five students from the BRIT School all listed as 17 - 18. The focus group was around how they see and use twitter in their daily lifes and news/media consumption. I conducted two one to one interviews on Twitter, they were all under four minutes in length and just summed up their opinions on the topics. I conducted an experiment tracking all of the analytical data around an article and how it was reflected on Twitter and beyond. I tested my own social data in apps like Klout and Crowdbooster and looked at how people were using an account from BBC’s newsnight. They followed me and I asked Why and most importantly did they have influence. What is influence? I conducted an interview with the Marketing Director of Storify Jeff Elder and asked questions about their news curation platform. How are news brands using it to comment on the stories and the sources. I interviewed Ricky Yean from Crowdbooster a tool using social data to provide deep analytics and used by companies and news agencies to look at how people are using their content and what is the future of this Tuesday, 13 December 11
BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14440865 (4) Twitter Blog, Mobile app. http://blog.twitter.com/2011/05/better-app-for-your-mobile-browser.html (7) Twitter’s stream is undervalued. http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/why-twitter-is-massively-undervalued-compared-to-facebook/ (5) Curated data: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14440865 (8) Twitter Guide: http://www.lostartofblogging.com/twitter-guide (9) Occupy Ad, Crowdsourced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVQPo62x3UI&feature=related (10) Wired, Judge denies Twitter on Wikileaks: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/judge-denies-on-twitter-case/ (10) DoJ Subpoena Proves Twitter’s Value http://gigaom.com/2011/01/08/twitter-doj-wikileaks/ (13) Five Questions Klout can’t answer. http://socialmediatoday.com/rohnjaymiller/397944/five-questions-klout-cant-answer (12) Why do people use Twitter? http://www.mpdailyfix.com/why-do-people-use-twitter/ (12) Aston Kutcher Mishap: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15692059 (17) Bufferapp increases Twitter following by 200% http://www.modernlifeblogs.com/2011/09/buffer-app-increase-clicks-on-tweets-by-200/ (16) Does Social media make a difference for brands? http://www.virtualsocialmedia.com/how-can-social-media-integration-make-a-difference-to-your- business/ (18) Twitter trends reflect the news? http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/SocialMedia-Updates/Twitter-reveals-top-trends-of-2011/SP- Article1-778931.aspx (19) Wikileaks? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12141530 (21) Is Twitter for self promotion? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57324189-17/twitter-a-self-promotion-tool-for-mainstream-media/) (23) BBC misquoting: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2101942/bbc-caught-twitter-copyright-row (23) BlueGlass: Do Hashtags matter? http://www.blueglass.com/blog/why-hashtags-belong-on-tv/ (22) Twitter in the age of breaking news. http://www.seanpercival.com/blog/2011/01/08/breaking-news-in-the-age-of-twitter/ Tuesday, 13 December 11
world. Bringing together a lot of high quality and low quality content (like Spam). This stream is very powerful for news providers and for the crowd as they can use Twitter as a news service or aggregator. I’m aiming to find out how Twitter has changed news for consumers, curators (news publishers), who owns the content and analytically. News organizations essentially curate Twitter content. If you follow some major news accounts they will retweet or quote twitter users and will post updates on breaking stories. The issue is they are confined to the constraints of any news organization. Twitter is a level playing field, meaning they have almost no advantage other than their brand which is limited to the area they report from (In this case the UK). Because of this level playing field normal people are becoming the journalists, curators and consumers instantly. There’s almost no due course or fact checking meaning the users are much faster than the news organizations. In the last two years Twitter has blown up and people are wondering has the growth of celebrity culture online fused this growth or if there is real journalistic value behind Twitter. How is Twitter being respected as a journalistic source and how can you trust the content? When countries like Russia are trying to stop the freedom by spamming and confusing the feed. Source: Twitter.com interface as of March 2010. Twitter has changed a lot and is adding features, it started a sms only service and developed passed three major design changes. We’ll look at how the changes coming today are changing how people will use the platform, how news is found and how tweets are becoming stories. Twitter’s mobile website allows anyone on any phone to access a full version of the site although it looks like an app. Source: http://blog.twitter.com/ 2011/05/better-app-for-your-mobile- browser.html Tuesday, 13 December 11
