Suw Charman-Anderson follows up with an internal version. Both are spot on. And while the web geeks amongst us giggle, they should also be compulsive reading for anybody or company thinking of getting into social media.

I’ve come across all these comments over God knows how many years in all walks of life. I’ve spoken to a few people who are so enthusiastic about social media but work for companies who take about six months to take any kind of decision on it. I’m quite thankful mine’s pretty proactive and willing to try new things.

Social media isn’t like other popular areas where you can just wade in go “hey, we’re great” and leave. What worked before offline won’t necessarily work online.

The best thing anybody can do if they want their company or client to get into social media is read and listen. Engagement also helps, but I’d honestly say just immersing yourself in blogs, wikis, pods, Twitter and forums and getting a feel for how they work will do no end of good.

If a blogger has a pop at your company, chill. Maybe it’s better to understand the reason behind the rant than panicking or getting worked up about the contents of the post. People say bad things, it happens.

Viral videos are called viral for a reason. If it’s something you’d want to send your mates at a slow day at work, then you’re onto a winner. If you struggle to watch it through, it won’t.

And while mass emailing bloggers may seem like a quick and efficient way to work, it probably won’t generate that much positive coverage. Certainly not compared to if you’ve taken the time to read, engage and see what’s relevant to this particular blog.

It’s not hard to do, but I suspect these won’t be the last conversations Chris and others have on this topic.

[I'd also quite like to add 21. Client puts something on the internet with no links in or out and wonders why nobody visits.]

Fast forward to today (or, if you happen to be reading this light years in the future, 2008) and bloggers haven’t exactly killed off the medium of print, although they have changed the nature of journalism, and how that change will finally pan out is unclear.

But the two are sitting, if not exactly comfortably together, in closer proximity than perhaps was expected. Most major papers now have blogs where journalists and, horrors, the great unwashed interact. Even more shocking is the number of journalists who maintain their own blogs. In their own time! Lawks! Who’d thunk it. Look, there’s one. And here’s another. And, my gosh, another. They’re bloody everywhere.

And what’s more it’s not just journalists who can write and have opinions. A lot of other people do it rather well, often in a niche area. One of the trouble with journalists is, unless we end up seriously specialising, our knowledge is spread a little thin and there’s invariably people out there who know more about the topic than we do. Which is, I think, largely a good thing. Holding the fourth estate to account and all that. And, blimey, occasionally you can learn something. Hell, transparency, which is pretty hot on the web these days, is a good thing. After all, journalists call for it all the time, right?

Ok, blogland does have more than its fair share of tub-thumping nutters who do like causing a shit-storm and enjoying the controversy. That’s largely the nature of a free and open platform for publishing. I’d hazard a guess than the majority of the tub-thumping nutters can also be found among the retired colenels in the letters pages of local newspapers. At the very least, they’re no less nutty than some of the people who write in.

But one of the great things about blogs and other social media is how they’ve changed the nature of newsgathering.

Certainly, today’s journalists are as likely to be tracking a breaking story online using Technorati, Summize and Twing as they are door-knocking (and both have their merits and disadvantages, and are best used in conjunction). Similarly, they’re turning into a great source of news as more newsworthy people get blogs. 

So it’s just slightly depressing to read the following comments in the leader column:

“It’s accepted practice – particularly if a public figure makes controversial remarks on a blog – for newspapers to use them as source material for their follow-up story, subject to the paper contacting the person quoted to check that what appeared is accurate.”

“For a blogger to moan that what they themselves put in the public domain has somehow been pillaged because a newspaper hasn’t acknowledged them smacks of breath-taking petulance.”

“Too often, blogs seem like slags or slogs, probably both; disappointing slogs through slaggings off. Perhaps when blogs have grown up a little more they’ll be better. For many, still, maturity seems a long way off.”

So it’s with a small degree of relief on my part to read Livingston Communications muse on a similar topic and conclude social media isn’t about to burst, but scale back a tad, probably shaking out some of the worse/more unsustainable sites.

