Mehmet Erdogan offers a half-dozen tips for using social media effectively when covering a conference: "Don’t photograph five men in suits sitting lethargically around a table. And if you happen to, don’t tweet it. When you post an image of men sitting around a table (and yes, the gender disparity is often glaring) you’re contributing to the impression that you’re doing nothing but reinforcing the status quo." Also, "don’t be scared to have a personality."
Social media
Shadi Rahimi writes that the news media and the public at large are using fewer hashtags in social media. She attributes the shift to their overuse and the ethical issues they sometimes pose: "You might have thought that by tweeting #CallMeCaitlyn last week you were guaranteed engagement. Perhaps, as the hashtag was trending up. But a quick glance at Topsy near the end of the day showed 'Caitlyn Jenner' as a keyword set on Twitter was trending higher than the hashtag."
Frances Caballo reviews nine applications for using Twitter more effectively. Included are the search engine Topsy; Hashtagify, which rates the prominence of any hashtag; Twitonomy, which analyzes your Twitter profile and extracts details about your interactions with other users; and My Top Tweet, which allows you to enter the usernames of any Twitter users and see which of their tweets were the most retweeted.
Daniel Victor is a New York Times editor who explains in a blog post how he searched Twitter for first-person anecdotes to go with a story about airline seating conflicts. Selecting the right keywords to use was the key, Victor writes: "Here’s the main takeaway: Imagine what your perfect source would tweet, or what you yourself would tweet in that situation, and search for the words that would probably be in it. And be sure you’re not limiting that to the SEO keywords."
Josh Stearns and Leighton Walter Kille offer suggestions for separating truth from rumor in the social media age. They include links to three tools for detecting altered images, plus fact-checking sites and other new tools: "The issue has become even knottier in the era of collaborative journalism, when nonprofessional reporting and images can be included in mainstream coverage. The information can be crucial — but it also can be wrong, and even intentionally faked."
Verification Handbook editor Craig Silverman addresses a problem that has becoming even bigger in the age of viral news and social media — confirming (or debunking) a widely disseminated rumor: "One of the easiest ways to avoid becoming part of a chain of dubious propagation is to take a few minutes and search/read closely to see where the claim or rumor originated. Don’t point to a rumor unless you have located the original source and evidence and evaluated it."
Michael Roston of the New York Times social media staff discusses some lessons learned, many of which boil down to "less is more." For example, Roston writes, the team of Times tweeters often tries different approaches to attracting readers from social media, "but there are also a significant number of instances where we shouldn’t try too hard to write a great tweet when other skilled journalists in our newsroom have already written one in the form of a headline."
Some Twitter users don't like it when you retweet a compliment, Adam Sternbergh writes: "This social dilemma is of particular salience to that solipsistic corner of Twitter populated by people who use Twitter, at least partially, as an implicit form of self-promotion: People who also write articles or books or songs or plays, or who otherwise have some sort of artistic or charitable or commercial pursuit that they would like to tastefully bring to your attention."
Adrienne Erin writes that the popular photo-sharing service can be a valuable promotional tool for writers, who can post photos of everything from their most recent vacations to their newest book covers: "Instagram is one of the best social apps you can use as an author, because not only does it give us a rest from all those words, but it can be used in so many ways — personally or professionally. You just have start thinking less in words and more in pictures."
Two new studies reach contrasting conclusions on stress and social media. First, the Pew Internet Research Project surveyed 1,801 people and found that "frequent internet and social media users do not have higher levels of stress." But then the Edelman PR firm found that "75 percent of journalists say they feel more pressure now to think about their story’s potential to get shared on social platforms." More from Poynter.