Last April, Facebook launched a ‘Journalists on Facebook’ page, intended to serve as a resource for growing number of reporters using Facebook for the purpose of finding sources, interaction with people and to publish stories. A couple of months later, Twitter introduced a similar initiative as well. ‘Twitter for Newsrooms’ (#TfN), is a guide for reporters on how to best use the microblogging site for the purpose of reporting. The endeavor elicited a mixed response from journalists and media pundits.

As online media and the Web continue to transform and challenge mainstream media and its established news distribution and revenue models, it is only natural to expect a permeation of social media into newsrooms and into the professional (and personal) lives of journalism practitioners. The tools offered by New Media enhance a journalist’s ability to tell a story – through text, audio, video, and photographs – unlike legacy news platforms. In the news gathering process, mobile-enhanced social media has been vital for finding real-time information from citizens, particularly those disaster struck or remote locations. The immediacy offered by digital media has compressed the news production scales. Today no self-respecting reporter can ascribe to the pace of work followed by his/her legacy news organization counterpart. Today’s online social world has accelerated the news cycle, many technology review and social media blogs are using social media platforms to report their news to the world, but they will have to enhance their technological skills in order to survive.

One of the most memorable examples of Twitter being the vehicle for breaking news would be live tweets by Sohaib Ather (@Really Virtual) a computer programmer residing in Abbottabad (Pakistan), of the dramatic raid on Bin Laden’s compound on May 2, 2011. Ather’s tweets may have garnered him overnight fame and the title of ‘the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it’, however, in the United States, the first indication of Bin Laden’s death came from another tweet by Keith Urbahn, tweeted more than hour before Obama’s official announcement of the news.

Depending on where one is coming from, the merits and drawbacks of online news sources/aggregators and participatory journalism in open to debate and interpretation. Sure there are incidents where lazy reporters will opt to search the Twitter timeline of a potential source and publish a tweet rather than obtaining an exclusive quote or stepping away from the computer to conduct a face-to-face interview. Some critics will even go so far as to equate e-mailed interview questions with belittling the importance of good interview skills and the ability to chase down a source.

If there is any real danger faced by journalism from the online and social Web, it is the temptation to succumb to the pressure to be first in order to keep pace with fast and interactive social media. This can potentially result in what would traditionally be considered sloppy journalism – stories based solely on rumor or gossip, unverified facts or the absence of complexity or context. Using multiple Gmail accounts can help journalists to communicate information more rapidly around the world. Apart from that, journalists will have to learn up-to-date technological skills in order to improve their efficiency.

paul prescott / Shutterstock.com

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Just so we are all on the same page, Apple Ping is a social media platform for music.

Ping is an underestimated platform that really has an incredible amount of possibilities for those who really love music. Not only does it allow for people to share what is in their libraries, but it also allows for people to see updates about a specific artist and even concert updates. It imports their Tweets and you can see what everyone is saying and listening to.

It’s not so much a platform like Facebook where you can comment on people’s walls and such, but you can comment on songs and albums that people recommend or are in your library that you recommend to others. Then you can then hear a short little clip and if you like it that much, a click of a button and it’s yours for no more than $1.29. Crazy right?

Not only is a social media platform, but its online marketing at its best! It’s unbelievable. People can recommend things for you to buy and ultimately make Apple even more money. We don’t normally hear about Ping as often as we should. It is the Facebook of the music industry and I think people are missing out.

I have been a music buff since the day I was born and it is a huge part of my daily routine. For instance, right now I’m listening to some Doobie Brothers and the Allman Brothers band on my iPad. Ping is recommending me artists and songs galore along with other people who have similar interests in music. As much as Spotify allows you to listen to music much like Pandora does, it does not give you the same connectivity that Ping does.

I think its wild. Social media has taken over all aspects of life whether we like it or not. I enjoy it. It’s fun, its connective; it’s something that is ever changing and ever developing. Sometimes it’s creepy that it can know everything about you, but at the same time, the ease of finding a song that could be your new favorite is out of this world. I love it, and it would be a “Genius” idea for everyone to get involved.

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It’s fitting that a “Social Discovery” site holds people on the page longer than Facebook. In today’s ever-increasingly over-connected virtual world, we are no longer as fascinated with the daily machinations of our friends and family. We have become good at shuffling through pictures of little nephew Timmy sliding into third base with a quick Facebook like or clicking the retweet button when a friend declares their local sushi bar has the best Sake in Long Beach.

