Social Media Montana

Is Twitter just a toy, or a serious social media tool?

I’m aware it could be both, but in its current iteration, Twitter is mostly toy.  Don’t misunderstand me.  Twitter is a marvelous creation, far above anything I could come up with.  The last thing I created involved about $1 worth of steel and a couple of tack welds.

But for all of Twitter’s gee-wiz, world-wide popularity, it is surprisingly clunky at doing real work.  I’ve been sending out information to groups of followers for many years.  I used e-mail, and I didn’t have to limit myself to 140 characters.  I could also send attachments, like photos and documents.  Toss in a smart phone for portability and my e-mail trumps Twitter for disseminating info.

Twitter’s public profile makes it very easy and fun to find interesting Twitterers and follow their musings, but it’s surprisingly 20th Century in its ability to facilitate two-way communication.  Three or more people can keep up an inclusive conversation using e-mail by simply hitting “reply all” to each message and adding their thoughts.  That can’t be done on Twitter.

In fact, when someone replies to you on Twitter (putting @yourusername in the beginning of their message), your Twitter home page not only doesn’t show the reply, it doesn’t even alert you to look in the special sidebar tab that holds the segregated replies.  You could miss a reply for days unless you thought to go looking for it.

Strangely, the reply is public to all the replier’s followers - without context, which makes the message obscure and meaningless - but it is not visible to the followers of the person you sent it to … the ones who would understand the context and possibly benefit from the reply.

With Twitter, you can send someone a direct message, which is private and doesn’t show up on either your feed or theirs, but you still have to go hunting for those messages on yet another sidebar.  Yes, you can configure Twitter to alert you if you get a direct message, but the alert goes to your E-MAIL, not to your home page.  If I want to send a private message to one person, e-mail is far superior, comes with a better guarantee of privacy and is ultimately easier.

If you’re a blogger, there’s a widget that will automatically send out a Tweet announcing each new blog post.  Not a bad idea, but the widgets that do this simply capture the first 120 characters or so of your post and attach the URL of the blog at the end.  Such Tweets look something like, “I was driving down the road today.  It was raining like a mother and I began thinking about all the times I’ve suc… http://bit.ly/kdjfo.”  Not exactly a compelling reason to click on a link and read your blog.

Smart bloggers don’t use this widget.  Instead, they create a unique, pithy Tweet designed to entice followers to go to the blog.

Another blog widget allows you to publish your Twitter feed right on the front page of your blog.  It looks good and might come in handy, but again, big whoop.  Your Twitter followers already get the Tweets and if someone’s reading your blog, who cares if they get your Tweets.  It’s all about the blog, stupid.

What I want is a widget that will automatically post my Tweets and replies on my blog page.  Think of the potential.  I send out a Tweet asking for input and dozens of my followers respond adding relevant, timely and concise content to my blog that everyone can read.  It would be more effective than blog “comments” or a forum since many people receive Tweets on their cell phones wherever they are and can reply instantly.  But, alas, Twitter doesn’t do this.

The future of social media is getting collaborative input from the largest possible group of followers and being able to share that input with everyone else.  Twitter is halfway there, but sharing the responses with your group is still clunky, cut-and-paste.

When I navigate my Twitter home page, it’s hard at first glance to tell what page I’m on.  There are no page headers that say, “Home” or “Settings” or “Replies.”  I would like to see some professionalism put into the design.

Twitter also makes it difficult to have more than one Twitter account.  You have to have an e-mail address to open an account and you can only have one account per address.  Come on.  I know it’s easy to get multiple e-mail addresses, but this is just plain cumbersome.  Maybe they could put a limit of five or 10 accounts per e-mail address, but limiting it to one makes Twitter less attractive for business and serious endeavors.

I have several blogs and they all feed into one e-mail account.  I would like to have a Twitter account for each blog, but I’m not wasting my time opening multiple e-mail accounts that I won’t use just to accommodate Twitter.

And lastly, most of the Tweets going out on Twitter are mindless crap.  I have a Facebook account and it pains me to read posted brain-farts like,  “Farley Nadabrain is home from shopping. Got new golf spikes. God I love Dick’s.”  It’s hard to keep my lunch down knowing those few seconds of my life are gone forever.

But that’s the same garbage most people toss out on Twitter.  No wonder there’s no push to make it adult friendly.

Twitter is a great platform for sending messages to your fans from just about anywhere.  Whatever did Paris Hilton do before Twitter?

But for guys like me who want to capitalize on the power of social media to collaborate and create, it falls far short of being a useful tool.

