Here are five don’ts and five dos for how media companies should use social media, as suggested by Media Helping Media.

This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run by David Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

Traditional media’s attitude to social networking is evolving with varying results. Some harness the opportunities offered, while others refer to ‘social media’ with a condescending ‘and finally’ tone that suggests they are out of touch with their audience.

The five don’ts

1: Don’t appear out of touch

Never refer to social networking as a new phenomenon in your copy, bulletins, studio discussions or in a piece-to-camera and live radio spots. A large part of your audience is using Twitter and Facebook and increasingly turning to them and other sites as their primary sources of information. Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility.

• Your failure to grasp this will lose you credibility

2: Don’t call it new media or new technology

It’s not new. Using terms such as ‘new media’ makes it sound as though you are ‘old media’ and lagging behind. The term was okay towards the end of the last century, but you should be part of a converged news operation delivering content to whatever platform/device the user turns to in order to access information. If you are, then it is part and parcel of that. If you are not, then you should be.

• If you keep calling it new you will come across as old

3: Don’t leave it to your online team

Or worse still a junior member of staff to manage and monitor. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination strategy. All your journalists should be using tools such as TweetDeck to monitor what people are saying and to discover stories. Take it seriously or you may soon find you are no longer taken seriously.

• Twitter, Facebook and other social networks should be an integral part of your newsgathering and news dissemination

4: Don’t snigger

Never let presenters refer to stories that involve social networking with that ‘and finally’ tone or that condescending, knowing nod and smile, as if it is all a bit of a joke. It could come across as patronising or (even worse) disconnected, distant and judgemental. Get some of your more connected correspondents (and there are loads around) to educate the studio presenters and some of the less connected producers. Those in the field often get it because they are rubbing shoulders with the audience on a daily basis and understand the significance of the changing audience behaviour; they also know, first hand, how your news organisation is being perceived.

• Don’t take pride in adopting a patronising, disconnected, distant and judgemental tone

5: Don’t miss the story

Remember that the number and speed of tweets on an issue is a story in itself, and you can run that story even before you have been able to verify what is being said with the usual two independent sources. Simply reflecting the activity and taking the time to follow a few tweets in order to sample the diversity of perspectives and opinions will enrich your news coverage. If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news.

• If you ignore this phenomenon you will be ignoring news

The five dos

1: Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

Remember you can tweet facts, you don’t need long, complex concepts. Tweet about things that your news organisation can confirm have happened as soon as the confirmation is in. You just need the facts in a short sentence. Subject, verb, object – send. The social network audience feeds off facts (and other stuff), and it is taking those facts to another place (their preferred social networks) where they add their own context and analysis by interacting with their friends (rather than sitting in front of a TV or radio or clicking through your webpages or thumbing through your newspaper/magazine pages). Always add a short URL if the story is supported by an article or audio & video online.

• Tweet your own news as soon as it is verified

2: Take a gift with you

If you are going to gatecrash the social network party offer something that those who tweet will value. Your best offering is facts from stories where you are ‘digging where others don’t’ or in the category of ‘had it not been for you the world would never have known’. They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites, broadcast networks or newspapers. Originality is the key. Tweet facts that they can’t get elsewhere. Automate your feeds through to Facebook and Twitter to provide a steady stream of content for social networks to feed off.

• They won’t thank you for regurgitating the wires and throwing up a slightly modified version of what is running on 100 sites

3: Change your tools

Think differently about the way you set up the desktop for your journalists. If they can only surf the net and browse the wires some may limit themselves to that window on the world – and your news offering will reflect that limitation. You need to observer, evaluate and, where appropriate, integrate the social network chatter and make sense of it in a way that informs the public debate and broadens perspectives. Also encourage your journalists to engage in conversations when they find a story, rather than just feed off what is already there.

• You need to integrate the social network chatter into the tools your journalists use

4: Widen your contacts

Start to build up a new contacts file of those hundreds of thousands of (free) stringers who are filing copy (that’s the stuff of headlines) free of charge 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year. (Imagine organising a rota for that — the work flow implications are mind blowing, let alone the staff costs). So enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known voices who may no longer have the connection with changing audience behaviour.