We’re ready for more. We’re ready for something new.

A recent article on Mashable was aptly named, “What’s America’s Most Engaging Social Network? You’ll Be Surprised“. Surprised we were. With all of the attention that Pinterest has received the last few months, that Google+ has received the last year, and that Twitter and Facebook have received the last several years, it is shocking that a website can get as big as Tagged without hitting more radar screens.

The company, which launched right around the time that Facebook was starting to get attention in 2004, allows users to find new people for friendship or romance. It wasn’t always like that. They started off trying to be much like Facebook but for high school students.

“We took a hard look and decided we weren’t going to win,” co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng said. “But we had found out a lot of our users were actually using Tagged to meet new people, so that led us to pivot into a new space called ‘social discovery,’ where people use sites to make new social relationships.”

The pivot has paid off. The company has been profitable since 2008. It recently purchased competitor Hi5 and other startups. Perhaps most importantly, they have been continuing to attract top Silicon Valley talent, tripling in headcount the last year to 170.

Tagged users average 18 visits per month and stay on the site for 12.1 minutes according to comScore. Facebook users by comparison stick around for 10.9 minutes per visit.

It makes sense. The learning curve for Facebook is often the biggest reason people get stuck on it for so long. Checking through our friends’ and family members’ updates is quick for experienced users and posting to the site is a breeze. With social discovery, there are limitless connections, searches, and profile-views that can happen. It’s simply a matter of how much time someone is able to spend looking for their next social BFF.

Over the next year, expect a shift in time spent on social discovery. Facebook will be the end destination for the connections we make (unless Google+ can somehow grow more quickly) but the site does not lend itself to finding fresh acquaintances, to “reloading” so to speak. Tagged may be the perfect place for freshness.

The New York City Department of Education has banned students from interacting with their teachers on social media. The policy pertains to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Flickr. No teacher is allowed to interact with students on these platforms unless it is through a page that is affiliated with the school.

I can understand why a policy like this is necessary, but I also feel that this can quickly get out of hand. The people who get together to create these policies, in my mind, are a bunch of old out-of-touch individuals who probably need to use anti-aging cream. There are obviously a bunch of inappropriate things that could take place by a teacher reaching out to a student through social media, but this new policy also blocks some of the great opportunities that social media provides.

Students will no longer be able to reach out to their teachers and request help on a topic they might not understand. Sometimes students can be embarrassed about asking questions in front of their peers and by now having students only able to interact with their teachers on certain public pages you may be alienating some students who don’t want their questions to be seen.

Social media also allows you to see your teacher as a person, not just someone who stands in front of you during class and lectures. The best teachers are often the ones that the students feel a genuine connection with. Social media is great for fostering relationships and students are probably happy to see some photos on Facebook of their teachers dressed casually and doing normal activities.

I do think there are definitely dangers in students and teachers interacting via social media, but I think the positives can outweigh the negatives. Teachers who are able to form sincere bonds with their students can change those children’s lives forever. I don’t think any department of education should take that away.

Related articles

• NYC bans teachers from Facebook friending students (zdnet.com)
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• NYC Department of Education cracks down on teacher-student social media (theverge.com)
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• NYC’s new education guidelines to restrict teacher and student contact via social media websites (ubergizmo.com)
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I watched a movie with Bruce Willis called Surrogates. Willis is a detective who uncovers a conspiracy to destroy the nation’s dependency on surrogate androids. The film was based loosely on how society lives their lives around technology and how people depend entirely too much on it. With that said I checked my Facebook status twice, answered an email and texted a funny picture of Darth Vader to my cousin in Arizona from my home in New York; I love my phone.

Over the years I have seen different technologies come and go. From Cassettes to Beepers, technology has been rapidly developing in a short period of time. Like the advances in technology, the social media platform has evolved with the times as well. From chat rooms to Facebook, social media has been a part of our lives for over a generation. Like anything good, how long will it last?

Facebook dominates the day to day. A moment can be captured with an iPhone. Business can carry on faster than usual. What will happen next? What is the next step for those within social media? We have managed to gain access into the lives of millions with the push of a button but will it stop there? How long until the lives of others have become a fact on Wikipedia? How long until internet users become completely desensitized to one another.

