Did someone just ask a question about your coverage of their club? Show up and engage them, find out what they liked and what they didn’t, explain what you do, or find out more about what they do.

Make your own version of this US Air Force flowchart and post it in your newsroom if you want to follow some good guidelines on when it’s a good idea to engage with people complaining about your work on the Internet.

Pick a topic, (hey, football season is coming up…) and set a goal of building a social media dashboard for your student newsroom that any user can access from the Web whether they’re in the newsroom or not.

The dashboard is your constant checkpoint for news, information, conversations, and sources related to the team you’re covering. Build this once, and you’ll understand RSS, search feeds, Google Alerts, and you can find the tools you like best to get the job done and make sure that you and your colleagues in the newsroom know what the buzz is — especially when it’s about you.

If you make it clear when you’ve got an interest in something, make it clear who you work for and what you do, and make it clear when any of that changes, you’re in good shape. Make sure you fill out your social media profiles as fully as you can, grab your Google profile, update a LinkedIn profile and generally make it very easy to find out who you are and what you do.

Anything worth hiding from your readers is probably worth disclosing. That way, you’ll stay out of trouble, and they’ll trust you.

How to teach that to students who probably don’t own stock in any of the businesses they’ll be covering? Maybe make it an exercise: Try using social media channels to gather man-on-the-street style quotes about a campus business you *love* and spend lots of money in. Find the right way to let your sources know that you have a point of view, but you want theirs.

My five keys to authenticity:

1. Be Human.
2. Be Honest.
3. Be Aware.
4. Be Everywhere.
5. Show Your Work.

I think #1 is pretty easy to teach: Take a budding columnist with personality (Kevin Yuen, you were this guy, right?) and a real voice of his or her own, and set them loose on Twitter and Facebook with instructions to grow a network of followers and fans. Show them Favrd and Tweeteorites and tell them their goal should be to get to the top of those lists.

The lessons they learn building that network based on their own voice and natural instincts for promoting themselves will be useful on any beat, in any newsroom.