5 social media lessons from Roger Ebert, @EbertChicago

Screen shot of the Twitter feed of Roger Ebert, who died on Thursday at the age of 70.

It's appropriate that I first learned on Twitter of the passing of Roger Ebert. Not only because that's the place I get most of my breaking news, but also because Ebert helped me understand the power of social media and helped me teach it to others.

Here's what I posted in December 2009 when I started following Ebert on a regular basis:

For years, I've told people reluctant to use Twitter that @EbertChicago is a model for how to use that platform. In his last years, after a fight with cancer left him unable to speak, he used Twitter to connect to a new audience (read Mathew Ingram's (@mathewi) post in PaidContent about this). "It breaks through the silence I have been condemned to," he said. "It gives me a voice."

Here are 5 social-media lessons I learned from @EbertChicago:

1. Being interesting in real life means you can be really interesting in social media: Erica Anderson (@EricaAmerica), manager of news at Twitter, told the audience at Social Media Weekend 2012 that, "if you are good in real life you can be great on Twitter." That struck a chord with me and I've seen how some of the most worth-following feeds are from people who do good or great work in real life.

Ebert, of course, fell into that category and his insightful, smart reviews and large newspaper and TV platforms made him an obvious candidate to do well on social media. But very few people of his background, age and stature have bothered to make the leap onto social the way he had. Among the folks who have is Ruth Reichl (@RuthReichl), the 65-year-old former food critic of the NYT and editor in chief of Gourmet magazine (if you think of others, tell us in the comments below).

2. Great content will get you followers: Ebert always had compelling things to say - and not just about the movies. He wrote about a wide range of topics in his tweets, and always in a way that got a reaction. In June 2010, he wrote about how and why he tweets in a blog post called (what else?) "Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!". It's an article I've shared with many of my classes and recommend it to anyone still unsure of what to make of Twitter. He wrote it on the occasion of his 10,000th tweet - he'd go on to cross 31,000 in less than three years. Here are two excerpts from the post:

I am in conversation. When you think about it, Twitter is something like a casual conversation among friends over dinner: Jokes, gossip, idle chatter, despair, philosophy, snark, outrage, news bulletins, mourning the dead, passing the time, remembering favorite lines, revealing yourself.

My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.

3. Be humble: Look closely at his Twitter bio above. No mention of his many achievements, including being the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, no boasts of any kind - just a dig about his age and pointers to his blog and the Sun-Times website. Way too many of us spend way too much timing being anything but humble on social media. 

4. Engage with others; participate in conversations: Long before Twitter, I learned this lesson from watching Ebert participate in a forum of the media blog run by Jim Romenesko (@Romenesko), which was then hosted by the Poynter Institute.  He would write letters regularly to Romenesko, riffing on the news or reacting to some piece of media news. The letters, which ran in Romenesko's letters section, gave that blog its true water-cooler feel and made it a must-read for journalists around the U.S. 

But it wasn't just professional editors to whom Ebert responded. One of my young students, LaToya Tooles (@LaTooles) tweeted this and Ebert RTed it, resulted in her getting more attention than anything she had tweeted till then:

And here's how Tooles marked Ebert's passing two years later:

5. Social media has changed the role of expertise: As good as Ebert was and as often as I read his major reviews, I rarely relied on him for crucial movie outings in recent years. When it came to picking a movie for a rare date night with my wife, Roopa (@RoopaOnline), away from our 9.5-year-old twins, we just ask our friends on Facebook, who are able to give us more targeted, precise recommendations and almost never steer us wrong.

Turns out social media has meant the nature of expertise is different than it used to be. I experienced this first hand when the first iPad came out in 2010. That day I appeared on CNN, and said, in multiple ways that the iPad, while interesting technology wasn't for me and that I'd be awaiting version 2 of the product. A viewer in Brazil appeared to hear none of my criticisms:

A tweet from 2010 in response to a poor review of iPad shows how the role of expertise is changing, thanks to social media.

A lot has been written about Ebert's passing but I wanted to highlight a couple of pieces that show the range of Ebert's ability and personality - and reflect on the items above:

One is a piece by the fabulous writing teacher Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark), on "Why Roger Ebert was a Good Writer." The other is a piece by Robert Mankoff, cartoons editor of The New Yorker, on Ebert's obsession with captions for the magazine's cartoon contests (he entered 136 times and won once): "Roger Ebert's Final Cartoon Captions." And I'll let Ebert have the last word here, with a pointer to his final article, which he wrote a day before he died (he wrote the article 37 years after he started at the Sun-Times):

What are your thoughts on Ebert? Post in the comments below.

A screenshot from SocialFlow, a social-media publishing tool that tracks what's trending in one's own audience. As of 5 pm ET on Thursday, April 4, 2013, several mentions of him were trending among @Sree's followers.