Dell Uses Social Media to Promote Brand

By Dave Fidlin

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, companies had one primary method of connecting with consumers, and that was through advertisements within the traditional forms of media: print publications (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast outlets (television and radio). The Internet, of course, has altered the playing field, and social media has become a prevalent method many companies have been using to reach out to new and existing customers.

Computer manufacturer Dell is among the companies that have been embracing social media to market new products. In fact, the company employs a chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, who is responsible for a swath of sites under the banner name Direct2Dell.

DMB’s Dave Fidlin recently spoke with Menchaca, a 17-year Dell veteran, about social media, and how the method will continue to shape the company’s marketing and outreach efforts in the future.

Can you explain your role as chief blogger for Dell?
My role is to keep things moving with our external network of blogs. Direct2Dell now exists in five languages. Direct2Dell is our main corporate blog. Beyond it, we have 7 additional blogs. Our latest is Direct2Dell India, which focuses content on one of our fastest-growing countries in Dell’s business.

How is Dell marketing beyond established, traditional methods? Is the company getting the word out about its products through such avenues as Facebook and Twitter?
Yes, very much so. We have two main pages in Facebook — Facebook for Home, which focuses on product and service information for consumers and Facebook for Business, which focuses on reaching business customers there. We’ve been very active on Twitter as a company since 2007. We use Twitter in 4 main ways: 1) to keep our customers informed 2) to engage our customers from different areas of our business 3) to sell to our customers who opt in to sites like @DellOutlet and 4) to support our customers. We now offer 24/7 support to customers on Twitter via @DellCares. See Dell.com/twitter for more details

Aside from the two big companies — Facebook and Twitter — how else is Dell using social media?
Our core strategy in social media is to go where our customers are. That means we maintain a Dell presence in many other social sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Scribd and outside the US in Sina’s microblogging service. Beyond our own blogs, our forum site and all of our presence on outside social networks, we’re also focused on responding to comments on other places on the Web, like third-party user forums or blog sites.

Can you quantify, percentage-wise, how much of Dell’s marketing and outreach efforts go toward social media (versus traditional marketing) in 2010?
Our social media marketing budget is very small compared to our traditional marcom spend. Outside of some ad credits to drive awareness to the Dell Facebook for Home pages and drawing attention to some of our social media efforts via Dell.com, we spend very little to promote our social media activities.

Do you have an idea of what the ROI (rate of return) is for Dell’s social media efforts?
Yes, we do, and that’s an area where we are still working on. In the early days, we measured social media’s impact on customers’ perceptions and found a pretty strong correlation—at the low point in 2006, about 48 percent of what was said about Dell was negative. We were able to get that into the low 20+ percent range. Today, we’re able to track all the basic traffic numbers you would expect, but beyond traffic, we’re looking at things like reach, engagement, brand reputation and more. We’re also starting to use more of the same tools on the social media side that we’ve been using to measure Dell.com like Omniture. There’s still more work to be done, but we’re making progress.

Where, in your opinion, is social media heading into the future, and how is Dell going to stay on the pulse of this still-growing method of communication?
I really think over the next several years, social media will become an integral part of how companies in many industries will do business. To me it’s a natural progression to add from things like telephones, e-mail, the Internet, chat and beyond. Just like many other aspects of business, it all comes down to execution. In my view, companies who learn to use social media to really connect with their customers will have a huge fundamental advantage over companies who don’t.

Do you envision a day when social media might completely replace traditional marketing methods, or is that an extreme statement?
No way do I think that social media will ever replace traditional marketing methods. I do think that social media can and will continue to augment traditional marketing methods. I think social media will make companies smarter in how they market to and engage with customers, and I think that’s a good thing. Like many others in social media today, I’m glad to see the era of one-way push marketing giving way to something different – a place where customer feedback shapes the direction of the company.

Can technology help parents monitor their kids online?

