20 Reasons Why Twitter Matters to Media Organisations

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian Editor in Chief, has outlined 15 reasons why Twitter is important. I have listed them below and then added 5 other reasons. I’ll add more as I think of them.

1. It helps with distribution of news.
2. It is often the source of breaking news.
3. It can often outdo Google when it comes to search.
4. It is a formidable aggregation tool.
5. It is a great reporting tool – for both finding information and asking the crowd.
6. It is great for marketing and letting people involved in your content know that it is there.
7. It is a series of common conversations with instant feedback
8. It is diverse environment.
9. It is opening up a new tone of writing – brief but humourous, succinct and more personal.
10. It levels the playing field – hard work is rewarded.
11. It has different values – a story may make in all the nationals but have little Twitter impact, and vice-versa.
12. It has a long attention span – conversations around a topic can last for ages.
13. It creates communities.
14. It changes notions of authority.
15. It is an agent of change.

And here are my additions:

1. You can follow events as they unfold – any news event will be given a hashtag and you can easily find help from the eyes on the ground.
2. It allows you to be in several places at once.
3. It encourages serendipity – you stumble across ideas and people that will completely change your opinions and direction.
4. You can contact people directly – and it is much more likely you will get a response.
5. It is perfect for finding the exact person you are loooking for – not to mention the possibilities in Geo-Tagging.

List of the 100 Most Influential News Media Twitter Accounts

I have created a list which contains the 100 most influential news media Twitter accounts.

This isn’t just a list from some social media guru – it is based on a Cornell University study into what makes an account influential, a study conducted to the highest standards of scientific standards.

The study is based on how much traffic a tweeted URL received. To read more check out the paper here.

*At present there are a lot of American news accounts – so I may have to remove some of them if they clutter up the stream.

Hope this is useful…

http://twitter.com/#!/list/oliconner/influential-news-media

 

Storify – The Evolution of Blogging

With such an abundance of information flying at us from around the web, the role of the curator is becoming increasingly important.

A curator is responsible for helping a clear narrative emerge from all the noise. They find the important parts and pull them together to create a compelling experience.

As blogging platforms have evolved they have increasingly  helped willing curators easily save and present content, allowing them to create highly engaging content for their readers.

Tumblr in particular has recently blossomed as a curating platform.

The easy to use blogging platform has attracted some of the top news organisations. They are finding content from across the web and using Tumblr to create an informal, human and social ‘scrapbook’ (Newsweek and TotalFilm are two excellent examples).

Storify is the next step in the evolution of blogging platforms.

Designed to enable curators to pull what people post on social networks into a compelling story – it allows a user to seamlessly pull video, photos or tweets into a single Storify story.

After playing around with it my initial thoughts are that it would be excellent for creating a story on any event that is being tweeted.

A curator can watch an event unfold on Twitter (by simply following a hashtag from within Storify) and drag and drop noteworthy tweets into a Storify story.

They can add text comments at any point, easily input any relevant links/images/videos/updates, give the story a headline and summary, and then embed the story on a website.

It is quick, easy and intuitive (key ingredients for any popular publishing platform) and destined for large scale adoption.

ReadWriteWeb have already demonstrated its potential by publishing an interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams.

For more excellent examples check out the Storify blog. And to gain access to the beta use this code TCDISRUPT

A New Way to Analyse Twitter?

I really like the TellYouGov service which allows its members to express an opinion on anything they like, whenever they like.

I particularly like the way a member can use Twitter to express a sentiment – as long as it is formatted in a way that TellYouGov can understand (using #tellyougov).

However, what I think is its main limitation is that only YouGov members can express themselves through it.

It made me think that what is needed is a Twitter convention for expressing sentiment. Something like TellYouGov – but simpler and more open to everyone.

So – if I like Nike for whatever reason, I can tweet: “#op+ Nike – really comfy footwear”. In this “#op” stands for opinion and the “+” indicates positive sentiment and a “-” would indicate negative sentiment.

If it caught on then it would make Twitter analysis much more reliable than the current methods. Any thoughts…?