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Mitch Joel on Social Media, Newspapers and Information
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Bob Garfield on Journalism, Advertising, and Future
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Future of Advertising: Kissel: Listen to Your Audience
Social Media: From Water Cooler to the World |
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It's all happened so fast with social media In 2005 - YouTube, a venture technology startup with early headquarters above a pizzeria in San Mateo, Calif., launches. "People are communicating more often with more people than ever before in history," says Robert Brown, founder of RDB Consulting Firm Inc. in Dallas. "It’s as if the long heralded information revolution has finally reached the streets, and now everyone is a citizen in this revolution. Like all revolutions, we don’t know how this will turn out ... it is at once thrilling and frightening." "Social media are changing the expectations of how we interact with institutions and people," adds Rob Salkowitz, author of the forthcoming book "Young World Rising." "They inject an immediacy and informality into the way we discuss issues, by taking the conversations that people used to have in small groups around the water cooler or the family dinner table and making them open and public to interested parties anywhere, anytime." "Social media are changing the expectations of how we interact with institutions and people," adds Rob Salkowitz, author of the forthcoming book "Young World Rising." "They inject an immediacy and informality into the way we discuss issues, by taking the conversations that people used to have in small groups around the water cooler or the family dinner table and making them open and public to interested parties anywhere, anytime." The universality of all this ... the no-holds-barred, all-encompassing commitment ... is what strikes Sasha Pasulka, who founded the websites Evil Beet Gossip and Zelda Lily: "They allow us to stay abreast of news and events around the world. They allow us to share our photographs, our good news and our frustrations. They allow us to keep in touch with friends and to rekindle relationships with people we thought we’d never hear from again. People put their entire lives online and share them with a broad network of friends and associates." Of course, lots of these conversations are nothing more than chit-chat. "Many inane exchanges that would have happened verbally or in our own heads are now on display for all to see," notes Jessica Clark, who directs the Future of Public Media project for the Center for Social Media at American University. While chit-chat can provide great entertainment ... "Have a question? Post it to your followers. A great event to go to? Update your status and have people meet you there!" says Louis Sarmiento, publisher of the Daily Group at IMG Publications ... what we'll deal with here are the more serious impacts of social media ... how they affect news reporting, how they affect government, what the drawbacks and limitations might be, and will they endure. Social media and reporting
"Many reporters are extending their own personal brand," says Larry Weintraub, CEO of digital marketing firm Fanscape. "They have blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, etc. Because they are so easy to use, reporters are allowing themselves to become friends with their readers through social media and solicit feedback and answer questions. This helps the publications for which they write as well as themselves should they leave that publication, write a book, or make a public appearance." Sasha Pasulka finds that "we’re seeing a lot of news operations ... from CNN to small local organizations ... set up Twitter accounts to keep audiences abreast of the news and to drive traffic to their web sites, and we’re certainly seeing audiences take advantage of that. CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account (@cnnbrk) has over two million followers ... that’s a lot of potential to drive traffic. "It works perhaps less effectively on a local level; for instance, KOMO News in Seattle (@komonews), where I live, has a little over 2,000 followers. That’s a result of the younger, Twitter-using generation taking less interest in local news in general than the generation that preceded them. However, each of KOMO’s individual news anchors has their own official Twitter page and following, and it’s an innovative way to build loyalty with viewers." Louis Sarmiento as a publisher knows first-hand what social media have brought to conventional media. "As viewers or ratings go down, so does the advertising revenue to these newspapers and broadcast stations ... social networking is a way to regain an audience and boost ratings," he says. "By doing so, it is a way to attract younger new consumers and also study their habits from likes and dislikes. By connecting with content and users' profiles, they become advocates of particular interest to their friends/followers ... reposting stories or content on their own page and having an 'influence' in their own circle." Robert Brown believes that "sophisticated use of web analytics can be used to pinpoint customers. Web analytics will soon drive major news operations as well. Web analytics is the mechanism that will drive the proliferation of targeted messaging across the web to users via the ever-growing array of social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg and so forth. Once you post something, it will be quickly disseminated via social networks to those users who care about the information.” Coming back in ... "Social media have given reporters tremendous access to news stories and leads," Weintraub says. "The old method was a phone call from a public relations person pitching a story. Then e-mail. Now