who we trust by following. We follow based on interests mostly. If someone tweets a lot of interesting content about politics then I may decide to follow them. News breaks virally, It’s retweeted and quoted by hundreds then thousands of people in seconds. I’ve seen news break on Twitter and timed the difference between a channel like Sky News and it took over five minutes for them to report the fairly major news story. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/16/why-twitter-is-massively-undervalued-compared-to-facebook/ (Reputable in the social media space, owned by AOL but the piece is editorial rather than news reporting). The question is, what do news organizations provide outside of the Twitter ecosystem? They curate, quote and comment. They bring you what they feel is the most important news, quote sources and sometimes show their own and comment on the news. I conducted a focus group with students in South London at the BRiT school. I asked the media students, did Twitter aid or stop the riots? The response was that it probably did both. A lot of people thought the prime focus was on the cleanups. One participant said that Celebrities were tweeting details about the cleanups their fans were sending to them. I found out their point of view but there were many key flaws with this question and the research gained. Firstly the Brit students tend to be better behaved than others in London because to get in you have to work hard and requires a lot of dedication. Secondly not all of the participants were located in London meaning their following may be onlookers rather than anyone that could participate as they wouldn’t be based in London. On the other side of this, twitter tends to be more about interests than friends. So someone’s twitter following is more likely to live further away from them than say Facebook. So there’s nothing to say they couldn’t be following someone in London. What did students think about how twitter was used in the london riots? Tuesday, 13 December 11
going to have all of this content. Twitter has millions of messages, It’s almost impossible that someone didn’t post about them rioting or didn’t use Twitter in such a way. So this has answered my question. I think a better way to phrase the question would’ve been ‘From your point of view’ or ‘From what you saw’ rather than asking a factual question about twitter. Looking at what both Yawer Ahmed and Lee Sanders said in separate one on one interviews they consumer a lot of news from Twitter and it’s growing “The more I use it, the more I use it. When I first got it I used it once a month” – Lee Sanders . So most likely twitter was key in the discovery and reporting process far more than organizing cleanups or riots. Their aim was originally to do the same for twitter and for the most part they are. But they’re tied to the rules of broadcast and are rivaling other users. Right now the way we curate tweets is quite simple. We use hashtags to follow stories, although these include every tweet on the stories, meaning it’s hard to see the wider picture and we follow accounts that are curating the story by retweeting lots of content. Some services like Storify are improving this process by letting anyone embed tweets, videos and pictures onto a page around a topic. So when the London riots broke users would find the most important tweets or sources to quote and created a page breaking it down. Even the BBC created a page to cover the story using this data on their own site *. Some services like Storify are improving this process by letting anyone embed tweets, videos and pictures onto a page around a topic. So when the London riots broke users would find the most important tweets or sources to quote and created a page breaking it down. Even the BBC created a page to cover the story using this data on their own site *. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14440865 (Trustworthy source but quoting users on Twitter and there is no crediting these sources for fact checking). Some said Twitter aided the riots, I used focus group data collected by me on the subject. Did Twitter aid the riots? Our student focus group that witnessed the riots felt that from their point of view Twitter was used for good after the riots, cleaning up. One student referred to celebrities tweeting about the riot cleanups. The data isn’t conclusive though as Twitter by It’s nature must have been used for both. Therefore there is a fault in this data. It does answer what they saw from their point of view and maybe what was more common on the service. Source: YouTube.com taken on 9th December 2011. Tuesday, 13 December 11
this shows a younger perspective. From someone that has had the internet and this openness for most of their life. Using two data sets (How long have you been on Twitter and how do you consume news) I’ve created a graph to reflect if increased exposure to twitter leads to increased access to news through the site. Most people have been on Twitter for a year or more. One participant wasn’t a Twitter user and another was new to the service, saying “Only a few months”. Interestingly this person has two accounts ‘Work and Personal’ limiting the amount of time they spent on one account. This also lead to them saying that they may not use Twitter much but friends tell them how much breaks on there and when stories break. This very much shows the aftershock and effect of twitter, how it’s almost being used as a source. As you may not be able to pin point one person so they say they ‘heard it on twitter’. As shown in a chart used later in this report the users that have been on twitter for one year tend to follow quite a lot of professional accounts. Eluding to the fact that many of them may not be active users, rather have accounts that they use in their career and check less often. Maybe using it less for news rather professional content or career related tweets or opportunities. The problem with this is that one person wasn’t a twitter user and there wasn’t much variety. I should have maybe had more variety in my focus group. Source: http://www.lostartofblogging.com/twitter- guide Tuesday, 13 December 11
