That may or may not be an exaggeration, but according to this data, it seems that more people are — at the very least — starting to explore location-based social networks by linking them up to their existing Twitter and Facebook profiles. However, for users who have just gotten used to Twitter and Facebook, these other networks (and how to act on them) may still seem very foreign.
I recently spoke to a reporter about folks who cheat at Foursquare and other location-based social gaming platforms, and was inspired to write up this quick guide to Foursquare etiquette. (NOTE: While I wrote this guide for Foursquare, it may be applied to other location-based social networks or games that involve “checking in” to a location.)
Here are some Foursquare dos and don’ts:
Do:
Create new, meaningful locations. Is there a landmark or cool restaurant that hasn’t been added to Foursquare? Do your fellow “Squares” (coining that term for Foursquare users) a favor and add it.
Add useful tips to existing locations. Do you have a favorite dish at a local restaurant? Is there a waiter or maître d‘ people should ask for? These are the tips that make location-based social networks (all social networks, really) cool — it’s the fact people are willing to share their local wisdom and preferences with others. If you have something to say about a given location that you think will help someone else out, take a second and add it.
Edit incorrect listings. Edit locations that have incorrect addresses and/or phone numbers, or restaurants and venues that are closed. By doing this, you’ll find that you may become a Foursquare Superuser in no time!
Share Foursquare promotions and deals with your friends. Know a bar or restaurant offering a great deal through Foursquare? Tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter and in real life. (For instance, there are several I’ve used: The Drawing Room at Le Passage [occasional client] and David Burke’s Primehouse.) The more people use these deals, the more businesses will create special discounts for Foursquare users. Don’t be shy to proclaim your geekiness to your friends — you may save them some money.
Moderate how often you cross-post to Twitter and Facebook. It’s easy to connect your Foursquare account to your Facebook and Twitter profiles; that said, it’s easy to spam your Facebook and Twitter contacts with your check-ins. Be mindful of how often you cross-post, and make sure to cross-post only things you think are important. Going to McDonald’s in a drunken stupor at 4am with someone who’s not your significant other? It may be risky enough to post it on Foursquare, but especially don’t post it elsewhere. (A hat tip to Benedict Wong for this one.)
Don’t:
Don’t accept friend requests from people you only know through Twitter or Facebook. When someone signs up for Foursquare, they have the ability to pull in connections through their Twitter and Facebook accounts. If you get a Foursquare invite from someone you know only through those networks, and you’re not comfortable with them knowing where you are, don’t add them, but don’t get weirded out that you’re getting these requests either. I only become Foursquare friends with people I know personally, but that’s my cup of tea. (Another school of thought: “Don’t like ‘em? Don’t Foursquare ‘em.”)
Don’t check in to places you don’t actually go to. I work on Chicago’s famed Michigan Avenue, and I take the bus to work each day. If I’m active on Foursquare, I may check in to my job, into the Magnificent Mile and to my apartment (not my real address), but that’s it. Some folks, as they commute via bus, train or car, will check into locations they pass by briefly.There’s no reason to check into locations you don’t spend any time at, so don’t do it.
Don’t let Foursquare consume you. Nothing will get you in the doghouse quicker than constantly checking in on Foursquare when you’re on a date. If your Foursquare usage interferes with dates or family time, you’re not enjoying the time you actually spend at that location, so you may want to scale back a bit. If you feel you must check in, however, retreat to the restroom.
Up for discussion:
Retroactive check-ins. It’s easy to forget checking in to a location, but if you remember after the fact, will you bother going back to check in to locations you’ve left? (I know I’ve done this on occasion, which is why I didn’t put it in the “Don’t” section.)
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Have I missed anything? Do you disagree with something I’ve said? Please feel free to post any additional thoughts you have as comments below.
We made a few predictions for how the media landscape will change in the new year, and we think it would be fun to hear what you think will be big in 2010, in less than 140 characters.
Use the hashtag #Media2010 in your tweet, and let us know what you think is coming.
Going by our predictions entry, our tweet would be:
2010 media predictions: More collaboration (soon with Wave), tablets on the rise, mobile strategies emerge, paywalls lose favor. #Media2010
Update: Because tweets don’t live forever, the widget we had on this entry displaying predictions has gone away. Thanks to all who participated.