It’s an excellent post, especially the first point:

“1) Too many communicators have the shiny object syndrome, yet don’t have domain expertise. That means we’re seeing a lot of bad social media this year. In turn, you can expect corresponding failures and a reaction against social media.”

One of the saving graces for social media, though, is many of the sites and applications seem to be born out of an idea of how to make something better or improve communication – something that will work for the group rather than immediately designed to make money. Take crowdstatus, a neat little site still in alpha – it was born out of the creator’s desire to make communication easier and it’s easy to see the potential uses. The note on the about page, to me, sums up this attitude nicely:

“This is a personal project for the moment so don’t ask me about business models :p”

Social media at the moment feels like its reached a tipping point of sorts. The secondary and tiertary adopters are now using these sites a lot more while some obvious cases, like Facebook, have gone beyond any expectations.

To some extent these new users will follow the early adopters, but they’re also likely to be more discerning. They’ve not drunk the initial kool-aid and will be asking questions such as “How can this help me in a personal/professional manner?”

I’ve started training, in the loosest sense, colleagues on how to get the best out of social media and, along the way, they’ve fired some difficult, direct questions at me. Sometimes it’s easy to show the value of a site like Twitter to PR, or netvibes to your personal way of working.

But with many of the other sites it’s somehow difficult to justify exactly why it’s worth spending time getting to grips with it and often it’s just a case of play and see if it suits you.

And this is where the shakedown comes. If you’ve got an overcrowded marketplace, there will undoubtedly be some casualties and financiers tighten their belts and new users ask why they should be using two or three similar applications.

Take Plurk, which I like but don’t use often, against Twitter, which is unreliable but has embedded itself in my life. It’s hard to tell if it’ll become Facebook to Twitter’s MySpace or Betamax to Twitter’s VHS. The most common question I’ve had in the past few weeks is ‘why should I use site x over site y?’ And there’s no good answer. At that point, I drop my geeky semi-early-adopter mentality and start thinking about if site x or site y is more useful to me in a work setting. And I’ll confess sometimes I get overloaded with the amount of new sites that pass by my eyes and wonder how or why the hell I should keep them all going.

Blogging is now embedded in online culture. Sites like Facebook have become part of our everyday lives, regardless of how much you use it. Twitter’s becoming a great source of not just conversation but also breaking news and news gathering.

I’m not quite sure what the final point is, other than that social media is here to stay but will eventually fall back into line with the basic laws of economics and the markets. And, at that point, as Livingston Comms say, “a more measured, intelligent debate will take place.” It’s a debate I’m looking forward to, even if the enthusiasm for social communication tools is fun at the moment.

While yesterday the best sources for breaking news were the online Exeter City fans forum Exeweb, and Twitter, today things have settled down somewhat. The thread on Exeweb has slowed and hasn’t been updated in a while, while Tweets on the issue have been restricted to those from traditional media accounts like ITN and the Guardian [1].

Likewise, Technorati and del.icio.us have sporadic entries, but nothing traditional media hasn’t already told me.

[A quick aside here - partly to blow my own trumpet, but partly because it fits in well here - POLIS director Charlie Beckett followed up his very nice comment with a blog post praising what I wrote yesterday, which is as unexpected as it is flattering (and humbling). But where did Charlie find my piece? Via his colleague on del.icio.us. QED.]

But where it gets really interesting is Digg. If you search upcoming stories for Exeter then the majority of articles ‘Dugg’ are from traditional sources: the BBC, the Telegraph, etc. [2].

Now, I’ll admit this has only been a cursory glance and any research I’ve done hasn’t been as thorough as yesterday but there’s still a few strands of hypothesis we can draw from this.

The main point being, when you have a breaking news story, traditional media is a lot slower than online sources and social media tool and, in many cases, less reliable. This also suggests that people are moving towards these tools rather than more traditional sources when they want to find out more information.

