by Roland Legrand

Online social networks are essential tools for journalists. They make it possible to build extended networks, search for story ideas, build contacts and dig up information. But even more important, they help to shake up the relationship between the individual journalist and the people formerly known as the audience.

But many journalists don’t know how to get the full benefit of online social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. They sign up, fill in forms, and … nothing happens. Or they have a lot of fun with friends but admit that, professionally speaking, their online network activity has little or no value. To get the full benefit of social networks, journalists have to be do more than just sign up; they have to be engaged and active within their networks. And that means they need to carefully think about what image they want to project of themselves, to a group of watchers that might include both personal friends and business colleagues.

Who are you?

In our newsroom workshop on social media, we talked a lot about Facebook. The main lesson of this discussion was that Facebook tries to be everything for everybody. That means that journalists can customize their pages to get the most out of them, but they should first think hard about what they want to achieve there.

There is one fundamental question for journalists in social networks: Who is it you want to reach? Or to put it another way, what kind of conversation do you want to engage in?

If your beat is covering bankers, chances are that you have to deal with a relatively conservative group of people. Maybe it is not a good idea to befriend them on Facebook in the same way as you would befriend your “real friends,” showing those funny pictures of that crazy party… But at the same time you do want to talk to these bankers in an informal, human way, without putting them off.

To help you run a page that caters to both professional and personal contacts, Facebook gives you tools to customize what you want to show to whom. These tools help you project an image of yourself that facilitates contacts. Facebook’s “privacy settings” allow you to control the access to the different components of your page: profile, search, newsfeed and wall, applications.

For every bit of information you can say who gets access: everyone, your networks and friends, friends of friends, or even specific individuals.

Whether you are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or whatever, you should invest time in your profile. LinkedIn is clearly a network for professionals, but many other networks are everything for everybody, and it is on these networks that you have to decide how you want to present yourself.

Asking, answering, starting conversations

It is a bit odd to go to a bar, stay silent and almost invisible for the whole evening, and than complain that you had no interesting conversation. Yet this is exactly what happens a lot on online networks.

LinkedIn has a terrific system of questions and answers. You can ask questions to other people in your network; you can even specify the sector which you target for an answer. You can also answer other members’ questions, of course, a good way to get recognition as an expert in your field.

It is obvious there are a lot of opportunities here for journalists to ask questions or to announce that they are working on a story.

Each and every time you have a deeper contact with a source, whether it is online or in the physical world, you should try to connect also on a social network — but which network depends on your source. In that way your online friends are maybe not “real friends,” but they will be much more than just “followers”.

To start a conversation, you have to know who is out there and what kind of people there are in your sector. You will soon find out that the “degrees of separation” between you and most people in the sector you cover are very limited. You’ll discover new people who are connected to those you already follow. It is always very interesting to look on Twitter to see who that interesting new contact is following herself, to give but one example — most social networks allow you access to that kind of information.

If you feel you have a strong reputation in your sector and lots of people follow you on social networks, it could be interesting to start your own specialized page. Nothing stops you from creating a Facebook group which deals exclusively with your beat.

Linking it all together

So, instead of saying “Here we are now, entertain us,” you engage in online conversations and you even start them up. You will have a group of close contacts who you know pretty well, a group of contacts you are less familiar with, and a group of people which might be interesting but whom you hardly know them.

It is fashionable to look down on people who gather lots of followers because it seems they deal in what are called “weak ties” as opposed to the “strong ties” we have with our closest friends. Often, however, those weak ties can bring you unexpected and highly useful information and support. The “strong ties” share too much of your own background to give you radically new insights. It can be the weak ties that turn out to be very efficient.

A show of hands in the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette illustrates how editors and reporters are using the Facebook social netowork.

Having many followers or “friends” also helps to promote your articles, videos, pictures etc. Don’t rely exclusively on your newspaper’s marketing department!

In your sector, you are the main representative of your newspaper, radio or television station or blog. Having good online conversations is probably more important for the brand of your publisher than yet another marketing campaign.

Of course, it is also important for you as an individual journalist. It is important to behave like a one-person enterprise, because, at the end of the day, that is what you are. It helps you to survive and flourish in difficult times for the media, and it helps your publisher.

So do not hesitate to have elaborate profiles and to engage in conversations on many online networks. Tools such as ping.fm let you send out messages and links to many networks with one simple click. However, don’t forget to listen carefully to reactions you get and engage in conversations — and to send out links to other stuff than just your own articles.

How to keep an overview of all this? Enter FriendFeed, a feed aggregator that groups almost everything together in a fast moving stream of information, and you can customize, slice and dice that information and your contact lists as you want.

