A tricky question for media companies will be how to best harness the power of social networking.

Some companies like USA Today have built in social networking straight to their sites. I think all journalism companies should embrace social networking, especially local sites. USA Today may be a poor candidate for social networking because it has an unfocused audience and content stream.

But let’s face it: social networking will always be done best by dedicated companies like Facebook and Myspace, and that’s what we’ll tackle today. Certainly, there is a market of young, educated individuals out there for media companies to tap into on those networks.

Journalism is facing a crisis. The majority of people reading papers and watching TV journalism are old, but social networking sites give journalists the chance to turn that around — if they play their cards right.

Facebook in particular has reached out and is allowing people to harness its vast and rapidly growing social network thought its Facebook Platform. The API allows programmers to build applications on Facebook that extend the scope of the site.

It also allows for a great opportunity to reach a new audience for journalism companies. The Washington Post, not surprisingly, was one of the first newspapers to jump on board and release an application. I’ll examine the Post’s first crack at harnessing social networking to give other companies insights into the dos and don’ts.

The Post created the The Compass application — a graphical way to display a person’s political orientation. The application requires users to take a short political quiz.

VP of Product Development Rob Curley wrote about the experience on this blog:

So, as we began trying to explain exactly what we thought of this to our bosses back in D.C., we had two main points:

No. 1 — We shouldn’t even bother to try to build something on the new Facebook API if we were just going to try to get our headlines on people’s pages. (Yep, that’s what every college student wants: headlines from The Washington Post on their Facebook profile).

Deryck and I emphasized that we needed to build things that would really work on a social-networking site, but that the very last thing we would want was for The Washington Post to look like Pat Boone rapping.

There’s no point in trying to pretend you’re Jay-Z (or even Yahoo!), when your stars are Bob Woodward and Tony Kornheiser.

Clearly, one of our biggest challenges was going to be coming up with things that felt like they belonged on both washingtonpost.com and on Facebook.

* No. 2 — We wanted everyone to understand that being able to build tools like this on Facebook was going to be really cool, but that we wanted everyone’s expectations to be managed.

Most of the journalist I have heard from seem to think social networking sites would be a great places to display story headlines. Now that’s thinking inside the box — way inside it. Curley on the other hand has the right idea.

If you want to harness the power of social networking you have to think outside the box, and create something that appeals to users of social networking. The political compass is a really cool concept. It’s graphically appealing and it’s something different.

It gets people thinking about the Post in positive ways.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people (most are quite young) have installed and used The Compass. Most of them probably never read the Post. But now they have seen this really cool application that may cause them to think differently about the Post.

They might think the Post isn’t like all the other dinosaurs of news. And honestly what more could you ask for?

The Compass application is an awesome idea, but something went wrong. The Compass is terrible, terrible execution. This is a lesson to the Post and other would-be application makers.

It takes more than a cool idea to help your cause and engender you to a new audience. The Compass falls short on the content side, because it is a terrible political test. It’s 10 questions long (which is really short for a political quiz) and some of the questions are quite poor.
The worst part is that the compass itself only goes between right and left (it’s a half circle and not a full circle like a real compass). Political scientists would tell you that political beliefs exist along two axes (one of my majors was political science), not one as the Post would have you believe.

One axis measures whether you are more economically libertarian or authoritarian. The other measures your social libertarianism or authoritarianism. This allows for a myriad of political beliefs, not just the standard liberal, moderate or conservative.

You might believe in small government with few social programs (“conservative”) but also believe in gay rights (“liberal”). Those beliefs would make you a libertarian, but the Post would call you a moderate because the views basically cancel each other out on the quiz (even though neither is moderate). That’s the kind of nuance that The Compass can’t accurately display.

In short, it’s not a good enough test to gauge someone’s political leanings, and it focuses on the politically divisive labels of liberal and conservative, which is exactly what a respected newspaper like the Post shouldn’t be doing. The Post should be trying to get people to expand the political conversation in this country.

Here are two great political quizzes: The Political Compass is a favorite of many, while the Politopia quiz has a special place in my heart. Both are similar and much more more nuanced than the Post’s compass.

It’ll open your eyes and teach you something about political beliefs.

I really like the idea the Post had, but the execution borderline hurts them by being it so rudimentary. If I were the Post, I would redo the quiz with better and more questions. I’d also make it a real compass (the current one is half a compass) and measure along the two axes I have suggested.

Then it would be a really cool application, and it would serve a real purpose. I applaud them for thinking outside the box. I hope they take my suggestions to heart because it would serve the Post and the country well and wouldn’t take much work to fix.

The other awesome part about The Compass, and what makes it a cool social networking tool, is that it shows you a political map of where you stand in comparison to your friends. It would be even greater to find out the average political orientation of your friends and then be able to compare that average to your networks’ and the facebook’s average (hopefully the Post adds this feature sometime).

The idea and the application is great. The execution just wasn’t fleshed out well enough.

Besides the obvious political science issues with the application, it’s a good example for others to follow. If journalists think outside the box (like The Compass does) and deliver quality content behind the application, they’ll have a hit, and they’ll reach a new audience.

Social networking and journalism will be a reoccurring theme on this blog. Check back regularly for more insights.

How do you think journalists should harness social networking?