Your Facebook posts might be set to "friends only" and your Twitter feed may be protected, but what about your LinkedIn activity? Martin Brinkmann has some tips for LinkedIn privacy: "When you make modifications to your profile, follow a company or make recommendations, you will find them listed on your activity feed by default. The fact that you are looking for a job may be revealed on your activity feed for instance, which can cause issues" with your current employer.
Social media
From Bárbara Mendes-Jorge, here are five pointers for calling attention to your organization's events by covering them live on Twitter. At the top of her list is the wise use of Twitter's signature hashtags: "Using a hashtag will group all your tweets, enabling people searching for the event hashtag (or the hashtag you think up) to find them. It also makes it clear to your followers that you are tweeting about a certain event, not just spouting off random sound bites."
Ben Adler's advice for reporters might be summarized as "Be careful what you say, and be careful what you quote." Both can be risky, Adler says: "For digital natives, media consumption is platform agnostic — a Twitter feed and NYTimes.com are both just websites, visited in rapid succession. And so, say news literacy and journalism experts, no one should let their standards slip just because they are posting something on Twitter instead of their publication's website."
Mathew Ingram predicts that Twitter and other stream-based social media sites are in danger because their users are becoming overloaded. Sure, you can prune your "following" list, but "it’s like cleaning out the garage or indexing your photos; you know that you should do it, but it just seems so daunting that you never get around to it." Also, Paige Brown reviews a study on building relationships through Twitter. Rule one: Reply and engage.
Teenagers stopped using Facebook as soon as their parents signed on, right? That's what the recent news reports said, but Victoria Turk says they're all wet: "To get to the truth behind these sensational claims, you have to work through a mess of qualitative versus quantitative research, artificially 'sexed-up' academic writing, and lazy journalism with loose headlines." Turk traces the viral story to an anthropologist's blog post and gets his views on his research.
If you use Twitter's trending topics list to keep up with breaking news, read this Wall Street Journal story about the brisk trade in phony Twitter accounts: "The fake accounts remain a cloud over Twitter Inc. in the wake of its successful initial public offering. 'Twitter is where many people get news,' says Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. 'If what is trending on Twitter is being faked by robots, people need to know that.'"
"Abraham Zapruder uploads his raw footage of the assassination to YouTube. So do many others," Rem Rieder writes for USA Today in a "what if" story on how the JFK assassination would have played out in the social media era. "People save Oswald's Facebook page, anticipating that the social networking giant will soon shut it down. Other Lee Harvey Oswalds receive threatening messages on their Facebook pages." Also: how reporters worked in 1963.
"The internet and other technology keeps us on insanely high alert, ultimately producing an effect where we attend to everything and we attend to nothing (deeply)," L.L. Barkat writes in a post that discusses overload's physiological effects and suggests ways of curbing the beast: "When you let yourself get carried away by the high-alert cycle and give in to its constant interruptions … it takes you about twenty-five minutes to fully return to your original project."
Forget the old practice of offering your references only when asked for them. Now, you should simply publish them on your LinkedIn profile, Arnie Fertig writes for U.S. News: "Recruiters, human resources staffing pros and hiring managers all scour them to find great candidates. Rather than assuring the hiring authority at the end of the process that they are making a good choice, a reference can now bring you to the attention of decision makers at the very beginning."
When NASW member Dan Fagin's brother-in-law, also named Dan, fell seriously ill recently, the first Dan posted updates to his social media accounts. That's when the confusion began, Fagin writes for Slate, as countless friends voiced concern for his health: "This episode drove home just how profoundly the Internet has transformed the way most of us acquire and act on information — a transformation that has forced wrenching changes in my own profession of journalism."