reporters are pitched numerous times a day via Facebook, Twitter, etc. Investigating those leads can also be facilitated via social media by viewing videos via sites such as YouTube, reading user-generated insight via sites like Wikipedia, or seeking sources via professional social networks like LinkedIn. What would have taken days previously to source can now happen in minutes. "Authentication still needs to take place utilizing the methodology engrained in a journalist, but lead generation and following trails is infinitely easier." Weintraub says the best recent example was when "the American Airlines jet crashed into the Hudson in New York. The story was broken via Twitter. Within minutes, people all over the country were alerted to this near-tragedy. The human network of spreading this news led to places like CNN, which immediately jumped on the story that was started on Twitter." Sasha Pasulka says news-gathering is perhaps where "we’ve seen the biggest impact" in journalism from social media ... "how news organizations use Twitter and Facebook to get up-to-the-minute information when they can’t or don’t have people on the scene ... during the November (2008) attacks on Dubai, Twitter was one of the primary sources of information for the major news networks." But by far the most well-known use of social media for journalistic coverage came during election protests in Iran ... a subject that fascinated Larry Elin, a Syracuse University media professor. "One can immediately see how the public protests over the election fraud in Iran, and its dissemination by social media, are a case study of the wise crowd theory," Elin says. "The crowd consists of thousands of individuals who are armed with cell phones, Blackberries and laptops, and who have Internet access to social media aggregation sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. "They report bits and pieces of information from deep within the protests in a decentralized fashion: no one individual influences the rest. The crowd is diverse: individuals are located all over Tehran, and other parts of the country. The crowd is independent: some of the information is 'bad,' in that it is planted by Iranian authorities, but it is quickly balanced by 'good' information. Social media aggregation sites provide the collaboration necessary for the entire world to develop a collective intelligence about what is going on there by seeing all of the individual, small parts." The effect on mass media has been immense. Social media have cut dramatically into the reach, prosperity and influence of newspapers, magazines and TV networks. "Social media threaten any organization that functions as a middleman," says Patrick Schwerdtfeger, who has spoken at conferences in Canada, the United States and Europe. "Traditional media outlets are a good example, acting as a filter between live events and a viewing audience. As we have seen recently in Iran, regular citizen journalists played an important role disseminating developments on the ground. While their reports fall far short of trained journalists, the appetite for that type of unedited footage is growing. As broadband access continues to grow and video content becomes increasingly accessible through online channels, this trend will accelerate. The media operations that will survive are those that facilitate the contributions of citizen journalists while moderating expert contributions by trained journalists at the same time." For Rob Salkowitz, social media "have completely disrupted" mass media "by creating so many niche markets and communities, and by making it possible for anyone to reach anyone without having to own a broadcast studio and transmission tower. "The consolidation of media in the broadcast age also changed the sociology of journalism by turning it into much more of a profession for educated people and, at its highest levels, an extremely powerful and prestigious position. I think an increasing portion of the audience for mass media, especially at the young end of the demographics, is turned off by the self-importance of highly visible mainstream journalists (as demonstrated by the success of media parodies like the Onion and the 'Daily Show'), and resent the inability to talk back in any kind of meaningful way. "This creates an appetite for the more down-to-earth approach you find in blogs, where comments and conversation are usually encouraged as part of the site features. Members of the Millennial generation in particular find the pomposity and stuffiness of traditional media less engaging than the give-and-take of social channels. I think the broadcasters sense that and are trying to adapt to the new environment by doing things like scrolling a Twitter feed under the news broadcast, bringing bloggers on the air to discuss their ideas, or setting up Facebook pages for the on-air personalities, but those efforts don’t seem terribly authentic or credible." As a result, Weintraub says, "every day, people become more used to hearing news from people they trust, oftentimes not a professional, just a friend or family member. That person may be originating the news or just re-posting something they heard from another source. "There is a certain level of trust from within your circle if the news comes back to you multiple times, you tend to believe it. For example, when Michael Jackson died, many of us didn’t hear about it from an established news source, we were alerted by a friend. If we checked our Twitter feeds, multiple voices were stating the same news, 'Michael Jackson has died'” Thus we tend to believe it. "So news becomes free. Why do I need to go to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times? Aren’t they just re-posting the same information I already know? Do they write it better? Do they have more experience reporting? Sure. Do I need that? No. I just