• Enlist those who are tweeting, and don’t always turn to the known and overused experts

5: Embrace, hug and welcome back

Find ways of bringing the social network experience back into your news production process, and not just as a token nod and wink, but as a serious reflection of how both you and the audience are changing. Those tweeting may have taken your facts away with them to their preferred social networking space to discuss with their friends, but in doing so, they and their contacts will add their own value to the growing story. Be sure to invite them back, and find ways of sharing that enhanced understanding and feeding it back into the system so the richness of knowledge and experience and the diversity of perspectives is available for all.

• Social networking is a reflection of how the audience is changing – ignore it at your peril

See how others are doing it

Check out the Facebook sites for CNN, BBC News, the Wall Street Journal and other leading news organisations.
Look at how many followers they have. Check the number of times stories are commented on and discussed in the Facebook environment.

And look at all the automated links offering a direct route back to the media organisation. Next, check their presence on Twitter.

Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic; it’s a no brainer.

• Free social networking tools offer viral dissemination, engage the audience where they want to be engaged, and providing return traffic.

The ‘broadcast/publish at’ model died years ago. The ‘engage with on our terms’ model is in its death throes. Now it’s about ‘participate in’ and empowerment. Those traditional media organisations that move to this model qucikly may have more chance of surviving.

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Check also out the following resources from Media Helping Media:

• Social media kitbag for journalists
• Top sites for journalists

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This post has been republished from Media Helping Media under Creative Common Licence. Media Helping Media is an excellent site dedicated to offer free training resources for media in transition states. It is run byDavid Brewer, an experienced journalist and media strategist.

The service of Alexa.com frequently is used to get an indication of which sites are most popular in different countries. Here are two top 20 lists for Norway, registered three years apart. Check the differences.

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My colleague Espen Grimmert, digital marketing director and SEO expert at the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, checked the Alexa list for Norway three years ago when he gave a presentation for managers about the latest web trends in our country. His point at the time was to make the newspaper managers aware of how they faced online competition from a number of international brands. In Aftenposten he would show how the relatively unknown piczo.no – a social media site for children – seemed to attract more traffic than our own news site.

This weekend he copied the list again, exactly three years after the first one. And although Alexa for sure doesn’t give exact data for a small market like Norway, there are some interesting changes to be noted:

• Social media sites are rising. Facebook was not even on the list three years ago and is now the second most visited site in Norway. Other social media sites on the rise include Youtube, Wikipedia and blogging platforms like Google’s blogger.com and the local blogg.no. Also note number 10, Nettby, a social network run by the VG news site. Nettby is extremely popular among teenagers in Norway. Twitter, however, is not on the list. But it should be there soon: The microblog site is now number 21!
• Newspaper sites are still strong, but falling slightly.  These include vg.no, dagbladet.no and aftenposten.no. Another, the online newspaper Nettavisen.no, has dropped out of the list. Still, there is hardly any country in the world where local newspaper sites are used as much as in Norway.
• Portal and catalogue sites are also falling. These include Startsiden.no, sol.no and gulesider.no. Also Norway’s version of Craigslist, the highly successful Finn.no, has dropped a few places.
• Google remains on the top as the most used web site in Norway.
• All in all, despite competition from international players, locally owned sites remain very strong in this market.

As I already have pointed out, Alexa data should be taken as a tough estimate rather than an exact list. The official measurements from TNS would be much more accurate for the local sites. But I still think these three-year changes may reflect some trends that are noteworthy.

Social media activities have grown exponentially over the last few years. This amazing application gives you a live count of the activities right now.

I was taken back when I came across this social media counter.  It has been made by Gary Hayes, director of the Australian Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, and was published on this blog Personalize Media.

As Gary encourages other sites to embed his live counter, I have included it here for you to enjoy. As you will see, it gives a dynamic count of social media activities globally.

Here are some of the social media trends that are taking place in 2009.

Illustration: Matt Hamm

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What will happen in the social media during this year? A number of bloggers have tried to identify the most important trends. This is an attempt to summarize some of them. Many more could – and probably should – have been mentioned.

1. Social networks are integrating with each other

Users are getting tired of registering for and maintaining profiles on numerous social communities.  They want to migrate their profile from one network unto another.  And they are right: Why should we need to upload the same profile photo again and again?

