Making sense of social media

Twitter is the whipping boy of social media because it’s one of the most visible networks out there, so please bear with me once again while I talk about general trends using Twitter as an example.

A few people in the newsroom have expressed concerns about using Twitter. It’s too much noise and nonsense, too many people posting about what they had for breakfast or what their cats are doing to the curtains.

Certainly, if you look at Twitter as a whole, you’re going to find it to be full of crap. But looking at Twitter as a whole is about as useful as looking at the Internet as a whole. Let me put it another way; you don’t read the Internet for your news. You read CNN.com or Politico.

I can’t put it much better than former journalist and current media strategist Steve Yelvington, who responded thus to a post on Wired Journalists, an online community for reporters working in a digital age.

Social media looks messy and unrewarding if you view it as if it were mass media. But it’s not. That’s not how it’s consumed.

Social media includes social filtering.

For example: I don’t read Twitter. I follow a relatively small, carefully selected group on Twitter.

That group provides me not only with their thoughts, but also links to Web resources (including both social media and mainstream media).

I choose to follow those people because I find their thoughts interesting and because I trust their filtering; if they post nonsense, I stop following them. So the problem is self-correcting; my “friends” become my agents and actually help me decode the broader social media landscape.

Every person has a highly focused and highly individualized experience. This is especially true for users of Facebook and Twitter, but also for those who read blogs with the aid of RSS readers, other aggregators, or even bookmarks. You don’t read Blogger.com. You might read Newsosaur. The former is full of nonsense and even spam; the latter is highly focused.

It is a mistake to look at social media as new; it reflects the way people have been getting their information since the dawn of language in human society. We talk among ourselves. What is different is that the emerging technologies amplify certain aspects of this communication and remove certain boundaries (time and space).

A great way of looking at social media, if you ask me.

Related posts:

1. Dabblers go home; journalists need to be social media leaders
2. Richard Sambrook: Transparency is the new objectivity, and the Internet is not your enemy
3. Building a Twitter strategy
4. Washington Post columnist on why reporters should use Twitter
5. Got questions? Get them answered in a special media day version of Ask a Bobcat