need the basic facts." Still, the impact shouldn't be overstated, nor the disadvantages ignored. To Rodger Roeser, president of the Eisen Marketing Group, social media are "no different than a press release, op-ed, fax or bylined article. It’s just another way to reach out to news outlets in a format that they may prefer. Twitter and Facebook are just as cluttered as the fax machine and the inbox now. It’s still a matter of weeding through information ... and if anything, it’s yet another item the news operations have to weed through." Prof. Matthew L. Hale, chairman of the Department of Public and Healthcare Administration at Seton Hall University, says "social media make it easy for anyone to become a quasi-journalist. The Twitter posts from Iran prove that. More and more news reporting and information sharing will be done this way in the future and that is hurting and will continue to hurt traditional journalism. Major news organizations will have to figure out a new business model because the old one is dying. "There are two real downsides to this. One is that while everyone thinks being a journalist is just showing up and saying what is going on, it isn't ... good journalists ask difficult questions and do an enormous amount of research to make sure they get the story right. They have ethical standards that people off the street don't. Full-time journalists have a breadth of knowledge and contacts that regular people don't. Anyone can point a camera or say what they think is going on but that doesn't make them journalists or allow them to produce quality news. "The other downside is that having millions of individual journalists out there, we lose a sense of collective knowledge. It has been said that the Vietnam war was over when Walter Cronkite said we were losing it. Without a news source that reaches millions and is trusted by millions, we lose a sense of common experience or knowledge that I think is important." Matt Eventoff, a communications trainer with Princeton Public Speaking, says he disagrees with a number of his colleagues "in that I believe major news operations will always have a fairly prominent place in our society. Major media bring legitimacy to a story, and that won't change. Mainstream media still matter. "Why? Sheer reach. Mainstream media still reach more individuals than any other single medium. So when a major national daily (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today) runs an eye- grabbing headline, the public pays attention. "The reality is that a political campaign will use a positive headline in a major daily in paid broadcast advertising over an endorsement from my blog, or any one of the millions of bloggers out there. The difference now is that a candidate's 'blogging army' of 2 or 20 or 200 can relentlessly comment, post and generate their own content and get it listed on Google news, Yahoo, Bing, etc." While the industrious journalist may take pride in having hundreds of "friends" out there in social medialand, how does he/she handle it when all those hundreds of people Twitter in with news at once? During the unrest in Iran, Elin says, "interestingly, it was our very own CNN, Fox News and MSNBC that served the role of synthesizing all of the bits of information, and facilitating a collective intelligence. Much to their own chagrin, unable to gather information, images, or stories on their own, the professional news organizations relied on all of those 'unverified' sources from Twitter and YouTube to piece together what was happening in Iran. "We, then, formed our mental picture ... our reality ... of what was happening in Iran because thousands of news sources on the ground acted like the eye of a fly (seeing it from thousands of perspectives), while the cable news folks made a single image of it, which we hope was an accurate synthesis." The main purpose of this website is to demonstrate the need for, and a method of providing, such synthesis ... we call it "blooking." Site founder Paul Mongerson had long been dismayed by the low quality of blogging he saw in the Internet ... the scattered, disorganized nature of the comments ... their abysmal level of accuracy, relevance, expertise and civility ... and the fact they just sat there ... even the good comments were never made use of to augment a main article. So our solution is to inaugurate a topic, thus ensuring relevancy ... issuing a call for comment on the Internet, thus ensuring expertise ... editing the ensuing articles, thus ensuring accuracy and civility ... and then organizing pieces of the articles into an overall thesis so that the worthwhile points can blend and enhance each other into a hopefully powerful chapter of an online book, or blook, which unlike a real-life book can be constantly updated and rearranged as need be. Which is what you're reading right now! Social Media's Effect on Government and Society
"Social media’s popularity is based on the individual feeling the need to have a voice, which for too long was assumed by self-appointed spokespeople," says Val Marmillion, president of Marmillion + Company Strategic Communications of Washington, D.C. "In fact, you might call what is happening a declaration of independence by all classes in society. For the topic of representative democracy, this is profound." Prof. Hale agrees ... "I think the popularity of social media stems in part from the desire of citizens to take some control or even ownership of the news and information they receive. I also think that social media are popular because people have a desire for a greater sense of community. Individuals creating a community and sharing information are fundamental parts of a strong civic life, so there is enormous potential for altering the government/citizen relationship away from government and toward smaller somewhat organic citizen-led groups. So instead of