The future can’t come fast enough for the next big thing. New and improved iPads will be released. The latest trend will rise; leaving sites like Facebook face down in the dirt. Is this what we have come to? Are we the slaves of technology? Will the next generation be skillful in the arts or able to quote Shakespeare without reaching for their iPhones? How long will this runaway train take us? Perhaps Bruce Willis will save us from ourselves just one more time.

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As we discuss the ways that social media can be used instead of press releases as a superior method of putting out a brand message, one of the most enjoyable components of the technique is being able to add a flash of creativity and personality to the campaign in ways that press releases simply cannot. It’s the hippo in the room. It’s the fun stuff.

Unlike press releases, blog posts and social media posts can use riskier techniques to get the point across. For example, if someone was covering Sally’s Shoe Company’s partnership in South America to launch a new shoe with proceeds going towards building a wildlife haven for endangered species, they could use blogs and social media to tell the story of a particular hippo who walked into a bar and almost got shot. “Ginger the Hippo” could have a personality and add a human element through animal kinship that simply wouldn’t fly on a press release.

These types of personalize, true-to-life styles of posts are the ones that have the opportunity to get shared on social media. They can go viral. It’s unlikely that news of a partnership and support of a charity could make the kind of impact that a hippo walking into a bar could have. People won’t share bland news unless it’s huge and Sally’s Shoes won’t have anything huge happening any time soon. They can, however, post something interesting that focuses on sharable content and mentions the brand messaging in between.

Press releases have their place, but when it comes to getting the word out about something that is important to the company but not that important to the rest of the world, the use of creativity in the blog posts is a key to success.

About 1/3rd of Soshable’s traffic comes from various referrers with Google being the biggest one (that’s not counting Google search traffic). When I checked my monthly totals there was a new player in my top 10: Pinterest. I had completely forgotten about a conversation with a friend at Pinterest who told me that the site will send traffic whether I try to use it or not because of the handful of visualization posts we do here.

I was skeptical. In fact, I didn’t think it would break 1%.

Without trying or pinning much of the content myself, Pinterest became the 7th highest referral site for Soshable. We have posted a small amount of posts that were geared towards getting the network traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, but most of what we post here is geared specifically for our readers and occasionally for search. The fact that it popped up so high on the charts without much effort is encouraging.

People are clicking. There has been little doubt that Pinterest was going to get big as a referrer simply because of the visual nature of the site. They shrink large images down, forcing high-res pics and large infographics to elicit a click if people really want to see them.

It’s also used by many as a resource. The soul of Pinterest has been around DIY, style, cooking, and the like and users are used to using the site as a place to organize their great finds. Many times, those finds have to be explored more deeply beyond the casual pass on one’s board feed, so the clicks are coming from there as well.

I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon just yet and post tips about Pinterest. The site is still in an adolescent stage of awkward growth and changes and any strategy we post now will only be obsolete in 3 months, but understanding the community mentality can help people to make the most of it. Pics, graphics, resources. If you stick with those, you can benefit greatly from this wonderful emerging social network.

For years, Facebook, Twitter, and most other forms of social media have had a fairly friendly online culture. Sure, on occasion you might come across someone bashing their ex on their Wall or a Tweet from an Exec that should have never gone public, but even these negative statements are met with strong reprimands. People just like to see their favorite social media platforms stay friendly – that is, until now.

A new Facebook app titled EnemyGraph, which was launched on March 15th, makes it okay to hate. Instead of choosing to “Like” a person, place, company, or thing, you can now choose to make them your mortal enemy online and post it for the rest of your friends to see. Since the release of the app, Rick Santorum, Fox News, and the Westboro Baptist Church seemed to have quickly gained the most enemies.

Should Businesses Be Afraid?

While most businesses should be okay for the time being, if your business comes under fire for any type of poor product or customer service, an app like EnemyGraph can make that one screw up gain way more attention than necessary. For businesses with frequent customer interactions, this means that efforts to watch their online reputation need to increase a ten fold.

Can Businesses Benefit?

While EnemyGraph looks like an excellent way for your online reputation to be destroyed in 2.5 seconds flat should the right person choose to “enemy” you, it can actually provide businesses with good research. You can learn a lot about the markets you can’t seem to reach by what they choose to dislike. If you notice a common dislike amongst certain markets, you can determine how to approach them better so that you have a stronger likelihood of reaching them.

