Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

13 December 2011

Rumour management and Twitter #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Via crisisblogger.com comes a link to a Guardian feature on the role Twitter played in rumours about riots in London.

The site gives seven specific rumours and tracks the life-cycle of the rumour from inception to death.

From the Guardian:

A period of unrest can provoke many untruths, an analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests. But Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill.

This is a fascinating study that uses technology to help tell the story in a compelling way.

- srbp -

10 November 2011

The Age of Social Media

Twitter.

Facebook.

Social media.

All stuff for young people, right?

Wrong.

A new poll by Harris-Decima shows an increase in social media use among Canadians over the past two years, from 57% in a poll conducted two years ago to 68% in the latest survey.

The most significant growth came in the over-50 age bracket..  Only 39% of those over 50 had used social media in 2009.  But that number had climbed to 57% in the recent survey.

CTV carried a report on the poll by Canadian Press:

They're [the over-50s] getting more comfortable online," Mike Leahy, senior Harris-Decima vice-president, said in reference to older Canadians.

"My impressions are that they are communicating with different generations, who are very active in social media."

Facebook is the most commonly used type social media.  All but three percent of respondents had used Facebook.  Only two percent of respondents used Twitter in 2009 but 25% of respondents used Twitter in the most recent survey.

That parallels a survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Institute in August:

The frequency of social networking site usage among young adult internet users under age 30 was stable over the last year – 61% of online Americans in that age cohort now use social networking sites on a typical day, compared with 60% one year ago. However, among the Boomer-aged segment of internet users ages 50-64, social networking site usage on a typical day grew a significant 60% (from 20% to 32%).

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and co-author of the report. “While seniors are testing the waters, many Baby Boomers are beginning to make a trip to the social media pool part of their daily routine.”

- srbp -

08 November 2011

Dunderdale in tweet debate with opposition leader… or was she? #nlpoli

CBC has a story online about a Twitter exchange that supposedly took place between Premier Kathy Dunderdale and opposition leader Yvonne Jones.

One small problem:  is it really Kathy Dunderdale and Yvonne Jones?  Sure the Dunderdale tweets have all the arrogance of the Premier, but can anyone be really sure it’s Kathy herself?

And what about Jones:  Is it really her tweets?

You see it’s not like Dunderdale’s twitter account hasn’t sputtered out some odd tweets along the campaign trail, the kind of curious spellings that would make you very suspicious about whether or not Dunderdale is really clicking her thumbs for the account.

Someone toss up a picture of Dunderdale typing her own tweets and we can put this one to bed. Assurances from her publicity department – the people most likely to be ghost-tweeting for her, along with her personal aide – just won’t cut it.  Some enterprising young reporter should have a go at Dunderdale in a scrum.

Otherwise, let’s keep a healthy dose of scepticism about Dunderdale’s use of technology. After all, it’s not like there haven’t been a string of ghostwritten tweets that have popped up in the news and that’s from people a lot more tech savvy than Dunderdale:

As for the subject matter for the exchange – Muskrat Falls – Kathy Dunderdale (or her fake Tweeter) is the last person who should be talking about other people’s ignorance.

-srbp -

28 October 2011

New technology and medicine

Via kevinmd.com, an article by medical student Alex Chamessian on how he uses his iPad as part of his education:

I’ve tried to incorporate iPad into patient care and education as much as possible.

One salient example is from my recent pediatrics rotation. Our team cared for a newborn who was showing signs of what appeared to be benign neonatal sleep myoclonus. The baby’s mother was very disturbed by the sight of her new (and first) daughter contracting during her sleep. When I was presenting this case on rounds, I pulled up a Youtube video of benign neonatal sleep myoclonus and showed it to the parents and the rest of my team. When the mom saw the video of someone else’s baby twitching like her own, she was reassured that her daughter’s condition was fairly common and of little concern. Likewise, the rest of my team, which included residents, medical students, nurses and attendings, got a better view of what benign sleep myoclonus looks like. This particular experience showed me the great power that iPads and similar technology can have at the bedside.

Accessing medical records is also a big part of patient care. Most patient information is electronic at Duke and we have a dedicated system for managing that info. With the Citrix receiver program, I can tap into our EMR system via my iPad. This ability has been most useful on rounds. There have been several times where key patient labs were still pending at the time when we started rounding. With my iPad, I’m able to periodically check for lab values; more than a few times, I’ve been spared from having to omit lab values in my presentation because I was able to retrieve them while on foot.