Sadly, Twitter is still a toddler and little more than a toy.

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Shaq tweets that his “numbers” aren’t good enough so he’s got three more years in the league.  Perez Hilton tweets that Adam Lambert is now on Twitter.  Senator John McCain tweets that he’s at a radio station for an interview.

I don’t know why anyone cares, but evidently they do.  Twitter is the latest incarnation of social media, a category of communication tools that includes MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, text messaging, Flickr, YouTube and blogs.

You can read soporific tomes that describe each medium in detail, but social media is simply a means where anyone can share information (text, audio or video) with anyone and everyone, virtually instantaneously.  Being “published” takes nothing more than a few mouse clicks.

As social media matures, questions about its future arise.  For instance, will social media overcome its image as a frivolous time-wasting pursuit of teenagers and become a major source of reliable news and information?

To some degree, it already has.  While Twitter is still in its infancy, the other forms of social media are in budding adolescence.  Politicians, leaders, public figures and traditional news outlets all over the world use social media to keep constituents, fans and followers informed.

Social media will soon be ubiquitous, and as culturally integrated as television and radio.  Maybe more so.

Still, social media has been used primarily to disseminate traditionally-gathered information from the few to the many.  If social media is to become a player in hard news generation, it will have to operate in reverse, bringing information to the few for editing and formatting.

Social-mediaphiles point to the Twitter “revolution” in Iran as proof that a simple social media tool can unify thousands toward a common goal while giving the rest of the world a man-on-the-street view of events in real time.

Pundits argue social media’s impact in Iran.  Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 Web Tech said in Business Week, “I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect.”  It’s estimated that of all the Iranians involved in recent protests, only a few thousand use Twitter.  And many of the tweets broadcast about the protests are actually coming from disenfranchised Iranians who are not even in the country.

Still, the U.S. government thought Twitter was such an important tool in disseminating protest information that they asked Twitter to postpone network upgrades to protect the interests of Iranians using the service.

Infancy or not, Twitter may well be the Iranians best means for keeping their protests in the news.  It’s free, quick, totally public, very mobile and hard for the government to control.

But is the “news” broadcast by Twitter and other social media outlets “journalism”?  No, but not because it isn’t valuable and beneficial.  And not because media can’t use it as a foundation for journalism.  Info gathered via social media is raw.  Until processed and vetted in journalism, it’s credibility and relevance are unknown.

Journalism is a process, analogous to the scientific method.  Created and refined over centuries of trial and error, journalism is a methodical system for collecting, verifying, formatting and disseminating information.  Facts and information are components of journalism, and the people responsible for taking them through the process are called journalists.

Anyone can be a reporter.  Observe an event and report what you saw, and voila! you’re a reporter.  But you’re only a journalist when you operate within the system of journalism.  Anyone can be a journalist.  It’s not a club reserved for the journalism-school elite (although many paid journalists think so).

Using the science analogy, suppose you had a Twitter following of 50 million worldwide.  You send out a call for reports on climate change so you can compile “news” on Global Warming.  You get 10 million responses, and when digested and distilled, they form a report titled, Global Warming: Much Worse Than Feared.

Is this science?  No.  The information could be quite valuable and it could be an aid to research, but it’s not science until it’s been subjected to the scientific method.  The same is true of information gathered via social media.  Until it has been through the journalistic process, it’s nothing more than data.

Social media is a tool, not a process.

Social media can aid, augment and enhance journalism.  In fact, the future of journalism my depend on social media as a means to gather information and stay current on breaking events.  But trying to create solid news outside the boundaries of journalism is like offering herbal therapy to a cancer patient.  You might get lucky, but it’s a sucker’s bet.

There is an element of trust in journalism, and when that trust is broken, credibility suffers.  Like science, journalism is sometimes misapplied, resulting in “bad news” and outright fiction.  Still, it’s not the system that failed, but rather the application of the system.  Ultimately, the system is self-correcting.

The New York Times works very hard to see that every word it prints is the byproduct of solid journalism.  They’re not perfect, but because they consider the process of journalism sacred, 99 percent of their content is reliable.

If social media adopts the premise that, if enough people report, somebody is bound to get it right, it will never become a trusted source for news.  It will have all the credibility of a 3:00 a.m. infomercial for a vitamin-laden colon cleanser.  That doesn’t mean what’s reported is necessarily incorrect, only that it hasn’t been vetted by the journalistic process.

The National Enquirer got it right when it broke the story of presidential candidate John Edwards’s extra-marital affair, but no one considers the Enquirer a serious journalistic entity.  Journalism is about trying to get it right every time.  It’s hard work.