Guidelines and pleasure

Media institutions have had to grapple with the fact that social networks are knocking down the wall between journalists’ personal and professional circles. The Wall Street Journal recently issued new rules of conduct for its employees regarding social networks. I do agree with some of these rules, like the warning against misrepresenting yourself using a false name while collecting information for an article. (Although maybe there are exceptions in an investigative journalism context), but there has been some criticism of the rules. One of the most interesting reactions came from venture capitalist Fred Wilson, focusing on three rules:

• Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
• Don’t discuss articles that haven’t yet been published, meetings you’ve attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you’ve conducted. . . .
• Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

Wilson reacted:

This misses the chance to make their reporting collaborative. Of course, they should discuss how an article was made. Of course, they should talk about stories as they in progress. Net natives — as WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch calls them — understand this.

Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. also provide the opportunity for reporters and editors to come out from behind the institutional voice of the paper — a voice that is less and less trusted — and to become human. Of course, they should mix business and pleasure.

I think this is a most profound reaction. If we journalists want to survive, we will have to learn to come out from behind our institutions and to speak in a human voice — to engage in genuine conversations.

What is your take on this? Do you feel online social networks are crucial for your job? And how should we behave on those networks, being journalists?

Roland Legrand is in charge of Internet and new media at Mediafin, the publisher of leading Belgian business newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo. He studied applied economics and philosophy. After a brief teaching experience, he became a financial journalist working for the Belgian wire service Belga and subsequently for Mediafin. He works in Brussels, and lives in Antwerp with his wife Liesbeth.

Pittsburgh newsroom photo by Robbmonty via Flickr Creative Commons

It wasn’t long ago that people took a hard look at the social networking world and saw that such activities didn’t quite jive with the typical workplace environment. Some employers solidified that notion by barring visits to such sites via their networks.

Well, here we are in the final days of October 2008, and two individuals at the UK-based think tank Demos, Peter Bradwell and Richard Reeves, have published a 92-page assessment of the potential upsides of social networking within organizations and between organizations and clients.

The text (which, wonderfully enough, has been issued as a PDF [link] under a non-commercial Creative Commons licensing) is titled “Network Citizens: Power and Responsibility at Work,” and it essentially takes what is arguably a sensible view on the present networking situation. They see workplace bans on Facebook and YouTube as “almost impossible to enforce,” and they draw a sort of sociological analogy to such efforts that would entail limits for gossip among colleagues. A nonsensical move, more or less.

Bradwell and Reeves even think that placing restrictions on Web-based networking within Facebook, et al., can be counterproductive, given the fact that modern technologies have allowed the world to transcend ordinary means of interaction and to attain what is ultimately a more collaborative reality for business development.

Yes, it is true that the issues of lowered barriers and intensive PC-based socializing reveal things that can be prone to exploitation in quite negative ways. As the authors of “Network Citizens” state, the networks have a definitive “dark side.” Yet the benefits for the pursuit of a relatively happy medium (my own phrasing) have really become too outstanding to negate.

Such benefits have only grown with developments made in the market specific to business relationship management – which goes as much for workers’ presence on LinkedIn as YouTube, depending of course on one’s area of industry. All things considered, corporations currently exercising no-social-networking policies would do well to browse the ideas delivered via this research.

September 30, 2008 – 8:14 pm PDT – by Doriano “Paisano” Carta 1 Comment

Mzinga has been around for over eight years so they’re by no means a startup. They’ve been building white label social networks for companies such as ABC, ESPN, Amex and other big time players without much fanfare or media coverage. They’ve enabled businesses to add the social media tools that we use every day inside their protective firewall.

If you go to mzinga’s site you’ll see the numbers behind their success which are staggering. They have over 14,000 communities, more than 1 billion page requests every month from 27 million users in 160 countries worldwide. All impressive stats but the real measure of success is the quality of their clientele. They have a list of who’s who that continue to use their services internally as well as externally. However, because they rebrand most of these solutions to customize projects for their customers, the general public never knows who really did the fancy work. Fortunately, though, word of mouth spreads quickly from insiders so they generate the bulk of their work that way.

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This is a guest post written by Marion Freijsen and Adrie Reinders, authors of “The N Factor: How Efficient Networking Can Change the Dynamics of Your Business,” as a part of the Authors@Mashable series. Please join Marion and Adrie for a live Q&A today, Thursday, September 25th at 3:00 PM ET on Mashable.

It’s a Small World
Our world has gotten smaller. Not in the way that the huge house you played in with your friends when you were six years old seems small when you return to it at 30. More in the sense that these days, every business that starts up is no longer just competing with the company in the next village, but more likely with a company on the other side of the world. We all have access to the Internet, we can fly places and as such, the borders have stretched further and further.