looking to government to solve a problem, it seems that social media have the potential to empower citizens to solve their own problems." This can happen with issues big or small. If they wish, citizens can organize and fight for their interests more easily than ever before. Social media "provide users with both content and contexts to grapple with the issues that citizens have to jointly address in a democracy," Jessica Clark says. "These can range from the local (calling for a stoplight at a dangerous intersection) to the global (addressing climate change), or anywhere in between." On the global scale, the way Rob Salkowitz sees it, "social media have become a huge empowering platform for entrepreneurship by giving people all over the world access to information, social connections, resources, attention and encouragement. It’s collapsed many of the old barriers that made it difficult for young people with ideas to take charge of their future, and it’s also made entrepreneurship a global pursuit, open to anyone whether they are in Silicon Valley, in Hyderabad, India, or in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria. "It’s not clear whether coordinated, bottom-up action and collaboration can solve the problems ahead of us, but it seems to me that the only way to address unprecedented challenges is to marshal unprecedented resources. There are billions of mouths to feed, but, for the first time ever, there are also billions of minds connected and engaged through the medium of social technology." As with print and electronic media, this process can work both ways ... in extreme cases, it perhaps could help an autoritarian government maintain control. For instance, in the Iran situation, "the Iranian authorities and security forces may have lacked the imagination to adapt Twitter to their own ends, preferring, instead, club-wielding motorcyclists to combat the crowds, but there is no reason to see how the chaos of democratic expression can’t be bent to authoritarian needs by exploiting the unverifiability, the brevity and the instantaneousness of the medium," says Trevor Butterworth, a writer and editor of www.stats.org. More benignly, government can use social media to communicate more effectively with citizens in a democratic role. "My hope and belief is that more citizens will understand the role that government plays in their lives and that more elected officials and public servants will understand the impact of their decisions," says Scott Burns, CEO and co-founder of GovDelivery in St. Paul, Minn. "At this stage, both government and citizens are just getting used to using social media on a broad scale. I don’t think the impact is yet very clear, but there are some clear wins out there. Two examples come to mind. "First, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services made outstanding use of social media for flu prevention outreach. Judging by growth in Twitter followership, these efforts were very successful. "Second, the majority of major federal agencies now collaborate through mashups so that citizens can signup for e-mail and text alerts from many government agencies in one place. This type of collaboration, which GovDelivery is very proud to facilitate, has led directly to 300 percent-plus increases in the number of citizens signing up to receive information from the government. Increasingly, state and local governments are getting involved in the collaboration, which makes it even more powerful." The term "mashup," incidentally, means an integration from two or more sources. Prof. Hale believes this process has "an enormous upside. Research shows that people trust the opinions of close friends and associates more than any other source. So when you receive a political message from your friend, you are more likely to act on it. Politicians know this and slowly so will government agencies, and we will see more and more communication from government to citizens coming through social media networks. "On the other hand, for that to happen," he continues, "social media communities will need to move away from just sharing information and toward being a vehicle for collective action. It seems that right now people use Facebook to find their high school sweetheart and to pass along little slices of their daily life. Sure, some people use it in a civic-minded way, but for most people it is social, not political. Maybe someday it will get there, maybe not." Any other pitfalls to consider? Yes. Limitations and Drawbacks of Social Media
Hale: "The negative is that it seems on-line communities tend to contain mainly people who think like you do. Democrats hang out with Democrats, Republicans with Republicans. So while social media help people build communities, it doesn't seem to be as good at helping to build bridges between different communities. To see this. take a look at your Facebook friends and see how many are of a different race or political persuasion or sexual orientation or economic status. I'll bet for most people, the answer is not many." Weintraub: "People will start to splinter off from Facebook. Facebook is huge and people will look for something smaller. Something more focused. Niche social networks. Social networks that concentrate in areas that are important to that person. A plumber will migrate to a social network where plumbers congregate to talk about plumbing. Dentists will congregate at social networks about dentistry. Moms will congregate around social networks for moms. This is something that is already happening." Elin: "Social media sites will evolve and become more granular, more sophisticated and more focused. LinkedIn, a site for connecting professionals, is a good example, although it, too, could be broken into more granular parts, each with a special interest." 