the Marketing Director of Storify this question and he said: “What we used to think of as journalism — professional news-gathering and reporting — is now blended with real-time communication between all kinds of people. Pulling from that conversation allows you to capture news as it breaks, and the dialogue around it. So we would say curation is at the heart of journalism as it is evolving now.” - Jeff Elder Everyone is now a journalist, can we trust everyone? Inherently the answer is no. But from the consumers point of view, more openness and choice is beneficial. The curators are people that understand a topic and want to use their expertise to break down a story unlike a news gathering organization which may not have much experience on some topics rather wider knowledge. Although curation doesn’t have to be for news. The power is that it could be for anything, something that only appeals to a tight niche audience. Such as an event in a small town. Jeff reflected on how platforms like this can be used for such momentous or small events. “The New York Times uses us, as do people Storifying their weddings. Journalists have used Storify for Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring, Penn State and the 2012 Election. When looking around our site, you’ll see all kinds of use cases.” Source: Occupy Together TV advertisement. The Occupy Wallstreet campaign used Twitter to spread the word and curate the photos and videos from inside the camp and from the reported police misconduct. The TV advertisement was crowd funded by Occupy Wallstreet supporters. The campaign lead to hundreds of other Occupy movements springing up in major towns. Including London. This research has shown that Twitter isn’t a corporate machine nor is it a network for individuals. It’s used by media entities and people alike in many cases for the same purposes. A focus group member said “Twitter is a stream of consciousness I like to go on twitter to post anything. From an outsiders point of view, there’s a lot of useful news”. Although because of this campaign there have been TV adverts it shows that many of the users are interacting and being active. Rather than just consuming. Tuesday, 13 December 11
meaning the reputation of the brand behind twitter is reliant on the users, unless they start blocking and checking content which isn’t possible or cost effective, it also goes against their founding principles. An example of such behavior in in the Wikileaks case. Twitter refused to hand the US government account information of wikileaks members without going through a judicial process. Which is still ongoing. (Wired, March, 11th, 2011) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/ 2011/03/judge-denies-on-twitter-case/ The problem with my data is that I have a very limited supply of information from similar students. I was only able to provide one student that didn’t use Twitter and this student was asked the same questions that Twitter users were asked, all questions did swerve towards Twitter users rather than anyone discounting if most of the subjects would have twitter or not. If I had more data we may see very different information and a more diverse opinion. The other issue is that many of these people may follow each other or the same friends, leading to a similar experience because they are the experience. The only point on the other side of this is statistically Twitter is more about the interestgraph than the friendgraph which facebook focuses on, meaning most users follow on interest and you would see the same kind of content whether you know them personally or not. (Source, Gigaom October 12th: http://gigaom.com/2011/01/08/twitter-doj-wikileaks/) A 17 year old student said “With Twitter you don’t want to see random nonsensical rubbish. Or it’s just spam. I’d rather have mostly interesting content. If 70% of it’s interesting I’d rather have that. There’s two sides of twitter, there’s the friends side and the ‘business side’ to get news and such. Personal or business. That’s why many of us have two accounts. I use my Twitter account as a combined one, I follow work experience companies and my close friends but I’ve had to follow some friends as they post crap. I’d rather follow interesting strangers than boring friends.” Agreeing that in fact twitter is more about interests rather than friends in both a professional and personal capacity. We’ve seen that Twitter is for curation, rather than creating content it’s for commenting, reposting and attributing to content. My data shows that although users may have been on the site for more than a year, they use it for celebrity tweets and professional uses rather than just for news but news is part of this stream and is a very important piece of the puzzle. Tuesday, 13 December 11