By James Zipadelli

While kids and teens have grown up with technology and using the Internet, it’s not always easy for parents to monitor them online. There are many online services who offer technology that can be used to monitor your child’s Internet use. Among the most recognizable websites are SafeKids, KidsHealth.org and NetSmartz.org, which is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  Norton Family Online also has software that parents can find helpful.

Into this crowded field comes SafetyWeb.com, a website that attempts to bring technology and the expanding reach of the Internet to parents’ fingertips. Once parents access the Web site, they can put in their child’s email address for free to see how many times they are mentioned on the Web. Once they click “Search Now” a query goes out to more than 800 million social profiles across 100 social networks and public Web sites, says SafetyWeb.com co-founder Geoffrey Arone. To access more of the site’s features, parents can sign up for $10 per month. Generally, there are three settings regarding profiles: “private,” which means the child’s information on that website has been made private; “public” and “exposed,” which means that some of your child’s information on a website, such as LinkedIn, is private and some is public.

SafetyWeb.com is very user-friendly and built like a social Web site. Parents and kids can easily see what is being said about them on public websites like Facebook and  Twitter. If there is something positive the child has done, such as make their information on Facebook private, it is highlighted in green; if something is a cause for concern, such as profanity, it is highlighted in red. SafetyWeb.com does not look at private networks, such as a child’s or teen’s email.

Experts DigitalMediaBuzz.com spoke to all say any Web site is no substitute for good parenting and communicating with your child.

“We will not guarantee that child will not make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes,” Arone says. “However, we will help ensure that when they do make mistakes, we are there to help you ensure that it is not broadcast to the world, thus potentially jeopardizing your child’s privacy, safety and online reputation.”

According to Arone, technologies that attempt to restrict Internet use by ‘blocking’ websites or spying on kids are ineffective.

“The format of having one centralized home PC is shifting,” Arone says. “Kids today connect from computers at home, public computers at available schools and libraries, mobile devices, iPads, and when all else fails they can use their friends’ machines.”

Arone says SafetyWeb.com grew out of his experience doing interviews with prospective students for colleges and universities. He says while the quality of students has gone up, so has the digital footprint of those students - and a Google search easily reveals questionable content.

“The kids and teens we spoke with initially reacted to existing solutions (spy or block) very negatively,” Arone says. “Once I demoed SafetyWeb and made it clear that what we were searching was already out in the open, they were a lot more accepting, and in some cases relieved. People forget the amount of information that is out there. Our goal is not to catch and punish, but detect, share and encourage communication - that is going to lead to successful communication online.”

Hilary Bates, a spokesman for the children’s magazine Highlights, says the magazine did a survey in which they asked parents whether they used an online service to help keep their kids safe. ”Less than 3% of our respondents mentioned using a NetNanny or other service,” Bates says. “Obviously, when we included Glubble users, that number changed. But Glubble users tended to talk about how the technology was a tool, not a stand-alone solution to security.”

“Highlights recommends that families get involved with their kids’ on-line experience, as they do with other media, so it is a chance to share positive skills, and help kids navigate the risks as well,” Bates adds.

Devra Renner, a licensed social worker and author of the book  Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids, has a tip for parents on how to tell if their child is using the Internet properly. Renner has two children, ages 9 and 14.

“If your child is active on the Internet, sit down with them and have them show you the places they visit, the social networks they use, and how they use them,” Renner says. “Not only does it allow them to teach you something, it builds their confidence, and yours, that they understand what they are doing online. If they are unable to communicate to you what they do online, then you probably have a logical reason to incorporate a monitoring service.  And if you decide to use the service, you can explain, “You know what, we’re going to try this for a while until all of us are more comfortable with using the Internet.”

Renner also says a good way to find out if your child is could use the Internet responsibility is to monitor how they handle their friends and responsibilities offline.