When we all partied in 1999, who would have guessed how much things would change so quickly for the news industry in the first decade of the new millennium? In 10 short years, we saw change at a pace that was unprecedented in the history of mass media.
Instead of going back and examining those changes, which are well documented, I’m going to look ahead to 2010. Change is coming fast, so predicting what’s going to happen in the next year is perilous. But I’ll give it a shot anyway in three areas: social media, platforms and business models. Take all with a grain of salt.
Social media
The mainstream media really embraced social media in the last year of the decade. I think the media gets little credit for having done so, but the move to try out new tools was profound. When big news happens, newspapers, TV and radio stations are very likely these days to use Twitter and Facebook to collaborate with the community. In the next year, I think that collaboration will only grow. News organizations are realizing that user-generated content can be valuable, if used right. Twitter and Facebook are still relatively new tools, and journalists are just now hitting their stride with them. The interaction between journalists and the public is at an all-time high. For years, those of us in the news media have tried to find a way to make our reporters accessible to the public. We added e-mail taglines to stories, added reader comments online, etc. But it wasn’t until some powerful social media tools came along that we could really become accessible. It’s amazing when you think about it: An average fan could get in contact with a sports writer sitting in the press box at this year’s national championship football game through Twitter, ask a question - and get a response.
Social media is great for gathering public input and getting user-generated reports (think: Iran). In 2010, I see huge growth in using those mediums by the media, and some more experimentation in new tools that come our way, including Google Wave, which I believe has the potential to be the best collaboration tool journalists have ever seen. Real-time collaboration on a story is about to be a reality, and Wave will make it happen. Smart journalists are paying attention to Wave, though I predict it won’t be a serious option until near the end of 2010 (Google has scalability issues to work out, and developers need time to make it great).
New platforms
I think 2010 will be a year for big changes in the way we consume news. I’m not going to predict the death of print (that prediction has been around a long time, and print manages to keep chugging along). Rather, I see some new avenues complementing print and traditional broadcast media. The first one, I think, will be in tablets. Several tablets (touchscreen PCs that are roughly the size of a hardcover novel, but thinner) are on their way to the market. Apple is reportedly going to get into the game. Publishers are in talks with tablet makers to push content to the tablets. Apple jumping into the market could be huge. Can Apple do for publishers what it did for the music industry? I wouldn’t put it past them.
I also think 2010 will be the year that mobile really takes off. We almost saw it in 2009 with the prominence of the iPhone and the introduction of Android phones. Smart phones are becoming ubiquitous, and it’s only accelerating. With high speeds available (Sprint is unrolling 4G before many people are even on 3G), the possibilities are endless. I expect geolocation and QR codes to take off in the next year. Smart media companies will be paying attention to both technologies. Google is moving into the market quickly, offering QR codes to hundreds of thousands of local businesses. QR codes are like bar codes on steroids - people scan the codes with their mobile phones and it takes them to a URL. I can imagine a day (perhaps in the next year) when someone walks into a restaurant, scans a code printed on the menu with their mobile camera, and finds out instantly what the reviews are for the restaurant, not only from the public (via I predict Google-owned Yelp), but also from the local newspaper. If the local newspaper is smart, it is providing its own QR codes that serve as coupons for that particular establishment. Geolocation will also take off, and intertwine with social media. Foursquare and Gowalla, which are social networking games played over a geographic grid using mobile applications, will continue to grow (or be bought out by Google or Yahoo) and will become a bigger part of social media. The media should be watching these services carefully - there’s clearly some advertising potential here, because people are “checking in” to local businesses when they visit. Think about that.
New business models
The Miami Herald recently put out the tin cup online, asking for donations to “support ongoing news coverage” at the bottom of each story. The excitement over paywalls has died off some but is still around. Advertising revenue is expected to rebound some in 2010, along with the overall economy, so I predict that some of the more radical ideas (full paywall) will go by the wayside. Publishers should continue to look for new revenue streams, whether it is finding a way to monetize social media or make a buck off geolocation (imagine your phone buzzing when you walk by a bar, and the local newspaper is telling you about a drink special). I think experimentation in the next year is a good idea, but publishers should avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We’ve made great strides in innovation - pushing too hard to make money off the new ideas might stifle some of the enthusiasm. If the ideas are truly good, their value will be revealed soon enough.