However, once the story moves beyond it’s initial ‘breaking’ stage (usually 24 hours, or an overnight gap), traditional media reasserts itself. The posters on Exeweb or Twitterers are likely to have the time or access to compete with media outlets, so at this stage the fastest, most reliable sources online will revert to the familiar brand names. They have the lines to the police, they eyewitnesses, and the politicians and now can be seen to be across the story.

The big loser in all this now is not social media, which can happily exist outside of the mainstream media and isn’t solely news-orientated, but the Express and Echo, Exeter’s local paper.

Yes, the Echo have continued to add updates to their site, but I still can’t read today’s coverage, which is maddening – the message to buy the paper for full information has been on the site since they posted a brief summary of their lead story, and they’re already telling us to buy Saturday’s paper for the update. Which would be great if I still lived in Devon, but I don’t.

Now, the Express and Echo may well have some of the best journalistic coverage on this topic, and today and tomorrow’s papers may well be ground-breaking award-winning stuff, but it’s really too late. Any smart reader, Exonian or otherwise, will have gone to somewhere like Google News, done a search for Exeter and read a lot of the pieces available there, most of which contain not just yesterday’s story but up-to-the-minute articles with today’s events (the Telegraph’s is particularly good). In the meantime, the Echo sits with none of this.

Taking this logically to its conclusion, why would I – the online reader – then need to buy tomorrow’s Express and Echo or visit it’s website when I know there is better information elsewhere? In looking to maximise the paper sales, the Echo could potentially lose out on readers both on and offline.

[By the way, if you want to contact me with any links or aspects of this online case study I may have missed, or anything that may be interesting or relevant to the blog or, for whatever reason, you don't want to leave a comment, there's a contact form on the About Me page.]

[1] Assuming you can actually get onto Twitter – it’s having another bit of downtime/crash. Honestly, it’s more tempramental than all of my ex-girlfriends morphed into one.

[2] Anti-fascist campaigners may want to note the amount of Diggs BNP links are getting (and on Technorati as well).

Up to this point, I’d got what Seesmic did and how it could be used, but had no real wish to sign up, partly because this would involve exposing my face to the world and frankly I don’t want to crack anymore computer screens than necessary (I worked in radio for a reason, mmm’kay).

So, as a non-user, I’d only paused to consider how it could be used for PR and journalism purposes and had filed it somewhere in the back of my mind to explore at a later day. This has brought it back firmly to the forefront on my mind (note to self: remember to eat. This shouldn’t be done at the expense of food).

Creating an online buzz is just as important as traditional methods of PR these days and Seesmic could be an important part of this. The fanboy in me would love the chance to get to speak to some of my heroes, even just via video, and as a communication tool it feels a lot more personal than Twitter. Similarly, the chance to put a question direct in video to some of the top bods always quoted in press releases is very tempting, and opens up the company, personalising whatever is being promoted.

Similarly, it’s something any journalist should be looking at with interest. Video blogging is something I’ve always been a little bit skeptical on newspaper sites, but if there’s a conversation going on around a major, or interesting story… now that’s a little more like it. And the fact that many other users are posting comments in their pyjamas may loosen up hacks who’re not used to facing the camera. The potential for engaging directly with your audience is immense and could possibly do more than arbitrary video-for-video’s sake that many traditional media seem so fond of doing online.

Now all I’ve got to do is get beyond my utter dislike (not fear, just an extreme dislike) of seeing my face on screen before I hit the sign-up button.

Twitter’s tipping point, if not already here, is close to arriving. And that means both the company and PR Tweeters need to start sitting down and thinking out their respective strategies.

Firstly, here’s an example of how Innocent, a company that is usually pretty with it when it comes to social media, seems to have got Twitter a bit wrong. It’s a bit embarrassing when a government aide can work Twitter better than most companies. Usually this government is one of the last to leap on board new web projects and gets it hideously wrong in the process.