“Ask other parents about the sites their children use and how they use it,” Renner says. “Keep in mind your child will inevitably make mistakes online. Keep your response in check by making sure your child understands the mistake, help them fix it if you can, and have them tell you ways they can possibly prevent the mistake from happening again.”

At Chirp, Twitter’s Trends Emerge

By James Zipadelli

The best football players go to the Super Bowl. The best celebrities, journalists and politicians come to the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Up until this year, the best developers did not have a venue to come together. Chirp, Twitter’s first ever conference in San Francisco, was held last month.  Where else can you find Twitter’s founders, like-minded developers, and a contest that kept some of those developers up for 30 hours?

For a first-person account of Chirp, freelance developer Ed Borasky’s posts are very helpful. Representatives from Twitter did not respond to repeated emails or Tweets for comment.

In that two-day conference, Twitter discussed its financial future and new apps that would be helpful to users, according to developers present at the conference. One of the new apps is called @anywhere, which went live April 14. For an overview, click here.

“@anywhere is essentially a re-packaging of existing Twitter API services in a more turnkey solution that can be easily be embedded into existing websites without lots of custom coding,” says Eric Chang, founder of the app TweetSwell, which conducts surveys on Twitter.  “You can “embed” Twitter functionality into your web page using JavaScript, including:

• embedded tweet box - just copy-and-paste some JavaScript into your web page
• auto-linking of Twitter accounts - this is similar to how the iPhone auto-links phone numbers
• auto-hovercards - same idea, but instead of linking to Twitter, pop up the Twitter hovercard

Evan Bailyn, founder of firstpagesage.com, says Twitter has “done a nice job” with @anywhere but still prefers Facebook because of features such as the “Like” button.

“I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near what Facebook’s social graph is,” Bailyn says. “I think it’s going to be for people that Tweet the most. I don’t know that it’s going to bring tons of new people… most of the people that use @anywhere a lot will already tweet a lot and it will just make their tweeting easier.”

“The Like concept is very natural to online browsing and socializing. It’s a lot easier than typing something,” Bailyn adds. “Personalized stories are an idea that might have been good for Twitter to employ.  Points of Interest, a new Twitter function, makes it easier to associate your location with whatever you’re tweeting. You can tweet about a location you’re at, and find a restaurant.  This could provide a lot of personalized information about travel, nightlife, restaurants. @anywhere isn’t as exciting as Points of Interest.”

Peoplebrowsr CEO Jodee Rich says the key to Twitter’s success is that their stream is open and available to third parties developers. A cloud has already been developed that has enough space to support 20 terabytes of data, Rich says. For those that are interested, here is Rich’s slideshow on the metadata cloud.

“Developers have taken the stream and put it up in the cloud,” Rich says. “What we’re really doing is extending the half life of the tweet. You can look in the cloud and find data from six months ago or more. Twitter data is open, third parties developers can store it for a long time - it then becomes a cloud that extends metadata coming from third parties developers, adding to Twitter profiles information about gender, influence, fields of expertise and more. Both Private and public data can be added to Twitter profiles and posts.

“Now Facebook is allowing people to store the stream for an unlimited amount of time; another reaction to Twitter,” Rich says.

Some developers were worried about Twitter’s recent acquisition of Atebits to acquire the iPhone client Tweetie. Borasky says, “Twitter made a business decision. Using phrases like ’stabbed in the back’ or sexual references, despite the way one might feel about it, isn’t either appropriate or particularly relevant or useful.”

“I’m on the StatusNet developers’ list,” Borasky adds. “In some ways, it’s complementary to Twitter rather than direct competition. But I’m guessing that those who truly intend to

compete with Twitter via StatusNet are still working at it. I was never formally invited to join the ‘rebels’ and didn’t see much point in doing so anyhow.” Andrew Stone, who developed the iPhone app Twittelator, says the worry is “way overblown.”

“My twitter client, Twittelator, shows that 3rd party developers run circles around Twitter with new interesting features,” Stone says. “I got up at Chirp and said, “Thank you for buying Tweetie! I now have one less competitor. Don’t worry, just do some cool stuff and you can compete with Twitter and Tweetie.”