You can check his own blog – Dr. Willbe – for the continuing adventures of a medical student.  Take the time.  It’s well written.

- srbp -

27 September 2011

The Twitter Conundrum #nlpoli #nlvotes

Kathy Dunderdale sends messages using Twitter.

Herself.

Using her own two hands.

Someone who has spent about 60 years in this province -  give or take – and who has been a prominent municipal and provincial politician before being yanked out of pseudo-retirement to become Premier should know how to spell  the names of places in the province.

We are not talking Quirpon here.

We are talking the lush agricultural valley on the province’s west coast or as Kathy tweeted it this morning:

dundertweet

Cod Roy.

Two words.

Maybe she thought she was logging into the multiplayer version of Call of Duty using Danny’s leftover screen ID.

Maybe she was so overcome by the beauty of that part of the island that she fancied herself a Scottish-Newfoundland freedom fighter.

Maybe she thought she was the king of the fish.

Or maybe – and we are just just spit ballin’ here – Kathy doesn’t write her own tweets.

Maybe she has someone following her around, Crackberry in hand ready to spit out something from her boss to make it look like the amazingly transformed KD herself is telling us about yet another “beautiful” place she has been in the “beautiful” province in order meet all the “great’ people after her morning “run”.

Yes, folks, it is the Twitter conundrum.

The brand new image the nice advertising people invented for you demands you send twitter messages even if you couldn’t be bothered and so the campaign or the Premier’s Office sticks some junior joe or jane with the job all the while praying that joe or jane doesn’t blow away the cool facade by tweeting garbage.

Either that or Kathy herself had to consciously insert a space and push the shift key a second time on her computer or Crackberry to transform “Codroy” into two words both starting with capitals. The simple typo would be the errant extra space, after all.  Whoever typed that thought it was two separate words.

Which is more likely?

You decide.

- srbp -

20 August 2011

Twitter Psychology Insight

Via the always insightful Neville Hobson, came a link to a wonder little diagram that summarises the results o a recent survey of Twitter users.

You can find Neville’s post at the bizarrely named nevillehobson.com.

And you can find the original at whitefireseo.com.

Twitter-Psychology-for-Marketers

For those who are tweeting during the election campaign, see if any of these insights match up to what you see in real life. 

Don’t just look for the positives, that is the people who are obviously applying these ideas even if they never heard of them before.

Look at the people who might be running against the tide and judge their performance.  Are they succeeding or failing?

- srbp -

26 July 2011

Plastic, packaged and preaching to the choir

While some people may be excited about the fact that all three party leaders in the province are on Da Twitter, a close look at how political parties in newfoundland and Labrador are using, or not using social media, shows that there is a lot less here than meets the eye.

NTV aired two stories last week about social media and the upcoming provincial election.  Your humble e-scribbler is in both, along with local blogger and former candidate Stephen Eli Harris.  The first piece – here – started from the news that Kathy Dunderdale is the first Premier to use Twitter. The second one – here – built off the fact that the provincial government’s energy corporation is also using Twitter as part of its campaign to gain support for its Muskrat Falls megadebt project.

Do a quick Internet search and you will find plenty of commentary and analysis on the Obama campaign and social media.  Some of the more interesting assessments compare how the republican and Democrat campaigns in 2008 differed.  The Republicans preached to the choir.  That is they used social media as a way of speaking to people who were already committed Republicans or who were leaning heavily that way.

The Democrats used social media as a way of tapping into a large pool of swing voters, alienated voters and independents. The used social media to draw potential voters to core materials and give them plenty of options to take action in support of the campaign.

Both strategies are built around the basic point that social media offer some pretty potent ways to reach voters who are now tuned in a great many places besides television, radio and the local newspaper.

In the upcoming provincial election, you will see that the Conservatives have a heavy Twitter presence. The New Democrats are using it and some Liberals have discovered that it exists.

The more important thing to notice is the content.  The Conservatives tend to spout their talking points or spit out meaningless pap about getting a haircut. The New Democrats tend to retweet campaign news from the party president or leader.  In short, they are packaged, plastic and preaching to the choir. 

One exception that stands out: Jerome Kennedy, with this tweet:

"the harmonies of new floods", "the thunder of insentient seas", "eternal pathways of fire"- E.J. Pratt's "Newfoundland". Required reading.

The dunderdale2011.ca website doesn’t have any sign of an effort to attract supporters, engage them and turn them into activists.  Sure, there’s a “Get Involved” button but it takes you to some sterile text:

There are many ways you can get involved in our Party.

