I posted this morning about Instagram, and its rise to significance for social media journalists.
Which tools do you think are important now - and which do you feel you need to know more about?
Embedded interactive stories (timelines etc.) and when to use them. Meograph seems to have a lot of potential for this, if you wanted to recap on a story that broke quickly map/timeline storytelling feels like a good idea. I am sure providing comprehensive summaries would get you social media kudos.
It does not seem essential at the moment, but Google+ seems like it'll become increasingly important. Perhaps nobody in my social circle is really using it, but with most people now having a Google account it seems a place to go.
Topsy is really useful as a cleaner, quicker way to see exactly what's trending on Twitter.
Really interested to see what will become of Summly, too. I installed it last night and it's proved very useful so far.
Which tools would you recommend we get to know particularly well, Adam & Judith?
Oh, I'll let you know - but I'm not going to prejudice the discussion by jumping straight in with that. I'll add my thoughts when more people have chimed in.
I concur with the other two, George especially with meograph and the links Judith just posted look really exciting. I'd be very interested to see more of how to can use social media to be tell a story and to pull people into it and get them to interact as opposed to using social media to find/verify stories.
Meograph told me the story of the Trayvon Martin case very well, but how do you monetize this? If your story is told entirely on another site, then will you get any ad revenue? Or is it possible to embed, like George was saying?
I should clarify that my suggestion related to the latter question, "and which do you feel you need to know more about?" - contextual video is very much an emerging technology but one we will explore in the sessions. In terms of Rob's Q about ads and monetisation, this is something to ask of community managers/social media editors about tools more generally: how can each tool be monetised, and do they (and how successfully)? And should check out the services directly for details of monetisation possibilities.
Judith, I think those questions are pertinent. I think a problem with Storify/Meograph is that they might work too well, in the sense that users read/consume all the content they need and then never click through to your site. The upside, though, is that new users might think a story told on Storify is very neat and make a mental note of who created it, making it more likely they'll visit your/our site in future.
To pick up on your latter point Rob, that comes down to social capital. It would be far worse to not be aware of and using these platforms were they to become a success, irrespective of the slight financial hit you get from missing out on the ad revenue.
Meograph and Storify are only useful for some kinds of stories and even then they can be just one of a series of sources for that information. However, your primary aim is to inform and if readers think that you're avoiding the best ways to tell stories just to cultivate ad revenue then you are likely to lose kudos (and thus more revenue) in the long term.
Storify can - and should - be embedded in what you are doing. I don't think I've ever read one on the Storify site, just embedded onto another one.
The monetisation point is a good one. Back in 2005 we were creating communities on the basis we could figure out the business strategy later on. In many cases that just created running costs with no clear path to business benefit. Any community-incentive needs a clear sense of how it aligns to the title's business strategy.
The astute might take that as a hint of something you could include in your assessed community analysis work…
Adam Tinworth added Jonathan Hewett.
I wonder whether videos are the social media which is about to take off. Of course, there are lots of videos on the internet already but they're not often used socially. The comments on youtube are pretty bad. People mainly refer directly to the content of the video or insult one another. There is relatively little genuine discussion or interaction between people around videos.
Uploading photos is now popular and mainstream in a way that it wasn't a few years ago. With superior technology and better user skills, I think might see an explosion in videos and video apps.
People seem to be increasingly drawn to visual social media ie. Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr and the like, so I reckon this area will definitely be one that keeps expanding and becoming more important journalistically. I agree with Henry that videos could also take off, especially as they seem to be one of if not the most commonly shared medium among my Facebook friends. I've not heard of Meograph but George, Rob and Sam have certainly sparked an interest...
My background is in real time news. People into that kind of reporting, so desperate for timings, have trouble finding use for social media in the job they are paid not to get wrong at. Because of the stress that affects these journalists, many in this real time business are youngsters. All full of energy and interest in social media. Still they can't think of ways to use them. Social media might be fast, but not fast enough for them. And they write many of the stories shared in social media. That leads me to the question: is social media distrusted by many journalists because they are an extra, not the major events themselves? If that is not the case, why haven't big media corporations used them as the core of their news gathering?
I know it's such an obvious one, but I'm new to social media and have found the Tweetdeck app so useful already. It's great to have different columns for newsgathering, such as one for keywords and another for contacts, and two of my patch stories have been obtained through scrolling through my Tweetdeck columns.
I also agree with George in that I see Google+ gaining in popularity, as more and more people converge onto Google services and platforms. I'll personally be trying to get to grips more with Storify, Instagram and maybe even Yahoo Pipes!
Here's a really simple essential tool: having a good command of Advanced Search tools can be very useful for finding stories and monitoring a topic/patch ... especially if you regularly track results through email alerts or RSS feeds.
