Spoke for the first time at Social Media Breakfast Austin this morning. While 7:30am is too early for my taste, good discussion, smart people and Torchy’s Tacos made it worth it.
We got questions about whether PR professionals should use Twitter to communicate with reporters (yes, but not obsessively), how media can monetize social media (it probably can’t) and what the future of journalism looks like (Google Wave, wikis, context).
The most interesting question we’ve all confronted in journalism panels of late is this idea that there’s a vast ‘sewage pipe’ of information out there, and it is difficult for consumers to sort the waste from the valuable pieces of information. How should we best help people find the news they need? Curation/aggregation is a good start, so long as the readers grant the curator or the news organization credibility. I’m also interested in advanced, dynamic tagging. But let’s have a conversation about this… reliable information is hard to measure and hard to find. What’s the best way journalism organizations can get it to the people who want it?
Improving Google page rank is the best and simplest way to make that happen. A surprisingly large portion of traffic to BOR is through Google (and Yahoo) search.
Otherwise, its all about building partnerships with strong online voices, and figuring out how to create a mutually beneficial relationship in a medium where trad. media “heroes” like David Simon think bloggers are destroying journalism.
Hi Elise,
I was at the SMB this morning and really enjoyed the panel.
As far as your question goes, I find it interesting that with so many news organizations creating Twitter accounts and such, most of the news I get from the social networking type sites is from personal accounts and not the orgs. I follow @cnnbrk and they often have ‘breaking news’ hours after I’ve already gotten the information from an individual I follow. So on that front, I think it’s key that if news orgs create accounts on these sites in an effort to get the news out fast and easy, that they follow through on that promise.
As it was before the proliferation of mediums and channels for communicating the news, those who are interested in receiving information and news will still seek it out.
Good post, E.
I’d like to speak to Molly’s point – Part of the delay for the news orgs’ Twitter accounts is taking the time to confirm the news. That’s a step that people using personals account don’t have to worry about if they don’t want to.
Many people are responsible and won’t just RT everything that sounds hot, but not every social media user is – witness the Jeff Goldblum rumor that flew around after Michael Jackson died.
There are, of course, other reasons for delayed updates from news orgs, but we shouldn’t overlook the steps they take to try to confirm news.
That’s a good point that I had overlooked when posting my original comment, Fisc. Thanks for bringing it up.
I will say that if I see a tweet or post with a piece of breaking news that intrigues me, my first thought is to then reference the Web site of a reputable news organization (most often CNN) to verify the truth of the story. So, personally, I often find out about news from an individual, but verify and get more detailed information via areputable news sources.
I enjoyed the Social Media Breakfast this morning and posted a 60 minute video of it on http://spring.net/blog . . . feel free to embed to link to it.