Borasky says the future for Twitter is very promising if they partner with other media organizations.

“They’ve got Oxygen, MSNBC, the NY Times and Huffington Post already,” Borasky says. “I’d expect to see some name movie studios join that list for the summer blockbuster season.”

“The Promoted Tweets and analytics capabilities are still evolving,” Borasky adds. The kinds of questions their developers were asking me indicate that they’re looking to hire experts in this area. That’s a fiercely competitive arena, and their only real advantage is their huge raw data collection and real-time acquisition. The analytics, visualization, and natural language processing technologies are well-developed elsewhere.”

Stone calls Twitter “a beautiful meeting of media and personality.”

“It’s not a walled garden, like Facebook,” Stone says. “The degrees of separation between people on Twitter are very small. You can get some serious resonance with an interesting tweet. It’s fun to come up with content that’s small, easy and tight. It’s just this totally new experience.”

“We’re writing cool code that’s changing the world,” Stone adds. “Chirp was fundamentally about the team building and for that, it was truly successful.”

Peoplebrowsr’s Rich, like other developers DigitalMediaBuzz.com interviewed for this story, says he enjoyed the “openness and authenticity” of the Chirp conference.

“We truly felt like we were part of the Twitter family,” Rich says. “I’ve never been to a conference where they exposed the non-executive board members as openly as they did. I’ve never seen a management team go up on stage and explain how they are running their business. It’s very exciting to be part of that.”

Knowledge Management: Measuring Social Media ROI

By James Zipadelli

Companies are harnessing the potential of social media to make connections with their clients through so-called “knowledge-management systems.” Knowledge management systems are programs that harness the power of social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, and track a company’s “buzz” around the Web.

What companies using social media say

One company that is doing this is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has an internal social media application, Chatter. 500 clients are using Chatter now, and this service is available to clients who have a subscription to Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com says it has more than 72,000 clients and 150,000 apps in the cloud community.

“People want to have relevance, connect easily to other people, and using devices to do it,” says Ariel Kelman, VP of platform and product marketing, Salesforce.com. “They’re accessing more though smartphones and notebook PCs. That’s Cloud 1. In Cloud 2, we’re looking to YouTube and Facebook, which is the magic of Chatter. We’re looking at the feed as your ultimate user experience. We want real-time status updates and platform technology to be as easy to use and alive with data is as easy as Facebook.”

“With Chatter, we are resetting people’s expectations for how their apps should behave,” Kelman says. “When they go into work, their expectations are Facebook Twitter and YouTube work. That’s why IT organizations have to reset their priorities and a new set of demands. They’re going to be asking the CIO, why can’t our application use Facebook?”

Another company that uses social media to track company buzz around the Web is OneRiot, which calls itself a “real-time search engine.” OneRiot spokesperson Courtney Walsh says traditional search engines don’t deliver what OneRiot can, which are socially relevant results on any topic in real time.

“OneRiot is a search engine. Although, rather than a traditional search engine, OneRiot is a realtime search engine,” Walsh says. “While traditional search engines like Google, Bing, Ask.com offer a way to navigate the web and conduct research - realtime search offers a way to search any topic to find the current buzz.  Realtime search is a great addition to the whole search experience.”

Businesses can use OneRiot to track their company buzz. Search “Microsoft” or “Google” and there is a collection of videos, articles, blog posts and Tweets which people are sharing.

Carlin Wiegner, CEO of the enterprise social software website CubeTree.com describes social media as “good” for the business. “Sometimes, it’s the only way you can reach people,” Wiegner says. “But you’re also trying to drive revenue and making customers happy. Most people are trying to do old way or new way.”

Wiegner says it’s helpful to do polls of CubeTree.com users and changes its software every week, although most changes are incremental.