I hear all the time that this is a bad time for my industry. I don’t see it that way. I think it’s an exciting time, full of innovation. Of course, I still have my job, and I’m thankful for that. That’s it. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and a great new year.
Andrew Keys, a landscape designer and blogger, didn’t sign-up for Twitter with the intention of launching a writing career. In the spring of 2009 Andrew hesitantly created his @oakleafgreen Twitter account after a bit of coercion from a friend who told him it would be a great place for him to promote his landscape design firm.
So Andrew set out trying to find the value of Twitter for his business. What he found were people in his industry talking shop and learning from each other.
Intuitively, Andrew made smart connections. He followed people in his industry, including editors at gardening magazines. He stayed engaged, nurtured relationships as they developed and subsequently his investment of time resulted in an invitation to contribute to a national gardening magazine.
Three articles later and Andrew has added “freelance writer” to his resume.
I asked Andrew if he could offer some advice to other writers who would like to use Twitter to network and perhaps even pitch a story. He quickly recommended starting with research.
“Months before I created my Twitter account, I found a long list from a reputable blogger in my industry of her favorite Twitterers,” he says. “When I signed up, I went back to that list, followed everyone on it, joined the conversation and made some good connections.”
Even more connections followed from those initial relationships.
When I asked Andrew if there was one thing he’d done that really stands out as having helped him in his Twitter endeavors, he says, “I was real. That, to me is the crux of Twitter at its best.”
I agree.
“Don’t pigeonhole yourself,” he suggests. “All work and no play makes Andy a dull Twitterer! Keep in mind that Twitter is about being real, and it’s about entertainment…the more well-rounded you are in the discussion you generate, the larger a following you’re likely to gather.”
“In the end, I think that [earnest contribution to discussions] went a lot further in those editors’ minds than if I’d pitched them when we first met,” Andrew says. “And it went a lot further in my mind because I felt I actually came to know them and the rest of my community as people. That’s as valuable as any published article, if not more.”
Here are some final bits of wisdom Andrew shared:
Learn and obey the rules of Twittiquette {basically, be polite}
Post a photo of your actual face as your avatar
Nurture valuable relationships
Contribute intelligently to conversations
Self-promotion has a place on Twitter, but know when to stop
Be yourself and enjoy talking to people
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If you’d like to contribute to Old Media, New Tricks, you can reach us through @mediatricks on Twitter.
For you Twitter pros, this will be a bit of a reminder of what you should be doing. Twitter newbies, pay attention.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of posting one link after the next, spewing out an endless stream of information. Information’s great, but there should be a lot more to your tweets.
Without further ado, I bring you this: The Three E’s of Twitter
Simply put, one builds social media credibility — and value — through engagement, and Twitter enables one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many discussions.
Smart Twitter use happens through engagement.
2. Educate
As a journalist, your role is to help provide readers with information and insight to help them answer some big questions: Who should I vote for? Which product should I buy? What does this new law mean, and how will it affect my family?
Twitter audiences love this kind of information. They crave it. In fact, they pride themselves on the fact that they know about news before their friends — just because they’re on Twitter.
While you engage on folks on Twitter, be sure to provide relevant information that makes their lives better, and as you build out your audience, take note of which people like which information. Take it upon yourself educate your audience about your beat, your news organization and yourself.
But it’s not just enough to link to the news; convince your readers just why they should pay attention to you. Instead of tweeting “X law goes into effect today: LINK,” tweet “X law goes into effect today, and this is why it matters: LINK”. You’ll find that your links will get more clicks, your tweets will get re-tweeted and your time spent on Twitter will be more useful.
3. Entertain
Engaging and educating are two Twitter essentials, but if you’re not a fun person to follow, people just won’t follow you. Don’t just tweet serious or work-related posts all the time; if you’re at a ballgame, tweet photos from the game. If you’re at a restaurant, post a picture or two of your food.
Have fun with your tweets, so that other people will have fun following you on Twitter.
What other tips — ones that begin with the letter “E” — would you suggest to others? Please add them as comments on this post!