We have seen a number of efforts to bring the social networks together, including OpenID, Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook Connect.  In addition there are services like FriendFind aggregating all your activities on different platforms.

This trend will be much stronger in 2009.  Large as well as small players will realize they cannot operate in isolation from other social networks. Rather they will join the efforts to connect the networks to make it easier for the users, creating a portable social graph.

2. More people build their online personal brand

The size and quality of your social network matters – and is an integrated part of building a personal brand. Social communities offer users tools to create a powerful network. More people will invest time in building this network, both in number and quality of connections. This will largely take place independently from employers; in fact many will develop a professional authority through blogging and twittering which will offer them new opportunities with competing employers.

3. Social networks will gain momentum as marketing tool

In fact, consumers will demand corporate social media presence.  Successful companies will Twitter, keep professional blogs, maintain fan pages on Facebook, upload videos of their products on YouTube or otherwise use viral marketing to reach out their customers wherever they decide to spend their time.

4. More tools will help users to avoid information overload

You are following 1378 people on Twitter, have 356 friends on Facebook and connect to 76 other people on Flickr.  So how do you keep up with it? The information flow is just overwhelming. We need help! And we will get it. We will see a number of news tools making it easier to manage all the information.

ReadWriteWeb gives some examples of tools: Google Reader Add-inn, auto-categorization tools, more friend synchronization tools and friend lists sanitizers.

5. More social networking will go mobile

Most large social networks provide a mobile version. Yet 2009 might be the first year using the mobile phone for social networking really take hold.  Probably we will see some popular and neat applications spreading quickly.

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Additional reading:

• “Social Media Trends 2009″ from TrendsSpotting
• “5 Meta Trends Shaping 2009 Social Media Predictions” from Criskenton
• “Six Social Media Predictions for 2009″ from Spinfield.
• “7 Social Media Predictions” from Socialnomics
• “Yet Another 2009 Social Media Trends List” from Speak Media Blog
• “5 International Social Networks to Keep an Eye on” from CNET

It is web historic: In November YouTube had more searches from U.S. users than Yahoo.

We told you one month ago that YouTube was about to pass Yahoo as the second largest “search engine”.  Now it has happened. According to the November rankings from Comscore the former dominant search engine, Yahoo, now receives fewer searches than video site YouTube.

In November a total of 18,06 million searches were registered in the American market. Of these, Google received 7,98 million, YouTube 2,79million and Yahoo 2,59 million.

That is the first time YouTube receives more searches than Yahoo.

One might now ask whether YouTube may in fact become the next Google.

- Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense, ReadWriteWeb points out.

There are some interesting data in the latest report from Comscore: YouTube is just about to pass Yahoo as the secondly most used search engine in the USA.

In October 2,7 billion searches were made through Yahoo compared to 2,6 billion searches on YouTube, according to the numbers from Comscore. This type of data has made some observers ask whether YouTube will be the next Google.

Google received 8,2 billion searches in the same period. It is still an overwhelming dominance. And being the owner of YouTube, Google for sure is not worried about the success of the video site.

Overall both Google and Yahoo are increasing their market share, while other companies are losing.

Interestingly Yahoo keeps a leading position in Japan with a 51 percent market share, according to another report from Comscore.

Comscore points out that 340 million searchers conducted nearly 29 billion searches in the Asia- Pacific region in September, ranking the region higher than both America and Europe.

Barack Obama brings the presidency into the online world. His weekly addresses to the nation will no longer only be broadcast on radio, but also as a video message on YouTube and other social communities.
Here is the first YouTube addresss of a president to be, recorded on November 15th, 2008:

Many expressions are used to describe the online policy of the new president, such as “Fireside Chat 2.0″ and “the YouTube president”.

Barack Obama’s channel on YouTube – with almost 2000 videos uploaded -is already extremely popular – and the first weekly address (above) had been viewed almost 500.000 times only a day after it was published. It certainly is an indication that more people will be watching the president’s speeches than ever before, as ReadWriteWeb points out.

An interesting detail: The option for users to comment on the weekly address video has been disabled on the YouTube video.  Is it an indication of the huge challenges the new presidents office will have in managing the online presence?

In any case – distributing the weekly address on YouTube certainly is a strong symbol of change, Mr. Obama’s main buzz word.