2) MANIPULATION. Social media can bring trickery as well as truthfulness and light. Schwerdtfeger: "The risk is that special interest groups have a significant opportunity to skew the conversation in their favor. While regular users have the ability to contribute to the conversation, few are motivated enough to do so. That allows motivated subgroups to manipulate the conversation and portray an inaccurate picture of the most important issues. The social media platforms are working hard to evolve peer evaluation algorithms to reward truly active users while minimizing the effects of short-lived special interest campaigns. "Another issue arising out of the social media revolution is that the conversation tends to drop to the lowest common denominator. This distortion is particularly prevalent today because the most active users are among the younger generation." Salkowitz: "The downside is that social media do not distinguish between good and bad causes in terms of whom they empower. There are support groups for anorexics (that is, groups that encourage young women in their anorexia by promoting it as a good lifestyle choice); there are communities of white supremacists online that have a great deal more reach and visibility. There’s also a lot of misinformation masquerading as authoritative data ... sometimes put up by well-meaning groups or individuals, and sometimes a deliberate attempt to confuse people about issues. Because social media are so small-d democratic, there’s no editorial authority to help people sort fact from fiction, or to help sort out all these competing claims to truth. That kind of fragmentation of the discourse has led to a real polarization of opinions, with each side clinging to its own set of facts." Hale: "In 140 characters (Twitter), you almost always have to take a side. Universal health care coverage is either bad or good. In the real world, how we get and pay universal health care coverage is what determines if it is bad or good. In a tweet, you are advocating a position and leaving out essential information about that position. I have no problem with using Twitter or any social media to broadcast locations of places to get more information or places to discuss the issue more completely. What worries me is when we let the technical constraint of any technology restrict a full discussion of the real and underlying policy issues." 3) APPROPRIATENESS. There's a time and a place for social media, which means sometimes there isn't a time and place for them. Eventoff: "One of the drawbacks of social media is when they are used to replace face to face communication rather than complement it when face to face communication is not possible. Being able to relate and communicate with another individual face to face will, more often than not, determine your ability to succeed. "What do I mean? You will rarely be awarded a raise via e-mail, win a congressional seat on Facebook alone, become CEO via a text message or acquire a company or major funding over a tweet. VC's and bankers will always want to meet with you, as will a corporate board, voters, etc. Social media can certainly be extremely beneficial to all of these ... however, face to face communication will always be crucial." Brown: "Social media are a tool. Just as you can use pen and paper to send something silly, hateful, insightful or kind to a friend, you can do the same with social media. The stereotype we have of social media is of the teen-aged girl sending 50 or 100 texts a day to her friends. Nevertheless, you have to give this girl and her friends credit for being early adopters and seeing the potential of this new form of communication. As adults, we have the obligation to ourselves and others to use these tools wisely and constructively." 4) AUTHENTICITY. It's the same problem as in regular media, of course ... can you believe what you hear and see? Marmillion: "Potentially, the most negative aspect of social media is that with a glut of information, it may be difficult to find accurate and factual information. People are asking, what is authentic information, who is the authentic voice, and what sources of information are verifiable? People will be looking to separate opinion from fact, gossip and gasbags from honest spokespeople. Older critics may say we are dumbing down America, but I would offer that we are we are setting into place a new paradigm, where opportunities to find the truth will surf alongside more popular consumer subject matter." Salkowitz: "Social media have certainly played a part in mainstreaming what used to be fringe views and in pumping a lot of nonsense into the public discourse. However ... social networks actually have some self-regulating mechanisms that can help provide context, assuming people are interested in getting closer to the truth rather than just confirming their pre-existing opinions. Reputation systems that let people rate the quality of content, comments and contributors can provide some guidance as to what people find valuable. Wikis and other kinds of crowd-sourced collaborative content environments tend to be self-correcting because the extreme views cancel each other out (as they say about wikis, they don’t work in theory, they only work in practice)." Schwerdtfeger: "The progress toward reliability comes from the peer evaluation mechanisms built into these platforms. By allowing users to evaluate content, contributors are able to establish credibility, making their contributions more valuable. These mechanisms will continue to evolve such that proven contributors will rise to the top. Predictify.com is a good example of this. Those whose predictions have consistently been correct establish a score reflecting their performance, after which their future predictions get much more attention. These sorts of mechanisms already exist but their algorithms will become increasingly sophisticated as time goes on." Can Social Media Endure?