Wikipedia is a tremendous source for information on just about everything, but even rural high school students doing online research are forbidden to cite it as a reference.

Recently, a student in Ireland posted a fake quote on Wikipedia and several respected media outlets published it as fact.  Now, their reputations are severely damaged.  What’s interesting is that Wikipedia worked very hard to remove the quote, but since their business model allows posting of virtually anything before being vetted, their reputation took a hit as well.

Andrew Lih, an editor/administrator of Wikipedia said, “To the prospective journalist: there is no better place to start researching a story than Wikipedia, and probably no worse place to stop and use as a final word.”

Newspapers are dying and the future of sound journalism will be online, probably within the next ten years.  Social media entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on the immense potential of social media to bring news to the people would be wise to educate themselves on the power and process of journalism, lest they overlook the one element that could bring credibility to a medium born in social anarchy.

Journalism could be the ISO 9000 of social media.

If social media tries to reinvent news to be a socially correct, consensus of interpretation, then pray it dies a quick and agonizing death.  But if it works as an aid to bring journalism to the next level, embrace it.

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If you are a paid journalist, please cover your eyes. What I am about to write may cause internal bleeding.

Have you heard the aphorism that states that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type all of the great works of literature - plus a few episodes of Jackass to boot?

In our role as gadflies of social media, we will soon be conducting an experiment in citizen journalism that a real journalist might characterize as monkeys with typewriters . The question we will endeavor to answer is this: Can non-journalists create near-professional news content using social media technology? ( I can hear teeth grinding already.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The idea is simple enough. Select a news subject such as “City Council Investigates Neighborhood Planning Process (Yawn)”.  Using social media collaboration technology, encourage the creation of short term networks of individuals whose goal is to create content around said subject. Will such networks be created spontaneously fueled solely by reader interest and will those networks create content improved by the collaboration process? Or will content created this way be driven by narrow self-interest and misinformation?  Our guess is both.

The second part of this experiment is to investigate ways to avoid the latter result and encourage the former.

One potential indicator of what the results might be is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a “web-based, free-content encyclopedia project … that anyone with Internet access can make changes to”.  Essentially, it is a giant collaboration project whose collaborators are all of us and the result is a pretty good encyclopedia.

We are currently setting up our own Wiki site, using the same software ( MediaWiki ) that Wikipedia uses. Our collaborators will come from Montana citizens who read newspapers or visit local news websites.

Once our wiki is ready for prime time, we will launch the experiment with a half dozen or so suggested topic. Each of the topics will have different sets of rules to govern how the collaboration will proceed.  Some will be wide open while others are more regulated.

Why, you might ask, are we doing this?  Are we trying to take jobs away from real journalists?  No.  But the reality of the situation is that news content has taken a hit in recent years, both in quality and quantity.  Trying to stay viable, news organizations are opting for style over substance and advertising over editorial content. Collaborative news content could increase community involvement while providing more content to struggling news organizations.

There is still a lot to do before we’re ready to launch our experiment in citizen journalism and we need your help.

If you have wiki experience (technical) and or journalism credentials and would like to work on this project, please contact me

Do you care about social media?  If you have something to say, then we’re listening.  Social Media Montana is looking for great content from those who have something to contribute to the social media debate.  If you would like to be a regular contributer to Social Media Montana, contact me at socialmediamt@gmail.com.

The media’s favorite topic these days is the demise of newspapers in a world of Facebook, Twitter and blogs. While its clear that many Americans choose to get their news from their favorite blogger or twitterer, its less clear to what extent this is hurting traditional media.  Its possible that the threat to traditional media is overstated.

The newspaper business is witnessing a decline in revenue and many attribute that decline to non-traditional media.  If true, the effect seems to be less in Montana (and perhaps in other rural small-newspaper markets).  Declines in ad revenue seem to be happening not only to print media, but online media as well.  This could mean that declines in readership and ad placements are caused more by the weak economy than a shift in customer news preferences.

According to The Childrens Partnership, 9% of all Montana’s households have broadband compared to 20% of all households nationally.  This reduced access to the Internet provides one of the reason’s local news outlets are not being as adversely affected by social media as their  cousins in large metropolitan areas.

I work for a local newspaper (part of a larger chain) and this is topic one around the water cooler.  While we see the tsunami coming, it seems - at least in Montana - to be somewhat in the future.  But it will hit here eventually.

I’d love to hear your comments. How do you get your news?  How do you view news coverage provided by your local newspaper versus the blogosphere?