But Innocent’s misstep shows that in the age of social media, you can’t just stick out a press release or fire out updates. Perhaps that’s fine for a standard Web 1.0 website, or even a corporate blog. But if you’ve going to join Twitter then you’ve got to understand it’s a conversation not a lecture or an high-tech information pamphlet.

Whatever you’re promoting, you’ve got to be prepared to interact with your audience. You may even be promoting a brand that has lots of fans. But what’s in it for the fans if they’re just getting links or updates but no conversation? Other than the immediacy, why should that make Twitter any better than just sticking a regularly updated website into your RSS feeds.

Another side issue is brand v trust. Depending on how big the brand or event or whatever you’re publicising is, perhaps its worth having a trusted employee with an established Twitter presence on there. It’s a question I’m going to have to answer soon, with a football (sorry, can’t quite bring myself to write soccer) related bit of publicity for work. I’m getting plenty of football-related followers on my feed. Would they get annoyed or offended if I start using Twitter to publicise something I’m working on, or would it be more successful than if I launched a branded feed?

There’s also a fine line between PR on Twitter and spam. At what stage does targeting those who might be interested in your product cross the line and make your average user reach for the block button quicker than you can say tinyurl?

Finally, in Japan Twitter have started running adverts. As David North cautions, they need to handle this carefully, lest the company themselves cross that line into spam.

But for those Web 2.0 fans, and casual supporters, Twitter seems to be finally arriving. And now us in the media need to deal with it.

UPDATE: Ben Ayers asks if Downing Street has peaked on Twitter.

[A quick bit of background here, if you haven't just gone through and read his long piece. On the day of the July 7 bombings, Nosemonkey ended up liveblogging the event due to conflicting reports on news channels, plus the general sense of confusion that abound. It was, and still is, a great example of how blgging and/or citizen journalism can work and is possibly one of the best posts to emerge from the blogosphere].

What’s refreshing is his mixture of cynicism and enthusiasm for blogging. Much as I’m a proponent for all that is Web 2.0, it’s always useful to step back and ask: “So, we can do this. What is it actually achieiving?” In the case of social bookmarking especially it’s a great way to share stories (an update on cutting a story out of the newspaper and passing it onto a friend), find great content, and, for journalists, track what users believe to be important. Slow burning stories can also be picked up this way.

The best blogs too aren’t the ones that claim to be breaking the news or searching for bias, but the ones that have a genuine knowledge and passion for their subject (which is why I think niche sites will be the next big thing, internet wise this year).

And yes, in these cases they often surpass coverage in the traditional media because the blogger is more au fait with the subject than the journalist (assuming the blog isn’t already hosted on a major site). Other citizen journalism is more a case of being in the right place at the right time and happening to have a blog.

The concept of citizen journalism from a few years ago is probably near to vanishing. Those blogs that do, on occasions, break news stories, are largely well-known and well-staffed (and often pick up their sources from other blogs or websites, they just don’t bother running them through the laywers first). More often well-known bloggers use their site as a shop window and earn their corn thanks to their blog but not because of it.

But blogging is still a great medium, whether you’re running a personal blog for three or four friends, covering a niche topic, or attracting a large readership as an expert on the topic. It’s a great way of carrying on the conversation beyond the news article (which I still think should be kept as separate from comment as possible), can provide a great lead for a story, or a change to gauge the depth of feeling if you’re a journo or PR. It also makes it easier to pick up on errors of poor writing.

I’m still positive about the bloggersphere and Web 2.0 as both a journalism and a publicity medium, and it’s great to see the media embracing new trends and experimenting with them, a la Birmingham Post and delicious.

But it still doesn’t hurt to be cynical about the Web. For every trend that works, there’s half a dozen that the media will jump aboard only for it to be a less than stellar success. In some respects you could say the philosophy of scientific testing and paradigm shifts applies just as much to internet trends as it does to biochemistry and physics. Eventually the problems with citizen journalism or a Web 2.0 trend will collapse under the weight of all the problematic rocks that have been thrown at it.