“One, clearly more than one customer sees this need,” Wiegner says. “Two, it shows the customer they’re engaging in feedback. Those are sometimes the most passionate users but not all the users. Three, competition: We constantly think about where our competitors are going to be. Finally, you also need to have a vision. That’s why you need a project manager but it’s exciting to see what people want fixes to the product.”

What the analysts say
Gartner analyst Michael Maoz says companies are beginning to understand the value of social media and how it helps their businesses.

“There’s just as much value being able to foster internal social communication, and it’s not written about much,” Maoz says. “For example, with social media, companies are onboarding a new employee more quickly - plugging that person right into everyone. Before social media, a new employee comes in, and they jump around from server to server. When you bring together social media in form of wikis, blogs and integrated knowledge systems, they more quickly get a sense of, ah, this is who we are.”

According to Maoz, using social media saves time and money because people can find what they are looking for faster.

“It reduces the number of support personnel that they need directly and also helps product development,” Maoz says. “Instead of figuring out what to work on, I observe the community. Some companies, like Apple, Google, or Amazon don’t work that way. They say, ‘This is how the customer will interact.’”

Maoz used the example of Microsoft and Oracle having communities of developers posting solutions to questions instead of employees. Maoz says the benefit for the developer is two-fold: The developer is sharing information with the consumer and promoting themselves as a trustworthy source in the process.

“These social tools are in a way a mechanism to get back to a level of trust,” Maoz says. “The best way to gain your trust (from a company perspective) is to know what you’re thinking in the first place. We know we’re not perfect, we know you know we’re not perfect and now we’re giving the mechanisms to help you.”

It remains to be seen whether there will be a dominant social organizer on the Web, like Google for search engines. ABI analyst Dan Shey says there will not be a dominant social organizer on the Web.

“I think social networking is enhancing current applications already used in the enterprise.  I would say that search is an important function for internally-focused enterprise social networking - the ability to search the web and internal databases for data specific to a group’s needs.”

Gartner’s Maoz is more optimistic.

“I think it’s going to happen, I don’t know when,” Gartner’s Maoz says. “What they’re going to provide me is a secure way to plug into a framework. I’ve got my stuff right there,” referring to his social media tools to communicate. “Facebook is the idea. I want Facebook to fit to me.”

CubeTree’s Wiegner says having a program organizing social media would be helpful.

“We’d love to have a single tool for social media,” Wiegner says. “You really have to get specialized social media tools to figure out who is saying things about you.”

DMB Releases iPhone App: Provides Users With Key Stats From Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Digg

By Lauren Fritsky

For the media professional that is constantly on the go, the ability to access his or her website’s analytics and social media stats from anywhere, at any time is essential. Digital Media Buzz just released its first mobile app, Buzz InSites, to provide users with the ability to access their website’s metrics and social networking stats directly from their mobile devices.

DMB founder Eric Diamond says the app is ideal for the mobile professional who wants to keep track of his or her key website and social statistics whether on the road, in a meeting or on line at the bank.

Buzz InSites mines key stats from all of your Google Analytics accounts and statistics from Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube to keep you updated on your website traffic and activity. The app will also let users email reports in Microsoft Excel format.

“Mobile devices have become a bigger part of our business lives, giving us access to information anywhere, anytime,” Diamond says. “We want to enable digital media professionals to get quick and easy access to all their analytics data anytime within one app. Now you can monitor, review and analyze your site’s metrics remotely, on your schedule.”

Buzz InSites will display key information from Google Analytics such as website page views, unique visitors, top keywords, top referrers and important stats from your social networks such as number of friends, number of followers and top video views. The Buzz InSite service will synchronize with Google’s database to update daily from various analytics accounts, and the service will store one years worth of data.

“We felt that anything beyond one year wasn’t useful to the mobile user,” Diamond explains. “Anything beyond a year, you would probably want to sit at your computer and use other applications to help analyze the numbers.”