But Will it Last?

While EnemyGraph may be making a few uncomfortable with the immediate hate they are receiving, there is a good chance that business owners and prominent individuals won’t have to worry about such an app being tolerated for long. As mentioned before, social media platforms seek to maintain a more positive and friendly user experience, and this will most likely remain the status quo.

Last year, Undetweetable was created which allowed deleted Tweets to be recovered and posted. While all in good fun, many weren’t to happy with the service, and Twitter was quick to force the developers to shut it down. There is a good chance that EnemyGraph will experience a similar timeline of events. However, if the app gains considerable attention, businesses may have to up their brand management to a whole new degree, hiring professionals such as ReputationManagers.com, and providing more around the clock attention to their online presence – even small businesses.

Is it just me, or has the world become smaller and smaller? Maybe yes, but I really think that the Internet has mostly everything to do with it.

We have basically lost the element of surprise. The chance to really meet someone new, someone you have literally never seen before is a miracle to come by these days.

In many cases, yes, this could be a good thing. You can get an idea of people before you actually meet them. You can see what a person does for work, where they are from and who else they are connected to. Although I can’t help but sometimes miss the old fashioned way of certain things.

When I say that I think the world is becoming smaller and smaller, I am relating it to my social life. I can go out in NYC (a place I don’t even live) and will see at least a handful of people out that I have somehow seen before, guaranteed!

It is like those commercials that phone and Internet companies have where they hover bubbles over peoples head throughout the day to show just about everything there is to know about a person due to their personal social media sites. That commercial happened right? If not, I will be taking the royalties for that one, thank you very much!

So as I was saying about my social life, I have been honestly finding it hard to meet someone new, the way it used to be done. Having the access to endless amounts of social media really ruins the fun of all of it, don’t you think?

It’s not even running into a person where you know you saw their face in someone’s picture that your sisters, friends, cousin’s roommate was tagged in, it’s the overall stalking effort that people feel obligated to do in general.

You see someone out, you know you’ve seen them before and then you drive yourself crazy finding everything there is to know about that person before you even talk to them or…”friend request” them.

What happened to people who had the courage to actually come up to one another? I miss having someone new and unrelated to my mutual friends and me. Where is the opportunity to make something really special happen?

What I’m saying is, I think the Internet and social media took the excitement out of the potential of meeting someone new. It’s hard to ignite the sparks through only pictures and how many friends a person has.

I’m not saying that I am above anyone and don’t ever dabble in social network stalking, because trust me, Facebook and Instagram are my go to’s and I am one of many who use them as a way to hide behind something without talking to face-to-face, (which is a whole other story itself), but I am beyond ready to focus on only doing things the way it used to be done!

So next time I go out (and you go out) and our eyes meet a person with a gravitational pull, let’s all do ourselves a favor and just go for it, right then and there. Don’t let the Internet do all the work for you! I guarantee if you put this person on the spot right there, rather then letting your “friend request” linger in his/her inbox, you’ll have a better chance than the rest of them!

There are lots of reasons to love Pinterest from a marketing perspective. The challenge is understanding why it’s potentially effective rather than trying to figure out how to work it.

Messaging through social media has always been one of the primary advantages for marketing. It may be hard to get people to sign up for sales or to become a lead worthy of conversion through social media, but the viral spreading of messages and ideas gives the various platforms marketing life. This is an area where Pinterest has an opportunity to excel.

In January, 2012, an average of 89 minutes was spent on the site per user. Compare this to Twitter (21 minutes) and Google+ (3 minutes) and it’s pretty easy to see the difference. Like Facebook (405 minutes) and Tumblr (89) minutes, Pinterest hooks people into the site because of the visual rewards given. This isn’t the case on Twitter or other social media sites and highlights the value of messaging.

There are several Pinterest strategies that companies can try, but at this stage it’s still a matter of getting to know the community. If you want to use Pinterest for marketing, you first have to use it for what it’s designed to do: sharing interesting, informative, funny, or helpful images and videos. Once you have that down, you can use the site to start forming your messaging. If you try to early, you’ll get very little traffic.

This graphic by Statista breaks down the time on site of Pinterest.