I’m not quite sure what point or conclusion I’m trying to come to here, other than embrace Web 2.0 but also question why, how, and what you want to achieve at every step of the way.

[1] I emailed Nosemonkey with a similar request several years ago when I was doing a similar piece for my postgrad course. If I kept the post from the now defunct Coffee and PC, I’ll post it up here. It’d be interesting to see if his views have changed since then.

[Enters broken record mode] 

What was really fascinating was to hear how his views matched mine and, at times, was even more vehemently critical of the efforts of some local newspapers when it comes to online video [1].

Chief amongst his criticisms were:

1. The idea that throwing video online for the sake of throwing video online is a good way to win readers.

2. Journalists aren’t trained properly and are given sub-standard equipment, so produce sub-standard videos.

3. Sub-standard videos damage the brand.

4. Local journalists simply don’t have the time to produce consistent good quality web content.

This isn’t to say he was negative, and could point to some examples of papers within his group producing well-produced web content, be it video, podcasts, or blogging. But the frustration was there – it wasn’t that he didn’t want to do online content, its just the resources and time available were nowhere near enough.

What was somewhat more terrifying was the attitude of senior management to online content. There was no consistent approach to RSS feeds and he’d taken to putting the videos on YouTube himself because it hadn’t occurred to anybody else in the office to do so. Tellingly, the YouTube videos appeared to be getting more hits.

Then there was the inflexible CMS, not to mention the fact that nobody was even mentioning blogging. He’d considered trying to start a newspaper blog but didn’t have time, although he did occasionally expand some of his print articles. The management attitude to online media players such as Bebo, Google, and Myspace was nonexistent. While it’s not surprising to hear these criticisms coming from somebody who works within the industry (and is by no means representative. A more casual acquaintance is much more upbeat about their paper), it’s worrying. Even more worrying is hearing that those who have some nous about harnessing online potential are just giving up and moving elsewhere.

Tonight was definitely food for thought. There were a lot of positive ideas bandied around, as you’d expect over a few pints, but also a lot of frustration. It’s a shame for his paper that he’s moving elsewhere – he’s not just a very good journalist, but also one who’s willing to embrace the web and can see where the problems lie with local papers’ attempts to move into the digital age. 

[1] I’ll freely admit I’m writing from the point of somebody who has done a bit of this and a bit of that, which includes print and broadcasting, but am not currently working on the front line, as it were, of newspaper’s online efforts. 

Firstly, Paul Bradshaw’s extended piece on how local news is changing[1], which nicely sums up the challenges facing all media, but especially local media. There’s an especially pertinent point when he mentions Google’s Super Tuesday election mashup with Twitter and YouTube.

News, and news innovations, are no longer the sole preserve of traditional media companies and anybody going into the traditional end of the media, be it print or broadcast, needs to recognise the landscape has changed. The online startups and established brands may not always get their experiments right but it’ll only take one of them to hit upon an easy and popular idea and the whole industry could be playing catch up.

It doesn’t hurt to experiment with mapping, mashups, wikis, widgets, vodcasts, podcasts and, yes, even online video content and bulletins. The important part is remember not to do them for the sake of being able to do them, but thinking about how this will resonate with regular users of the website as well as drawing in new users and strengthening the brand online.

Getting it right isn’t an easy science and not every experiment will work. But in any media, be a national magazine or broadcaster, or a local paper or radio station, it’s vital to have somebody on board who is naturally interested in keeping track of Web 2.0 developments, like the Google/Twitter/YouTube mashup, and going: “Hey. We could adapt this for our readership.”

All of which brings me nicely to Roy Greenslade’s response to Bradshaw’s post, who also emphasises the need for investment and experimentation. His conclusions are spot on:

“Journalism is being reborn online and it requires total dedication.