On the social networking end, data is displayed in live, raw numbers, not graphs. Buzz InSites is the first iPhone app to provide access to data from both Google Analytics and social networking sites, Diamond says. “There are apps out there that individually do these things, but not one app to easily get all your website analytics and social stats.”

There will be a second phase for Buzz InSites that will focus on creating custom reports and obtaining statistics from additional social networking sites such as LinkedIn.

“Each day we download from Google all of your key stats, and store all the information in a secure database,” Diamond says. “Because of this we can ensure that our app serves up the requested data as quickly as possible. Also, because we store all of your data, in future releases we will be able to provide you with very useful custom reporting options.”

Users can download the app for $4.99 by visiting the BuzzInsites.com website or by going to the Apple iTunes app store from their iPHONE. DMB also welcomes feedback from users to help shape the second phase of the app or contribute to updates. The company’s mobile division is also working on other apps, such as sales management tools and display advertising insights to meet the needs of the mobile business professional. For more information, visit BuzzInsites.com.

The Rumor Mill: Social Media Trumps Traditional Media

By Moria Byrne

As social media expands into the role of news source, media experts question the reliability of personal contacts as sources.

In a recent experiment sponsored by Public Francophone radio, Janic Tremblay and four other journalists tested how reliable social media sites for accurate news. Tremblay and friends concluded in their blog documenting the experiment, Behind Closed Doors on the Net, that social media news was only as reliable as its sources.

“It’s really important to choose the right people (to follow) because what they say and do will be very important,” says Tremblay, a radio broadcaster of Radio-Canada.

There are 30,000 followers on the Canada Broadcasting Channel (CBC) Twitter profile, according to Tremblay. Yet, he’s only seen retweets once or twice coming from CBC.net. Apres, a local Canadian newspaper, has the same number of followers on Twitter. Tremblay receives many retweets of Apres’ articles from readers. Why? The stories from Apres journalists have been retweeted by people following the individual reporter.

“There’s some kind of relationship that develops between the journalist and their network,” Tremblay says. “And network seems more enthusiastic to retweet the stories from the journalist themselves rather than his employer.”

Using Twitter as a news source is really all about finding a trusted source for news information, according to Robin Carey, press contact of Social Media Today. The micro blog entry should be cited, contain a link to a reliable news source or social network site and provide proof the event/news did happen.

“If I receive a link to a blog that’s not citing any links or citing any sources, well, and no one else knows about it, I’m going to be a lot more skeptical about that,” says Andy Carvin, senior strategist, NPR Social Media Network Desk.

Carvin says he learned about many major stories such as Michael Jackson’s death first on Twitter. He’s found his Twitter feeds to be accurate almost every single time, as he follows people on Twitter who are reliable sources.

For example, if someone sent him an article on Twitter from TMZ that said Michael Jackson was dead, Carvin wouldn’t automatically trust this information. TMZ doesn’t have a track record of being completely accurate all the time, Carvin says. Readers need to be discerning and pay attention to the sources of tweets received, he says.

“You are who you follow,” says Tremblay, who follows people interested in news or working in the news industry on his Twitter account.

Misinformation
“The one downside of social media is that enables the spreading of misinformation,” Carvin says.

Tremblay saw Twitter create a momentary panic among residents in Lille, France. There was news on Twitter of an explosion in Lille. As many as 5,000 people signed onto a special fan page with updates on the Lille explosion status. The danger Tremblay saw in this uninformed chatter was that people were not only were people sharing (retweeting) the news, they were responding to the news. Also, most of the updates people posted on the Twitter site were actually false. The day after, the media reported that it was a plane crossing over a sound barrier.

“You can hear a lot on Twitter but you don’t always know what’s happening (what the truth is),” Tremblay says.

A month ago, a Canadian singer, Doug Fieger was reported dead on Twitter. The message originated from a Facebook entry written by her stepfather.