In the lead-up to the general election campaign in October 2011, you may choose to volunteer with your local district association in support of your Progressive Conservative candidate.

You may wish to serve with Young Progressive Conservatives, the Progressive Conservative Women’s Caucus or the provincial campaign.

If you wish to get involved as a volunteer, please contact our Party office:  blah blah blah

This is not about pulling people in and turning them into activists.  This is a website about pushing information out, most likely to people who are already converts.  And if you think about it in light of the leadership controversy earlier this year,  that’s basically the way the party runs.

Ditto for  the NDP website.  For starters it’s just a sub-page from the national NDP site.  The buttons that look like ways to get involved are just e-mail forms to fill out so somebody can contact you later.  The Twitter button takes you to the leader’s feed.  As this is written on Monday evening, the last update was 24 hours earlier.

They’ve got a map of where they have candidates for the election.  That’s right above a list of nominated candidates:  14 as of July 25. The individual candidate web pages are pretty bare.  There’s not much there beyond some basic biographical information.

Ditto ditto the Liberal website.  it hasn’t been updated in a couple of months.  if you click the “where we stand” button you will find the party constitution.  No sign of a platform or policies. The news page is up-to-date with releases as recently as Monday. 

That’s the one clue on this website that there’s an election on.  There is a link to something called candidate nominations but it is a pdf of candidate profiles and pictures.  It’s out of date, to boot.

Of course, that’s pretty much consistent with political parties that aren’t interested in drawing in new supporters based on a platform aimed at voter interests.  As your humble e-scribbler noted for NTV, you are going to have a hard time sliding a sheet of paper between the parties on major issues. The one thing they will all have in common is a commitment to spend gobs of public cash:  pork is the priority. Likewise, for all parties – but especially the current incumbent Tories, it will be yet more  paternalism.

Local political parties all practice a form of defensive politics that involves a combination of preaching to the people they already have while repeating whatever it is the other guys have been doing that worked before.  The more aggressive forms of the defence – like the Tories in 2007 – also use heavy doses of Republican-style attack politics to suppress the opponents.  It can work spectacularly well.

Well, sort of.  The 2007 Tories won a landslide of seats but they actually didn’t get any more votes.  What they managed to do was demoralise the Liberals whose lacklustre campaign couldn’t draw anyone out.  The Liberal vote collapsed and that made it easy for the Tories to pick up seats.

But the Tories actually got fewer votes in 2007 than they did in 2003.

That isn’t what you may think if you only listened to the superficial media reports that did nothing more than repeat the intensive hype coming from the Tory camp.

The current Tory strategy is essentially a pledge for more of the same. For the campaign, that seems to mean yet more of the same but without the small-minded, vicious personal attacks that were Danny Williams’ stock in trade.

Other than that, there’s nothing really new in their campaign at all. Social media could let voters see real people and let that personality energise the campaign. Instead, they get some cross between Max Headroom and Johnny Cab.

Don’t be surprised if the parties have to struggle to get their voters to the polls.  The Tories are almost certain to face that problem. The other two parties don’t stand much of a chance at pulling new voters to their cause and they too will work to get the same people to the polls again.  Some individual campaigns might stand out but at the provincial level, the campaigns are pretty much brain dead.

And growth isn’t really what they are doing even if, as with the New Democrats, they are claiming that miracles are about to happen.  Consider that for all the hype, the Dippers only have 14 candidates in place.  That’s roughly the same number as the Liberals. None of them has a name or a profile outside of their own community or in some cases outside their own household.

For parties trying to take down an incumbent government, social media should be the tool of choice. What’s so interesting about the current election campaign and social media is that neither political party in the province is doing anything but using the new, revolutionary tools, to spit out more of the same old anti-revolutionary crap.

At this point, that’s the story of social media and the 2011 election.

-srbp -

17 March 2011

Kelly wins in Corner Brook

Gary Kelly won the by-election for Corner Brook City council polling 987 votes.  He topped a field of five candidates.

He ran a campaign with a significant presence in the social media and took to the streets of Corner Brook with his sign in hand, greeting pedestrians and waving to motorists. His effort was often the talk of the city throughout the campaign, and Wednesday evening the results proved its worth.

Expect to hear more about this guy in the future.

