Communicat.us

Major news outlets are leveraging social media sites for both getting news as it happens out as well as finding the next breaking story. There is both risk and reward to this phenomenon.

Let me preface the rest of this as being a shorter post that planned because I wrote the longer one and my editor crashed (ARGH).

The prompt for this post was the closing credit on the NBC Nightly News podcast. (For the curious, I get most of my news through various internet channels but I still like the capsulated format of the National Evening News. I just don’t like having to drop everything to watch the broadcast at a fixed time.) recently, NBC added a graphic to the end of the news to indicate they are on Twitter, Facebook, and support SMS.

News agencies have adopted the various social media as alternative channels to reach their audience (micro blogging breaking news, streaming video of extended features, etc.). More and more, they are also monitoring these channels for the next big story. The risk to "sourcing" from public social media is "verification". Ideally, all sources are vetted and corroborated, but it’s easy to cut corners in an attempt to scoop the story. It’s risky to get a story wrong. It’s far riskier to make business or security decisions.

There are two common methods of confirming data – authenticated sources (having security credentials and requiring a login to post content) or authoritative sources (building trust over time). Both mechanism have merit. However, controlling the credentials of all users, limits the scope of the user population. This is fine for a private solution but excludes the large data pools generated by public social media services. An alternative is to use analytics on the social media data to create a level of trust …

• how many different sources are reporting the same event
• what medium is used (micro blogging vs video vs SMS)
• what past traffic have the sources reported
• who "follows" the source
• what else is known about the sources
• etc

Monitoring the social media streams and analyzing the content goes far in established a level of credibility in the information. While there is risk in gathering information from unauthenticated sources, there is also great value assuming it is not trusted without verification.

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I was in a discussion last week regarding the cost / benefit of blogs. The original point made was this …

The problem we have today is how to filter out the noise. Computers and especially the internet have made it possible for the billions of people to make a whole lot of noise. Before the Internet, only a few people made noise and only a few at a time. Information came from books, magazines, newspapers, and Television. Today, with the rise of social networking, blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. the signal to noise ration has dropped to near zero.

How do you justify the time spent looking at these sites on the random chance there will be something of value ?

I agree that there are lots of blogs published by individuals and somewhat less published by groups such as this blog. There are far more blogs than I will ever discover, let alone consume. Further, there are many that would be highly valuable to the work I do and yet I have not found them, and may never find them. Of the blogs I have found, they are a diverse spectrum, running the spectrum of mostly business or topical content to mostly personal content. How do I get to the information I need ? I read blogs like people read the newspaper 20 years ago.

Before mass access to the Internet, news was brought together from many sources, formatted with a title, introductory paragraph, and then a detailed article. The “USA Today” was the evolution of the model, making scanning of the newspaper a quick five minute activity over a cup of coffee or on a commuter train. Of an entire newspaper, the average reader might scan 80% of the titles, read 10% of the overviews, and only a small number of full articles. Readers of the Wall Street Journal chose that newspaper for it’s more focused content and as such, the hit rates might have been somewhat higher.

Blogs are much like sections of the newspaper. Different blogs have different authors and those authors specialize their content. When you add a number of blogs together, you have something comparable to a newspaper. The big difference is the reader decides the sources of content and not an editor in chief.  So, how do you build this personal newspaper ?

A feed reader or “aggregator” lets the reader choose the sources and decide on the layout and amount of content provided. There are even internet services such as FeedJournal to make the experience just like a newspaper (without the advertizing flyers). The trick (or challenge) is in finding the content.

Readers find blog content by trial and error but this is no different than finding content 20 years ago. The only difference is in how much content there is to find. The Internet has made much more content available. Fortunately, the Internet has also made it much faster to sort through all of that content. Better still is that the ratios between pre-Internet and today for content vs search and filter are in the reader’s favor. It takes very little effort to subscribe to new content, reduce the low value material, eliminate the no-value material, and filter to fit your available time and interests.

If you treat reading blogs and other published internet content much like the newspaper, it is a quick and easy way to stay updated on information relevant and of interest to “you.”

FYI – we’ll tackle the questions “Why should I blog ?” and “Why should I let my workers blog ?” in a future post.