It’s the failure of owners to recognise this fact that is holding back development. I applaud all the regional groups that have spent money on new kit. I am less willing to cheer them for viewing investment in kit as a substitute for investment in human beings. In this transitory stage, with papers being published on separate platforms, more staff are required.

If we want reporters to be innovative, to push the boundaries by finding new ways of engaging online audiences, then they must be given the time and space to experiment. Unless owners catch on, they may find people drifting off to non-newspaper websites.”

Finally, a slight tangent [2] from teacher Will Patterson aka J. Arthur McNumpty on teaching blogging in schools, but one that I’ll misappropriate towards journalistic endeavours.

Patterson’s main points – that blogging is a difficult thing to teach and there’s a danger of turning it into a chore; a weekly exercise – could just as easily be applied to teaching blogging to journalists or journalists-in-training.

There’s no question that journalism courses or training should include a significant element on utilising online journalism but it shouldn’t be taught as a series of tick boxes.

Most places I’ve worked, I’ve been an evangelist for blogging, encouraging colleagues to get online and get blogging. Similarly, during my postgraduate training we were required to set up a blog and update it at least every week.

The same problem quickly became apparent in both my evangelising and on the course. You got those who, for want of a better word, ‘got’ blogging and started posting on a regular basis. You got those who didn’t see the point and ended up posting nothing at all. And you got those who kind of understood that it was something they needed to know about but weren’t quite sure what to do with it, so ended up posting in a very formal structure, ticking all the boxes that were required but not saying anything very much and, ultimately and through no real fault of their own, not creating particularly interesting content. Many probably got fed up and joined the not bothered category.

Conclusion: You can take a journalist to a keyboard but you can’t make them blog.

I’m not going to pull out some wonder-solution to teaching blogging, or at least understanding blogging, because I’m not entirely sure how I’d go about it myself. Blogging’s partly about finding your own voice and in formalised settings its not always easy to do this.

The only way that immediately springs to mind, is a bit of coaxing towards storytelling behind the story by tapping into the enthusiasm for what the would-be-blogger was originally employed to do – journalism.

Some of the best posts I’ve seen have been from infrequent bloggers who’ve been out to a story or event and want to share what they’ve been to or seen, but are restricted by space in their traditional outlet. Hence turning to blogging to add depth and context to the story from a personal perspective – a little like an online version of From Our Own Correspondent.

If you’ve got somebody who’s genuinely excited by an aspect of their work, then employers should give them the online means to do this – it works much better than the formal: “This is a blog and this is how to blog.” It’s still probably nowhere near the best way to push media people into the Web 2.0 world, but it’s as good a starting point as any.

[1] A shorter version can be found at journalism.co.uk

[2] Via this week’s Britblog Roundup.

The short answer is obviously yes.

Gawker’s move shows why journalism schools up and down the country should be showing and encouraging their students to blog (although you can take a journalist-in-training to a keyboard, but like the proverbial horse and water, you cannot make them write), and why media organisations should be doing the same to their existing staff.

I can see plenty more blogs/journalism crossovers in the months (years ahead). There will still be a ‘them v us’ mentality from some quarters, but hopefully that’s becoming less common. Blogging won’t usurp journalism. Journalism, no matter how high a standard, won’t see off blogging. But the two can definitely find a happy medium.

What would be really interesting would be to see how attitudes to blogging have changed among the intakes on assorted journalism courses. Up until now, I’ve been if not quite a lone voice, then one of a very faint chorus singing the virtues of blogging in every job I’ve had. And even 18-or-so months ago, when I took my postgraduate diploma in journalism, the percentage of people who ‘got’ blogging was worryingly low, with the number of regular bloggers even lower. It’ll be interesting to see how the current intake view Web 2.0 (or 3.0, depending on where you see this being in. Shall we say 2.5 as a compromise?)

[1] Via Strange Attractor.