When journalists spoke to the record company for verification, the spokesperson reported that singer was doing well. This created a great deal of tension between people who had passed this false message along. Eventually, journalists confirmed that the singer was in fact dead. Yet, the mistake continued to plague the Twitter community in Canada, according to Tremblay. He believes that the incident may have forced users to reconsider how they use Twitter in the future.

“Maybe we’re starting to learn that there are some subjects that we better not tweet about,” Tremblay says.

Although social media allows users to share information freely, Tremblay noticed during his experiment that most retweets originated from a news source.

There was a PEW Research Center study, 90 percent of the information mentioned on Twitter and Facebook comes from regular, traditional media and only 4 percent on Twitter comes from original content.

And there’s still admittedly a quality gap between social networks and regular news, says Robin Carey, press contact, Social Media Today. But she thinks that the gap is increasingly going to close. “You’re going to see a lot more cross pollination between traditional news gathers and social networks,” Carey says.

Opportunities
While social media network Facebook allows users to share news articles and videos, the channel revolves around sharing personal information about daily life, according to Carvin. Twitter, on the other hand, is a “real-time chat room;” a combination of a chat and a newswire service, according to Carvin. Twitter has been gaining greater attention over the past year as a real-time news source during the Iran election.

Twitter became a useful tool for gaining information when there weren’t any usual forms of communication available to journalists.

There were no electricity or phone lines working after Haitian earthquake. Yet, people managed to contact each other on Twitter. Many citizen journalists provided critical insight and updates following the earthquake, according to Tremblay who monitored the post-earthquake chatter on Twitter. Also, Haitian photojournalists, Carel Pedre, Marvin Ady and others took pictures and sent them on Twitpic. Their pictures were all over the newspapers the next morning.

Despite the advantages of social media, Tremblay still believes news belongs in the hands of journalists; they have institutions to protect them and professional journalism skills.

Self-policing
Users keep each other in check through an open communication and transparent approach to social media and community.

If someone’s got a large group of followers and writes something false, people will respond, according to Carey. Social media channels are a medium that are inherently transparent and self-policing.

A well-known blogger, Dave Winer was having a conference call with someone else in northern Virginia when the co-worker heard an explosion and told Winer. As the blogger mentioned this event on Twitter, his many followers started passing this information around. Meanwhile, a local radio station, WTOP, quickly posted a write up about the explosion. In the course of a half an hour, a several people in northern Virginia wrote back to negate earlier claims. Some felt it wasn’t an explosion but a small earthquake. Twitter users had corrected the rumor. Eventually, the weather channel confirmed that what Winer’s co-worker and others in northern Virginia experienced was in fact a small earthquake.

If someone says something out of the ordinary, enough people will question it, and eventually it gets resolved, Carvin says.

Best journalistic best practices ask writers to confirm a source, according to Robin. Just as Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein needed to get confirmation from Deep Throat before going public with the Watergate story, the same holds true of all news stories. There isn’t an equivalent rule in social media, Carey says. Information is confirmed through links, but the information isn’t required to have a source. Instead, it’s the “wisdom of the crowd” that serves the same function, Carey says. Undocumented information could lead to copyright infringements and defamation among other problems.

Yet, a survey of online research revealed that 65 percent of journalists go to social networking sites (Facebook or LinkedIn), while 52 percent refer to Twitter and other microblogging sites for information, Poynter reported.

Future
Most online journalists get their news, from informal networks or Twitter or other social networks, according to Carey. She believes the trend will continue to grow.

Social networking sites are the most popular with 75 percent of 18-25 year olds and 35 percent of 25-34 year olds.

The number of people using social networks is growing at such a fast rate, the new director of BBC Global News, Peter Horrocks, told staff last week that they need to start using social media or find another job.

Yet, as there is a quality gap, most people would be unwilling, at this point, to accept something on Twitter totally on face value, Carey says.

“Most people realize that they need to cross reference that (micro blog) with a paradigm for trust,” Carey says.

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