One, who was using the tool to announce new content, said audience engagement was still minimal. Another said they were unclear as to how the organization was tracking any benefit from their effort.

A new study released July 20 suggests the news outlet could benefit substantially by better focusing and communicating its social media strategy — getting more reporters involved and encouraging them to become more personal.

The study found a financial correlation between companies that outperform their peers and those that strongly engage people across multiple channels of social media. It didn’t look specifically at news media organizations but its recommendations would seem to apply widely — especially since it found that media and technology companies were, on average, involved in the most social media channels.

The study is authored by social media analyst Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group in collaboration with social publishing platform Wetpaint. The researchers found:

Social media engagement and financial success work together to perpetuate a healthy business cycle: a customer-oriented mindset stemming from deep social interaction allows a company to identify and meet customer needs in the marketplace, generating superior profits.

The top scorers in the study — Starbucks, Dell … and Thomson Reuters — all engaged the audience on multiple platforms. But the researchers also concluded that focusing heavily on just a few channels can be effective.

The study listed a number of take-away points. One of the key ones was:

Social media is no longer the responsibility of a few people in the organization. Instead, it’s important for everyone across the organization to engage with customers in the channels that make sense — a few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

So, it suggests that while social media editors are important, to become truly effective, news outlets need to spread those tasks much more broadly.

David Schlesinger said in a speech to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission that London 2012 will be covered by “Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging out the result in a Tweet from their mobile phone.” (2012?)

He called on organizers to step back from their hard-line policy on the issue: “It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and media-enabled public, and not against them.”

The Vancouver organizing committee for the 2010 Winter Games is prohibiting spectators from:

Broadcasting or recording through the use of cellular phones or other recording or transmitting devices (e.g., two-way radios, recording devices, PDAs, or video cameras), use of flash photography or other lighting devices (e.g., laser pens, etc.)

In addition, it decrees that “spectators must consent to being inspected for prohibited and restricted items” while explicitly stating it will not provide storage for seized items.

The restrictions reflect the attitude in February 2005 when Bell Globemedia and Rogers Communications Inc. paid a record US$153 million for the Canadian rights to both the 2010 Winter Games and the 2012 Summer Games.

Ivan Fecan, Globemedia’s president and chief executive officer, told the Globe and Mail (one of its properties): “By 2012, we think there will be so much digital proliferation in the country that there will be opportunities in all of these platforms that we haven’t even thought of. And that doesn’t even deal with what might be available from mobile video and other applications.”

The assumption then was the companies could cash in on a broadcast monopoly in a wireless environment. But that was before Twitter and Facebook — and the iPhone.