All right, folks. It’s finally time to re-do our blogroll. If you know of any journalism-related blogs we should add, please suggest them as comments on this blog post.
Chicago-based Nate Silver, a baseball statistician and analyst with Baseball Prospectus, was ticked off about politics.
As a data-driven guy who appreciated precision, the sloppy use of political polling information drove him crazy. From his perspective, there didn’t seem to be a site that really dove into poll data analysis in a relatively balanced and knowledgeable fashion.
What do you do when you’re one smart person with a vision and enthusiasm? You launch your own butt-kicking Web site. Let’s talk about the power of his FiveThirtyEight.com site and the lessons that both old and new media can draw from its success in the 2008 elections (538 is the number of votes in the Electoral College.)
I’m not a political journalist, only a news junkie citizen, but FiveThirtyEight kept me enthralled during the election. I would stay up past one o’clock in the morning, repeatedly hitting Refresh on my laptop screen so that I wouldn’t miss a single thing that Nate and his team posted.
What was so compelling?
Quality and depth of Nate’s information. Almost all of the mainstream media US maps predicted individual state election outcomes simply by coloring the state red or blue. Only FiveThirtyEight had minute color gradations (light pink to dark red, for example, indicating how much a state was predicted to go for Senator McCain.) Only FiveThirtyEight maps accurately portrayed the two states that split their electoral votes: Maine and Nebraska. Silver even showed a blue box around Omaha (the Second Congressional District) surrounded by red-tinted Nebraska, because the Obama campaign worked that area very hard to try to win its one Electoral College vote (and they did win it.) I loved this sort of detail. Lesson: Don’t dumb down your information. We’d prefer the full story.
Human interest narratives that also predicted election outcomes. Only on FiveThirtyEight did a tiny team of guys travel to multiple states to interview and accompany ground workers in both the Obama and McCain headquarters. Over and over, from Troy, Ohio to Grand Junction, Colorado to a damning photo in Florida’s Panhandle, it was obvious from their digging and persistent reporting that the Big Mo was in the Obama camp and not with McCain. I never saw this sort of detailed ground campaign storytelling anywhere else. Lesson: Show us what’s going on by telling gripping stories, even when those stories are buried in relatively obscure towns that no one else is talking about. We want to know.
A lively, engaged community makes a Web site even more powerful. I rarely saw such interesting readers and commenters as I did on FiveThirtyEight. Sure, there were the usual trolls and yellers, but there were a lot more people who were thoughtful and impassioned about the unfolding political process. Some got pushy, wanting to know why the latest daily Rasmussen poll analysis wasn’t up by a certain time. Others were concerned that Nate was still posting information at 3 am as the election neared its end. I began to recognize certain commenter names and would smile or groan based on what I knew to expect from them.Lesson: It’s not only about detailed data, or interesting stories – it’s also about the people who come to the site, hang out and chat.
One baseball stats nut who loved well-presented polling data. One bare-bones Web site. A couple more people running around in a car doing interviews across the country. Insanely detailed analytical posts about voters with dense explanatory graphics (my math teacher husband told me that they were “rectangular coordinate system scatter plots.”) That was it…that’s all that FiveThirtyEight had going for it, but they kept me up nights with “just” that.
What can your media organization do to keep readers up at night, hitting “Refresh” and trying to figure out how to read a scatter plot? Which reporters have that kind of passion and drive, and what can the organization do to help fuel their fire?
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Sheila Scarborough is a writer specializing in travel, the social Web and NHRA drag racing. She’s also the co-founder of Tourism Currents: social media training for tourism professionals.
For reporters on the social web, the strength of their personal brand can gain them readers or, more importantly, sources. Twitter lists are just one way you can introduce people to your work and get that one source you need to follow you on Twitter. (Of course, you can always pick up the phone and call them, but that’s besides the point.)
Here are some easy things you can do to brand yourself through your Twitter lists:
Thank every person who lists you. While it may take only a second to add someone to a Twitter list, it also takes a second to notice that you’re on someone else’s list. If someone thinks you — and your content — add enough value to warrant addition to their contacts, thank the person who adds you. If you’re not following the person who added you, give them a follow and then, once they follow you back, DM them a quick thank-you note. That note will get you noticed, and it’s yet another opportunity to talk to people in your network, as well as a new reader and a potential source.