When something is said, it can be shared and remixed thousands of times most of which unknown to the creator. Everything is realtime and although you can delete a tweet It’s impossible to find all of the people quoting and sharing the original comment. Television and Film star Aston Kutcher recently commented on what he thought was a sports related story by tweeting about it. The actual story was about covering up abuse in a sports team, he claims to have not heard the full story and thought the perpetrator of the cover up was simply fired for sports related reasons. When he tweeted with his feelings on the matter he annoyed his millions of users dramatically and lead to mass apologies on his part which could have hurt his career majorly. The next day he announced he was handing control of his Twitter account to the pr staff as his production company. (Source, BBC News, 11th November 2011). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15692059 I used Crowdbooster a company that offers tools that media brands from around the world use to track the conversations, reply and look at trends. They also offer the ability to create custom reports for brands which is used by companies to show how Twitter is affecting their business. From looking at who’s influential and following you to what are your most popular tweets (Looking at retweets and other elements). They create graphs and analytical metrics to judge this. Using Crowdbooster I was able to look at trends in my following and others to try and understand how people use twitter in relation to the media. Source: Crowdbooster.com (My own Twitter data) 12/12/2011. Tuesday, 13 December 11
have, it very much shows that most of the accounts are spam and just follow to get followed back and it seems to work. This shows a false sense of credibility for many of these accounts. Crowdbooster uses a service called Klout which is a market leader in social influence scoring, in a recent article Rohn Jay Miller questions if Klout can be gamed by having a lot of followers which may not lead to influence as they got their followers by essentially asking a lot of people to follow them or signaling so. Klout says they do not use followers as their main method. (Source, SocialMediaToday, Nov 29, 2011) http://socialmediatoday.com/rohnjaymiller/397944/five- questions-klout-cant-answer I tested this out by taking a news account that followed me (BBC Newsnight) and looking at how they rank. Firstly they have substantially more followers than people they follow which adds credibility. They only follow 7000 people and have 100,000 followers. According to Klout.com the account is fairly influential (Scored are ranked out of 100), they have a 64 and it shows that they only directly influence 21,000 people. These people reply, retweet or interact with them. It correctly shows that they are influential about all kinds of political issues which are discussed on the show. When asking in my focus group how many people they follow one person answered “I think I’m following about 70, personal account 76 with 40 followers.” Showing that most people follow a similar amount of people regardless of their follower count, if they are following a large amount of people it’s an attempt to game the system or gain fake influence. This fake influence does not help them break stories or change something in the twitterverse. Who are these 70 accounts? An interviewee in a one to one interview Lee Sanders said “I follow news people, friends an celebrities. I follow news reporters over the brands but I do follow BBC News and Sky News as it’s interesting to see a personal take.” Source: Klout.com (My own Twitter data) 12/12/2011. Tuesday, 13 December 11
coming to the forefront. Most likely because on Twitter the news brands don’t comment, which is one huge reason why people watch the news. To see news and some comment and discussion referring to past news and their experience. While if you follow a reporter on Twitter you’ll see a feed of content that interests them, thus may interest you and you see their comments on stories. Someone in a focus group question replied “I first heard a lot of it through twitter trending topics and you can follow breaking news accounts like I follow Sky Sports news.” Agreeing that the breaking official content started at the official accounts and is then retweeted by others while the news that is already broken is commented upon by the reporters on the ground and news personalities. Also the new twitter personalities that may not represent a media entity but have a lot to say and are respected for this. The reasoning for this was answered by one student “You get updates quicker, the news is set in stone. You rarely get breaking news, Twitter is mostly breaking news. Everyone comments and discusses and it becomes an open conversation. We found out about the Amy Winehouse death via twitter an hour before it was confirmed on BRITFM, we didn’t report until it was confirmed. In this realtime age, although many of the sources are on the ground, It’s the media entities that are pushing it faster with their large reaches and the masses are spreading it, remixing and retweeting. 11% 33% 22% 33% Friends Celebrities Professional accounts Unknown people The problem with my data is that it goes against most of my points and what many believe is the main use of Twitter for celebrity content. My flaw was that I didn’t separate groups of possible followings instead just asked for a list of the kinds of accounts they follow. Secondly if someone mentioned three types it would put three votes into the graph, meaning it may unfairly show some results over others. Our media department tweets and tells students to be active on twitter professionally, therefore the chance that students would have a professional account or follow users in a professional capacity is far higher within this BRIT School only group. The large flaw is that you see certain trends at the BRIT school and within media which are replicated in my one to one interviews and my focus group. Source: Why do people use Twitter? http://www.mpdailyfix.com/why-do-people-use- twitter/ Who do you follow? Focus group data. Tuesday, 13 December 11
