, letting their content lead the way. This is a great foundation for integrating social media into an existing site, and a model for others to follow as these tools become more and more expected.
Wow, they’re only 5 years behind!
Pretty soon, they’re going to hear about this “new” thing called “Myspace” and join it.
Dugg, even though NPR is the most terrible radio station ever