"How social media can be monetized and turn a profit so that they can continue to flourish has not been completely worked out yet, but I’m also not sure this question is being asked in the right way," says Robert Brown. "A writer in a recent Newsweek notes how he sees a cell phone sticking out of the back pocket of almost everyone riding on a motorcycle or scooter in Iran. This same phenomenon is true throughout the third world. Cell phones have become ubiquitous for almost everyone on the planet living above basic subsistence level. People use cell phones to send and receive tweets and text messages, so that means that cell phones are the predominant social media device. Cell phone makers and cell phone service providers around the world long ago figured out how to run profitable businesses, so how can we say that social media are not profitable?" To Jessica Clark, "The quick turnover rate on social media platforms makes sense: there are many of them, and some will be more useful to certain people than others. There's a certain novelty value right now that will wear off as people figure out if they're going to be incorporating social media into their lives and work. The question of how to monetize these services is still up in the air. Advertising is one source of income; value-added services (i.e, charging users for more storage space, vanity account names, ad-free usage, etc.) are another. But is that enough? Many millions of dollars are being bet on such propositions." Sasha Pasulka thinks that "social networking has exploded much faster than advertising and marketing teams can keep up. There’s a steep learning curve there that hasn’t exactly been scaled by staffs of professionals who learned how to sell and place ads in more traditional media. There’s a lot of value to be captured by consultants and teams who figure out how to navigate these waters and make these sites profitable, and I believe we’ll see that happen in the next five years." Aside from economics, will Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and all the rest remain popular and used by millions? Here's what our contributors said. Weintraub: "We are busy people with a ton of information coming our way. We only need the headline. If we want to know more, we’ll investigate and follow the link. But the Twitter methodology of delivering short bursts of information is here to stay. "The major social networks will not fade away. Facebook will not disappear in the near future. It will continue to grow until it hits the highest penetration possible and then it will level. There are only so many people in the world and its user base can only grow so much. "Meanwhile, someone will create something else. Someone will study what Facebook does wrong and build something that is better. This has happened repeatedly (Friendster to MySpace to Facebook)." Eventoff: "I believe Facebook will have a long and prosperous life because it helps us connect to those we know and interact on a somewhat deeper level with acquaintances. Communication is not an announcement, it is a discussion. Facebook provides for that. Twitter does, too ... however FB is much more personal and much more conversationally focused, and I believe those two traits really, really matter. The recent Twitter study saying that 10 percent of users account for over 90 percent of tweets is telling." Marmillion: "The service offering best protection for user privacy will endure in a world anxious for connections and suspicious of intruders." · Salkowitz: "Social networks, micro-blogging (Twitter, etc.), real-time communication (instant messaging, texting, etc.), geo-location services, and online gaming are all gradually converging into a larger concept of 'social presence,' where people are able to constantly keep their network of connections in their peripheral vision and engage with them spontaneously and opportunistically. I started noticing this effect myself once I really started using Twitter ... it becomes almost an extension of your central nervous system to have the daily status of everyone constantly updating in the timeline. "I’m not sure that short-form video like you find on YouTube has much of a future as a standalone medium. I also see Wikis and online communities moving away from this idea of crowdsourcing and more toward a classic power curve, where a very few number of contributors are actually engaged in creating content, compared to large numbers of consumers." Clark: "Twitter has shown particular potential because it's so simple and viral ... you don't just interact with it online, the messages can be transmitted via SMS, which means you can both send and receive it from the cell phone in your pocket. That revolutionizes information sharing, and the social aspects of the service ... following, being followed, messaging ... are also easy and fast. "YouTube also has had a tremendous effect on journalism because it has lowered the bar for on-the-spot reporting. Video used to be prohibitively expensive to produce and broadcast, and now it's almost unimaginably cheap. Live broadcasting is the next frontier; services like Qik make it possible for individuals to create, share and distribute live streaming video, again from pocket-sized devices. Many pundits warn about the fragmentation that's sure to follow from such technologies, but I think the best live shows will filter to more trusted outlets with larger audiences, which will