- srbp -

25 November 2010

Crowd-sourcing the news

From Mashable:

On the social web, investigative journalists are tapping citizens to take part in the process by scouring documents and doing shoe-leather reporting in the community. This is advantageous because readers often know more than journalists do about a given subject, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.

The rest of this article is well worth the few minutes it will take to read it.  If you want to spot a media trend with huge implications, this is it.

h/t @prsarahevans

- srbp -

15 November 2010

Un-publishing

No, it isn’t like uncommunication.

The Canadian Association of Journalists has a new draft set of guidelines on correcting online information and dealing with requests to remove online material. CAJ handed the job of drafting the guidelines to an “unpublishing panel” of the CAJ ethics committee.

You can find an excellent summary of the issues involved at j-source.ca.

Here are the basic principles CAJ is proposing for how to handle requests to unpublish a particular post.  Again, there is a more detailed discussion at j-source.ca along with an explanation of each point.

  1. We [the online publisher] are in the publishing business and generally should not unpublish.
  2. Ongoing accuracy is our responsibility.
  3. Put a clear policy in place.
  4. Unpublish for the right reasons.
  5. It’s fair to be human.
  6. Source remorse is not a right reason to unpublish.
  7. Unpublish by consensus.
  8. Explain your unpublishing policy.
  9. Help sources understand the implications of digital publishing.
  10. Consider the impact of publishing before publication.

- srbp -

30 October 2010

The Rally for Sanity and/or Fear

From Forbes online comes the story of how the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear started:

“Right after I made the post, some other reddit [sic] guys created the Colbert Rally web site,” Laughlin told me in an interview. “That inspired all of the Facebook groups.”Although growing on the web at a fast pace, the idea existed in its infancy across multiple fan pages across Facebook as support for Laughlin’s conception of a rally, but no immediate plans to make it happen. “Colbert’s staff was on a week-long break when the post first went crazy. Me and other Reddit users were brainstorming ways to get the show’s attention.”

After some Googling around, Laughlin discovered that Colbert sat on the board of directors for online charity DonorsChoose.org, where donations can be made to one of multiple charitable projects chosen by the donor (hence the name). “We thought that if we could get a bunch of Reddit users to do a big charity bomb,” having thousands of users donate money simultaneously while others publicized the cause behind the mass donations, “we could get his attention.”  attn.  [sic] In the first 48 hours, over $200,000 in donations were made.

- srbp -

22 January 2010

Twitterpating

1.  For those of you interested in social media trends, consider a post by Gerald Baron at Crisisblogger on the future of Twitter. Baron links to two different points of view:  one that Twitter will die, the other that it won’t.  Both offer food for thought and Baron gives his own perspective.  He thinks Twitter itself may fade but the concept will continue in other forms and through other software.

As Baron puts it:

What Twitter brought was the integration of various forms of instant communication including micro-blogging, text messaging, seamless distribution via web, email, text, etc. It has proven to be a highly effective means of instant communication with groups of people with whom you wish to communicate, or to audiences who have an intense desire to know what you have to say or track your every move (ala Ashton Kutcher). But, as I predicted, that functionality of exceptionally easy and fast distribution of messages to “friends” or people who connect via a network is rapidly be adopted in a variety of ways.

2.   In the same spirit, consider this New York Times article from last August – linked here previously – that indicated twitter is actually popular among an older demographic than the under-25s most people might assume are heavily into sending messages of no more than 140 characters.

3.   One of the reasons you’ll find Twitter feeds on the Haiti crisis linked in the right-hand nav bar is that it does give the opportunity to get some near real-time information from Haiti via reporters on the ground. There are tons of ways of getting that information, but here is just one more for you to chose among. if you look at the ones chosen, you can also see the radically different styles of the individuals writing. That adds a flavour to the coverage that doesn’t necessarily come across another way.

4.  You of the characteristics you can also see in the feed that these individuals are also having conversations with folks who may or may not be readers/viewers. Some are offering feedback on the coverage. Others are asking questions about what is going on in Haiti. Some of this stuff wouldn’t get reported otherwise.

5.  In the larger sense what you are seeing in near-real time feeds is a whole new form of information gathering and dissemination. Conventional news media are letting their people on the ground do much more than bang out copy and file it.  They are offering a way for the audience to become more directly connected with the news event.  In another sense, the audience is becoming connected not just to the event but to the news organization and the reporter in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously.  There are a raft of implications and there could be a whole blog/conversation devoted just to the many permutations of what this may do to the face of reporting. For now let’s just take it in as the whole thing unfolds.

-srbp-