Follow lists compiled by people you’re looking to interview. One way you can get noticed is by following someone else’s list. Many lists have no followers, and if you can distinguish yourself by being the first follower of someone else’s list, not only does it distinguish you, but it gives you and that person something to talk about.In addition, if you follow someone else’s list, it gives you a frame of reference in which you can formulate questions that will garner better responses.
Create lists of people you meet offline. Some folks have thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers, most of whom they’ve never met before. As you meet people at conferences, events and talk to sources, you may want to add them to a list devoted to people you’ve met. An easier way to do this could be to create a new list for each conference and event you attend. This way, your Twitter contacts will be organized for quick recall. (Don’t forget that you can always add people to multiple lists!)
Create lists to show how well-rounded you are. Some folks live, breathe and evangelize social media all day, every day, and quite often, their Twitter streams are filled with all sorts of social media-related blog posts, re-tweets and general observations.While this is great, it will cause their stream to be one-dimensional and, therefore, useless to most people who actually use Twitter. For metro reporters, create list of useful people to follow in your city or town. If you’re a business reporter, create a list of local businesses on Twitter. If you’re a sports reporter, find the local athletes in your town on Twitter, and add them. For restaurant reporters, create a list of local chefs and restaurateurs on Twitter.If you’re looking to connect with your audience on a more personal level, create a separate list about your interests. Create lists around your musical and/or artistic tastes. Show your readers that you’re a well-rounded person, and they’ll be more likely to follow you on Twitter.
Showcase your sources. When a story gets published, create a Twitter list of the sources you used, so that the story does not just end there. Link to the list after the story on the article web page. If you can, print the URL for the Twitter list in the paper. Enable your readers to follow the story after it’s completed.
Showcase your happy clients. For successful freelancers, whether their business grows depends in part on positive word of mouth. If you connect potential leads with your happy customers, you’ll find that there’s a good chance your business will grow.At the end of your projects, don’t just ask for a LinkedIn recommendation. If you do consistent, good work for a local newspaper, add your supervising editor to a Twitter list devoted to your references. Twitter is just another channel through which you can connect your clients with potential customers.
These are just some ways to grow your personal news brand through your Twitter lists. If I left anything out, please feel free to leave your suggestions as comments after this post!
If you are one of the lucky few who scored a Google Wave account, you’ve probably logged in, fumbled around a bit, probably were impressed by the instant nature of it — and you probably got annoyed relatively quickly at Wave’s slowness. If you have enough friends or colleagues who have invites, you might have gotten a peek at Wave’s potential as a collaboration tool.
Having played around with Wave quite a bit, I was ready Tuesday to experiment a bit with Wave’s potential to report and discuss the news. So, I set up a new wave, called it “Austin News”, put out some ground rules and then publicized my experiment through Twitter. Within a few hours, we had more than 100 people talking (mostly) about local news in the wave.
I even embedded a poll to let people say whether they planned to vote on Election Day. Someone went in and edited my poll question to add “or have already voted” since the polls had been opened for a few hours by then:
In five hours, the Austin News wave generated about 70 individual comments, or “wavelets.” The wave overall was a bit slow, somewhat hard to follow and a little buggy. (I couldn’t get a photo to appear, and I think it is because I tried to upload too large of a photo, clogging the system.)
I did, however, see some great discussion; I posted a link to the Texas constitutional amendments that are up for a vote, and people immediately began discussing why anyone should care about them, which are the the most important ones and why. I dropped in topics a few times throughout the day, from the election to the launch of the Texas Tribune to some local economic news. I included links to our stories. People discussed each item as they came in.
There is potential here.
Waves get overloaded after about 50 wavelets, or messages, are added to a particular wave. I’m going to launch another wave tomorrow (a daily edition of waves, of sorts) to keep them from getting too overloaded. I imagine Google will speed this system up quite a bit before opening it up to the public.
It was the first of many experiments on Wave. I’m excited to see where it leads.
- Robert Quigley
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If you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, please leave them as comments below!
There’s been a lot of talk lately about location-based social gaming platforms such as Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla. Even Pete Cashmore recently went so far as to predict Foursquare as next year’s Twitter.