create larger audiences for particular kinds of reporting and entertainment." Pasulka: "We’ve already seen sites like MySpace and Facebook have an enormous impact on society. There’s a high 'switching cost,' as it were, and a great deal of emotional attachment, and so sites like Facebook have staying power. You could make a similar, if less powerful, argument for Flickr or YouTube. "Another very cool aspect of social media is wikis, and I don’t think they’ve come close to reaching their potential. Wikipedia.org is wildly successful and useful, but there’s a ton of applications possible within large (and small) organizations for wikis as a form of information-sharing and for capturing “tribal knowledge.” I expect we’ll see growth there in the corporate world. "And while all eyes have been on Twitter and Facebook, 'virtual world' applications like Second Life have been quietly creating huge profits, both for their parent companies and for companies who buy and sell real estate and product in these worlds. The gamer community is large, growing, dedicated and willing to put a lot of disposable income into their hobby, and there will continue to be huge profit potential for the (very small) group of people who understand how to operate within this space. "Any that will fade? No, none of these will fade." Horowitz: "Just as MySpace faded very quickly when something better came along, I think Facebook and Plaxo and many others are vulnerable because their user experience/interface leaves a lot to be desired. As one example among many: how hard it can be to return to a page after several intermediate clicks. So they will eventually either evolve or be replaced, just as the very unfriendly listservs of the 1990s morphed into Yahoogroups, which vastly simplified use and grew lightning-fast." Hale: "I think social media as a form are here to stay. The cat is out of the bag and it isn't going back. Who organizes or manages it will change over time; Facebook beat out MySpace and maybe someone will beat out Facebook. Obviously, the next big iteration will focus on incorporating social media applications using mobile devices like IPhones. This is interesting and exciting because using mobile social media seems to me to increase the possibility that people will use social media to actually meet in person. People send out tweets or Facebook posts from the back of a taxi that say 'meet me at the bar in 30 minutes' ... to the extent people actually go to the bar, the strength of the community may increase." Schwerdtfeger: "The social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are definitely here to stay, as are sharing communities like Flickr (photos) and YouTube (videos). The questions about longevity surround micro-blogging platforms like Utterli, FriendFeed and the infamous Twitter. In their current form, these platforms are threatened by growing spam activity and it may indeed mark the demise of one or another." Clark: "I think social media is here to stay; more and more older people are adopting these technologies, and those young people who have made social media a daily (often hourly) habit are going to grow up and gain in both sophistication and purchasing power." Pasulka: "The burnout rate on Twitter is extremely high, and the ratio of valid, active users to spammers is probably lower than anyone on their end wants to admit. Twitter hasn’t done an especially good job of figuring out how to retain users or monetize their service, but there’s definitely value being created there, so they’ll either figure out how to capture it or they’ll sell to someone who will. "The age range of users for Facebook and YouTube is expanding rapidly. A recent survey by www.babycenter.com indicated that, today, 63 percent of moms participate in Facebook, Twitter and/or blogs. Only 11 percent were active in 2006. From a personal standpoint, I’m seeing more and more of my friends’ parents pop up on Facebook ... it was at one time surprising to get a Facebook friend request from the woman who drove my carpool in second grade, but now I’m getting used to it. Even my 82-year-old grandfather learned how to use the Internet so that he could read my blogs, although he still calls me on the phone to discuss them ... he has a stronger working knowledge of Paris Hilton’s day-to-day life than any octogenarian on the planet." Roeser: "I think they will all fade eventually as they are replaced by ever evolving and newer forms of communication. Social media in 2009 are identical to Morse Code when it was created. There will be several that will come and go, but social media will of course exist in some way or another as folks share their experiences and information." Trackback(0)
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It's a two-way street for reporters ... going outward, they use social media to promote themselves, solicit material and build up a base of contacts ... coming back in, they gather tips, sources or story material. Going out ...
Social media have become a veritable revolution for democratic government in that they provide a bottom-up counterpart to top-down officials and policies.
1) FRAGMENTATION. While social media promise to bring us together, just the opposite can also result.
Twitter ... which like most other social media entities generates little or no revenue ... just received $100 million in new private equity financing.
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