a social media experiment writing a quick blogpost about a real news story that wasn’t widely known about yet. I wrote it as it broke and posted the next morning, since it was a British story it wouldn’t be widely known as It’s the morning. The story was on O2 rolling out 4G networks in the UK. I tweeted it out and the following stats is how the story was read, reposted, shared. When you release news on Twitter you no longer own the tweet and it is retweeted, changed and shared so much is hard to track but I’ve tracked the stats openly available. http://brack.in/2011/11/14/o2-begins-4g-lte-mobile-data-trial-in- london/ 14th November: • 5 retweeted my tweet linking to the story • 5 users favorited my tweet linking to the story • 191 readers in 24 hours. • 1 comment: “It seems 4G will be a viable option at those speeds. Especially in rural areas that will get BT upgrades to give them around 20Mbps, 4G looks like it could rival traditional fibre optic and ADSL lines.” - Connor Jackson Minimum ‘theoretical audience’: 6615 (Total number of followers of me and two users that retweeted the tweet). If we were to try to estimate or count users accessing through favorites or directly this could change. • Posted at 11am (Far from peak hours in my experience). This shows that twitter has a lot of users consuming rather than creating. You can see 191 people read but few actually commented. The major flaw with this experiment is that I posted it in the daytime. People would be on mobile, at work or in school and may not be able to interact. If I posted it at night then I may see different results. If I did this again I’d try experimenting with different content, times and wording in the same tweets. Tuesday, 13 December 11
tool used before to track my social data in an analytical perspective. “How are brands and publications using Crowdbooster to optimize tweets and track insights and response? Brands and publications check in to see how tweets resonate in terms of RTs, replies, etc. It helps them iterate on content and also test the kinds of headlines that get shared, which can be different from the ones that get clickthrough’s, etc. And then they use Cb to determine things like the best times to post a piece of content, which people are the most important people to engage with (they even get alerted when someone influential follows them), suggestions for interesting content to share, and even tweets they should respond be responding to first.” Interestingly brands really care about retweets and replies more than favorites. In the latest twitter update favorites run in the tab that mentions (replies) do, meaning favoriting a tweet sends them a ping and it also sends an email as default, becoming a way to like a tweet without having to reply or share it to everyone. With the new activity stream it’s becoming a way to share content as well meaning news brands should care more about mediums like this. The other part is that you can now embed a tweet from Twitter, onto your website. Meaning tweets may have thousands of readers on say the Guardian but the author is none the wiser. How this will intersect with services like Crowdbooster is unknown for now. I asked How can analytics tools help publishers use Twitter? As there is not that many clear reasons or studies to show they really work “Just like some publishers use analytics to understand the kind of stories that drive traffic, publishers can use analytics to understand the kind of stories that drive social sharing. Social media is a two-way medium, and so it’s even more important for publishers to understand, using analytics, how to effectively participate in the conversations.” Interesting there is a lot of talk of stories, building conversations rather than one sided mentions. This is very much what storify is working on and brings to the table. Crowdbooster is interested in getting news brands to interact with the replies and to retweet and curate further. The problem is, there is no hard evidence that this works or makes a difference. This is spoken about by Virtual Social Media, speaking about how Twitter can make a difference to businesses that lack real branding or customer support. http://www.virtualsocialmedia.com/ how-can-social-media-integration-make-a-difference-to-your-business/ Tuesday, 13 December 11
