The Canadian Jewish Newspaper: Employee Involvement

The Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is a not-for-profit media organization that serves the Jewish community by providing a platform for diverse points of view, on subjects of interest and relevance. The award-winning CJN is Canada’s largest, weekly Jewish newspaper with an audited circulation of nearly 32,000 and read by more than 100,000 people each week.

Situation:

• A small Jewish newspaper establishment that runs a weekly newspaper
• The newspaper is available in cities across Canada
• There is a website: cjnews.com where all articles get published online
• There are about 25 employees, average age being 50-years-old
• The newspaper has an active Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook page
• However, the youth are no longer paying attention to newspapers, and current events. 

Challenges

• Helping the newspaper cater to younger audiences
• Getting the youth excited about opening up the newspaper, checking the articles online and paying attention to their social media accounts
• Most of the staff is older and to get them on board with the moving times

Actions

These are ideas to get the staff more involved with the social media of the company

• Hire a social media expert to speak to the staff during a group meeting
• Create a hashtag designated specifically to the staff. Examples: #LifeatTheCJN, #CommunityatTheCJN, #OurCJNFamilia. Tell the staff members to post fun photos/videos of them at work, or even at home reading the newspaper. Ask them use these hashtags and they can be entered in a chance to win very fun prizes.
• For the newspaper’s social media, put a different staff member in charge of each day. Say they are responsible for the content of that day.
• Tell the staff they can run contests, promotions, and other creative planning.

Lessons for Others

Results

• When the staff hears they can win prizes, they will be excited to post photos/videos of their experience at work or reading the newspaper on their own time. Using these hashtags will create a sense of community. Outsiders will see how much “fun” it is working there, or that even that the staff read the paper, and will get them wanting to be apart of it somehow.
• When the staff hears they can be in charge of posts, it makes them feel wanted, responsible, have a sense of power and be able to let their creative juices flow. They will work hard at these posts and then want their friends to support. So will tell their friends to tag, like and comment which creates engagement, which then causes these posts to circulate through social media.
• Workers that feel more involved in the expansion of the company then feel a greater want for the company to succeed. This will cause their work ethic to improve, which will cause the newspaper to improve, which leads to success.
• Happy workers = better work outcome. It is a continuous cycle.

If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.

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References