January 2010 Archive

Sky News was in the news itself on January 7th for mandating that its journalist install and use Tweetdeck for newsgathering purposes. The application is widely used by bloggers and journalists already to stay on top of social media but this is a rare instance of making Tweetdeck usage the formal policy of a news organization and does make sense. How many other news bureaus or communications agencies are doing this?

The reason for doing this is simple: news breaks via social media more and more frequently. Just this week, for example, director of Liverpool Football Club, resigned because of a ridiculous and abusive reply email he sent to a fan. The story was originally a blurb in the ‘sports rumor’ category but then gathered enough steam and attention to make it to virtually every UK front page and forcing the resignation.

Another story that gained momentum with far reaching implications is the Facebook ‘Bra Color’ viral debacle. No one knows the origin of the Facebook idea that encourages women to post their bra color to somehow raise breast cancer awareness. Yet, this prompted many prominent bloggers to bring attention to the phenomenon and question its worth, and furthermore justly questioning the line between marketing and the pink ribbon campaign/real charity/real contributions to breast cancer awareness. As the dominos keep falling, the spotlight shifted to questioning participation of certain companies in promoting or tying their products to Breast Cancer Awareness month/campaign. So it starts with an anonymous campaign and ends up bringing companies like BMW and Eli Lilly into an unwanted spotlight.

Is there a better reason to mandate Social Media monitoring?