alike to share tweets at optimal times of the day has grown in the last 12 months with tens of thousands of users on board both paying for the service and accessing it for free. They claim to increase your click through rate by 200%, they also claim that using the service will increase your Klout score by 3.5% in two weeks. Although it’s their own research and cannot be trusted to much of an extent it does make sense. Twitter is realtime and followers are from all around the world, spreading your tweets out and putting more thought into them (As they are sent out throughout the day) should naturally increase the quality thus the influence would be expected to rise with it. (Source: ModernLifeBlogs and Bufferapp.com Summer 2011). http:// www.modernlifeblogs.com/2011/09/buffer-app-increase-clicks-on-tweets-by-200/ Source: Bufferapp.com September 2011. Bufferapp shows link statistics as well as retweets and other data. It increases your follower and klout score because it spreads your tweets out so people in other time zones or schedules see more of your content. Google recently announced that they are going down the social analytics tracking, google analytics is the biggest web tracking solution ever so this shows the power of this content. Google also owns Google+ and has access to far more than Bufferapp or crowdbooster do in regards to Google+ but most probably any of the major social networks. Tuesday, 13 December 11
versions of Twitter they allow you to look at only the trends for your area or country. Twitter looks at the most popular topics but really only the growing ones. If something is constantly tweeted about there needs to be a big influx for it to become a trend. Source: Twitter Trends on Twitter.com Source: News.Google.com Above I’ve decided to compare two types of content. On the left is Twitter trends, these are what the people of England are talking about. Using millions of stories to break it down. On the right is the England category on Google News, the most popular news engine on the web. That is what the journalists are talking about rather than the people. As you can see there is no crossover whatsoever. Eluding to the fact that maybe the journalists don’t report what people care about enough. But do the trends reflect the peoples opinions? According to some publications they believe twitter does reflect the biggest news in the wide scale of things but I think it’s the smaller stories that last a day or an hour rather than week are missed by google news and the mainstream but aren’t by twitter if used daily. Source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/technology/SocialMedia-Updates/Twitter-reveals-top-trends-of-2011/SP-Article1-778931.aspx Tuesday, 13 December 11
did they use them and are they useful? One said “ I first heard a lot about the riots through twitter trending topics and you can follow breaking news accounts like I follow Sky Sports news.” another said “I’m never on Twitter but my friends tell me stuff is trending on Twitter first.” For them trends is an insight to the news rather than a news process, it’s the news accounts that provide or link to the real detail. Source: Twitter Trends on Twitter.com Site ‘Whatthetrend’ was developed to explain trends and show what they mean. A few days ago Twitter launched Stories that uses images, text from the most popular tweet and the trend title to explain them and build stories around them. Interestingly this has really increased the value in trends and shows how fast Twitter grows. The problem is, if trends are useless like some students claim like in this case ”No most are celebrity fan clubs getting their artists trending, sometimes it is. Like when Amy Winehouse died.” Then this tab on Twitter, which is now a major feature could scare or annoy users and confuse them if the content isn’t of a high quality. But Twitter has no editor? Does this require curation to keep it in check and if so then who is the editorial voice that represents Twitter and how can we trust it? In the case of Wikileaks Twitter was good and kept it shut, they said they keep out of free speech and let the users have their own opinions but if there were curated elements to the site, even if there were algorithms editing how could we trust them? Source: 8th Jan 2011: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us- canada-12141530 A lot of people don’t trust Google, they claim it’s just their computers ranking and there is minimal editing but what if Twitter does the same think, ranks items of interest in discovery but used user behavior to change this and to tweak. Tuesday, 13 December 11
a reaction to how users use the site and because they want to take over the format. According to PEW Center Project for Excellence in Journalism claims that news outlets are not about sharing but about self promotion. (CNET.com, November 14th http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57324189-17/twitter-a-self-promotion-tool-for-mainstream- media/) Most twitter users use Twitter for sharing, as in they use it to share information, links and photos while 93% of mainstream news outlets don’t share other outlets links or tweets. This means they are only using Twitter as a one way platform. As you can see in comparison most of my tweets are replying others, showing I’m more of a replier or curator than a creator. Yet I have more than 3000 followers. Bringing to light that Twitter tends to be a large mass of creators and lots of curators, people that retweet and reply to things that interest them, creating a feed of tweets that fit within their interest graph. Tuesday, 13 December 11
