If you’re a business, civic group, arts organization or good cause, and you’re actively using Twitter to share your community news, events, initiatives, or even reviews, we’ll automatically retweet your messages to our community follower base.

Why?

We firmly believe in the power of social media at the local level. Most of your daily errands, your business and your livelihood is really done within walking and driving distance. We want to empower you to be able to reach your local audience via our 300 Twitter feeds.

Again, we are community service media. We believe in Buy Local. We want to help our local causes. We will never charge you a cent for helping you get your word out, ever.

How?

You can tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed (whatever city you are from) simply by adding our Breaking News Twitter handle (like @breakingsfnews) at the end of your tweet. And follow our Twitter feed @theBNN so we’re alerted to you.

The tweet will show up instantly like this on our Breaking News Twitter feed:

We’ll authorize you

When you send out a tweet to us the first time, it will not get retweeted automatically. We will do it manually.

We will check your Twitter feed. If it meets our standards of good local community content (no spam or self promotional Twitter history), we will authorize you to allow you to tweet through our Breaking News Twitter feed any time simply by mentioning the local Breaking News Twitter feed (like @breakingsfnews).

We will tweet back to you that you have been authorized. We use Grouptweet to facilitate this all for you and highly recommend them for developing your own collaborative Twitter system (easier to use than CoTweet and Hootsuite!)

Oh, and contact me at @pkitano or thebreakingnewsnetwork@gmail if you’re still unsure about these instructions.

Our Twitter feeds are managed by locals. We’re looking forward to helping you get your word out!

Among our first assignments with real estate brokerages was to explain to thousands of agents the new realities of social marketing; how to build real estate blogs and use social media to foster community engagement. By early 2009, the housing crisis was in full swing. Traditional real estate marketing did not work as buyers disappeared with the economic crash. Realtors (for those not in real estate, the word Realtors is trademarked by the National Association of Realtors, and is generally capitalized), in desperation, jumped en masse into social media, but could only parrot their old sales training by trumpeting “it’s a good time to buy” to an unreceptive, even hostile audience. We thought the best marketing strategy while the economy was crashing around all of us was to stop this “good time to buy” messaging and build trust with the community by positioning the Realtor as the community hub. We developed Breaking News in the spring of 2009 to test this idea.

Breaking News is simply social media sourced news that is curated and automated to ticker tape 24-by-7 the most interesting local media in a city. Local news organically builds follower bases on social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. Conversations happen; yes, locals like to engage with news.

We developed Breaking News to support the real estate community. The marketing model behind Breaking News follows the premise that successful Realtors have always had a stake in their community, as mayors, newspaper publishers or Chamber board members. Breaking News updates the concept by positioning the Realtor as social news hub, which puts them right in the center of where news reporting is headed. A few months after launch, Breaking News won the Most Innovative Media award at Inman Connect, a prominent real estate technology conference.

Here are five key features that made Breaking News an effective marketing platform for real estate professionals and other local business.

1) Realtors “own” their city or neighborhood, and are interviewed to make sure they understand how to leverage a media property for building community engagement. In many cities hundreds of Realtors compete for business within a few square miles, and geographical exclusivity has always been coveted as a critical competitive marketing advantage. Ownership also puts skin in the game, and Realtors developed Breaking News as an asset they could use over the life of their careers and beyond.

2) Breaking News automates local news curation and aggregation using RSS feeds of the best media, blog and social media resources in a city. The 24-by-7 ticker tape of news allows Realtors to do what they do best – network and engage with their community.

3) Breaking News is customizable to the owner and the locality. The system is built on WordPress so owners can customize the design and messaging. New news feeds can be added easily. A comprehensive updated tutorial, along with twice weekly webinars on social media marketing and community engagement, provides guidance for Realtors in developing Breaking News as a local media asset.

4) Breaking News is community service media. We’re disrupting traditional local publishing business models by showing local business how to use social media to market themselves instead of purchasing advertising. We offer access to Breaking News social media feeds to anybody who wants to have a broadcast voice into the cities and communities we cover. By providing this kind of tangible marketing and financial value to the community, owners develop beneficial community relationships that they are leveraged for their own business. We dub this “good will marketing”.

5) Owning a local media asset can propel owners into new business opportunities because it puts them in front of the local business community. Socially Now and Apsides Media Group  are two examples of offshoot businesses that were developed from Breaking News by owners involved in real estate. Many Breaking News systems offer local deals. We actively show owners how to develop these businesses as a commercial service to their community.

In sum, Breaking News revolutionizes local media by providing a simple to build construct that can make anybody a local publisher and ringleader. The Network affirms the idea that future of local media will evolve grass roots, from individuals and community groups.