Recently I was sitting at breakfast and next to me was a table full of people. They were having fun, which I think is great, but they were so absorbed in their own little world and talking at such an embarrassing volume that it was hard to have a quiet, peaceful conversation with the person sitting next to me. You all have these examples no doubt. Maybe a person next to you with a mobile phone that talks so loudly that you can’t hear yourself think. Or an attendant in a store or hotel who is paying more attention to his colleagues whilst serving you, then to you, the paying customer. I could go on and on – and I am sure you can think of hundreds more examples.

read more…

This is a guest post written by Marion Freijsen and Adrie Reinders, authors of “The N Factor: How Efficient Networking Can Change the Dynamics of Your Business,” as a part of the Authors@Mashable series. Please join Marion and Adrie for a live Q&A today, Thursday, September 25th at 3:00 PM ET on Mashable.

It’s a Small World
Our world has gotten smaller. Not in the way that the huge house you played in with your friends when you were six years old seems small when you return to it at 30. More in the sense that these days, every business that starts up is no longer just competing with the company in the next village, but more likely with a company on the other side of the world. We all have access to the Internet, we can fly places and as such, the borders have stretched further and further.

Recently I was sitting at breakfast and next to me was a table full of people. They were having fun, which I think is great, but they were so absorbed in their own little world and talking at such an embarrassing volume that it was hard to have a quiet, peaceful conversation with the person sitting next to me. You all have these examples no doubt. Maybe a person next to you with a mobile phone that talks so loudly that you can’t hear yourself think. Or an attendant in a store or hotel who is paying more attention to his colleagues whilst serving you, then to you, the paying customer. I could go on and on – and I am sure you can think of hundreds more examples.

read more…

Searching for things through a service that scours multiple engines is one thing. Searching for things through a service that scours certain aspects of the news and social discussion space is another. This is what a new invention called Social Mention allows you to accomplish.

Employing Yahoo’s increasingly noteworthy BOSS search platform, Social Mention, an Ottawa, Canada operation, distinguishes its results by their variety of source. If you’re looking for items to do with, say, today’s official debut of the T-Mobile G1 device, you can specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.

Adding extra flavor to the mix is an asset labeled “Hot Conversations.” Everything deemed of the moment is listed, though these are not specific a category. If you search for the abovementioned handheld, and transition from left to right through the available tabs, the picks in the right-hand column stay largely the same.

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Last week, I wrote an editorial entitled “When it Comes to Politics, Don’t Listen to Me.”  It was fairly well recieved, at least by the contingent of Mashable readers who don’t tend to agree with me politically.  It struck on a number of themes and memes common to social media circles, though and my sentiments were echoed by none other than the inventor of the Web, Timothy Berners-Lee.

Stan wrote earlier this morning on what Berners-Lee told the BBC in an interview over the veracity of information on the Web:

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation…Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

Stan seemed to think that we as humans are capable of judging for ourselves whether or not information should be trusted or not simply based on the brands associated with the information we’re looking at. There are some serious problems with that assumption, but perhaps even more problematic was the dismissal provided by Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim today (emphasis added):

Do I have to keep repeating myself on this stuff? Why does the web need labeling? And, who’s to say which site is authoritative and which is not? Why can’t the web simply exist, grow, and morph into what masses decide? What happened to the “wisdom of crowds” deciding what’s credible?

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The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend, and I actually had a chance to take a look at it yesterday due to all the AIG/Lehman brothers mess as I tried to get a handle on how many stomach ulcers I should develop this week. What’s interesting, aside from the design itself, is that they’ve implemented community and social networking features that are almost completely unique to the web we all know and love; the WSJ socnet is (like much of the featured content) behind a paywall.

PaidContent called the new look “dark and brooding,” but I think it’s just the newspaper being overly emo and dramatic amidst some particularly depressing economic news-cycles.

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The Real World Change 2.0 series with Leslie Poston is an ongoing look at how people are using social media tools and their personal and professional social media networks to bridge the chasm from the Internet and social media bubble to the real world and do a variety of things to effect true change.

The biggest hurdle in the quest for real world change using social media is finding ways to take the challenge into the real world. Many of us know how to connect on Twitter, Ning, Plurk, Yahoo and Google groups, forums and any of the other social media tools. It’s bridging the gap that becomes the challenge.

The first step to making real change happen in the real world using social media is a small one. To build a national real world network, you must first start by building a local one. To do this you need to tap into the power of your online network and use it to branch out. It only takes a few simple steps to make an active real world connection that starts online.

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