Ex-MySpace exec Sean Percival claims that news brands can’t move fast enough now that twitter has exploded. He speaks about trending topics, retweeting and the @BreakingNews twitter account are changing the landscape Source: http://www.seanpercival.com/blog/2011/01/08/breaking-news-in-the-age-of-twitter/ Source: Twitter.com/breakingnews The Breaking News twitter account is trying to kill the news organizations yet is ran by one technically. MSNBC saw this trend early and put a team together to run a new brand that was only available on Twitter. The links they tweet are mostly linking to their site which is only really accessible from twitter links. They even have an account to follow the staff and they retweet sources like Reuters and other blogs like BBC News. They have UK and local accounts. On the other hand The Sky news breaking account only links to their own site, following the trend we’ve seen from the CNET chart. Which says that brands rarely tweet any rivals and merely themselves. To them Twitter is a feed. Not a stream where everything is new and custom for the platform. Sky News is taking the wrong approach almost spamming rather than Breaking News which livetweets and retweets all kinds of accounts, with the best content rather than their own. Source: Twitter.com/skynewsbreak Twitter user UnMarketing claims that twitter shouldn’t be a marketing platform and all the content should be unique and new rather than a stream and people will get bored. Sky is not the most popular account and falls flat behind Breaking News maybe agreeing with this. Although when testing I saw them increase by 9 followers in a minute showing they are growing. Tuesday, 13 December 11
media, is the user the source? The problem being is that retweeting leads to sources being lost and incorrect attributions. The BBC used photographs in the london rots and said that the photo was on Twitter and they have the right to use it without quoting the author. Usually the BBC would have to pay for rights or contact the author. Although the BBC started with many opinions around “Upset with BBC's treatment with photo credits from Twitter users during the London riots and Oslo attacks, Andy Mabbett, a blogger and amateur photographer, took to the web to express his disappointment - and to publicise BBC's surprising response. On 06 August, Mabbett sent a complaint to the BBC for its news coverage of the Tottenham riots in north London. The blogger objected to the way the images had been credited - the images appeared on the air with a "from Twitter" mention. "You may have found them via [Twitter] but they would have been hosted elsewhere and taken by other photographers, whom you did not name and whose copyright you may have breached," Mabbett told the BBC in his complaint.” - BJP Online, 15th August 2011. http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of- photography/news/2101942/bbc-caught-twitter-copyright-row The question is, this is curation, incorrect attribution or stealing? Copyright is becoming a huge issue as the world is becoming more reliant on social media for news, as is the major news networks as they try to increase their reporting speed. Twitter’s Media site has been developed to let media entities use Twitter in their brands but how to explain to them how to use the brand and content in their site. In my focus group people said that hashtags were common in TV and a part of their daily viewing. In a post on Blueglass.com Kerry Jones asks and then answers why she believes Hashtags work on TV, how the collection of comment on a topic is powerful in the spere of television. Source: http:// www.blueglass.com/blog/why-hashtags-belong-on-tv/ Tuesday, 13 December 11
far too wide. I started without looking at a targeted area and eventually was able to cut down on the market I was looking at. One major issue for me was Twitter changed multiple times since starting and it required me to keep up to date on how Twitter is changing. They released the biggest change the system has ever had in the last few days and has changed the way Twitter users access news. I believe I should have held two focus groups, one for twitter users and one for people seeing how twitter reflects on their life even though they aren’t on it. I would have had more diversity in people in regards to education, age and location. Also the fact that one of my focus group members was also creating a report on this topic could lead to an extreme bias as they are not portraying their point of view rather the point of view they have learnt after looking through a lot of data and this may have changed the way they look at the service or use it. Leading to unfair results. This could be why some of my diagrams had fluctuations from one member of the group. This could have lead to a complete missing of the point in regards to the point of the focus group. My one on one interviews were far closer to my focus group and were not offering a unique point of view as one of my interviewees was actually in the focus group. Even though my questions were different. My secondary research allowed me to gain a different perspective and accredit my research and ideas/trends I could see from the data. Using services like Crowdbooster, Twittercounter and klout I was able to see how the data was reflected on the wider scale. I would have probably created a questionnaire but would have conducted it online and to a different audience to my experiment and my focus group with different ages and more diversity. I would also have liked to have a perspective from a brand or from someone that is in the inside rather than the service provider and the content consumer alone. I’d have liked to take the data further and look at trends in a far deeper perspective. Tuesday, 13 December 11
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