Workshop given at the 2013 Media Coverage of International Justice conference sponsored by the Samir Kassir Foundation and the Global Center for Journalism & Democracy. Apps and tools to track information, strategies for content distribution and community engagement

1. Social Media & International Justice
Apps and tools to track information &
strategies for content distribution
and community engagement

2. Robin Johnson, Ph.D.
Twitter: @go4robinjohnson
Facebook: facebook.com/go4robinjohnson
Email: robin.johnson@shsu.edu

3. Outline
Today we will be discussing the use of social
media to:
1. Track sources and information
2. Engage with sources and news consumers
3. Distribute stories over multiple platforms

4. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
TRACKING

5. Twitter
• Twitter is a social networking
tool in which users post 140
character updates of what is
going on in their lives along
with links to things they think
are interesting, funny or useful
to their followers
• “Following” makes it a very
public network since you don’t
have to be someone’s friend
to follow them, although there
are privacy controls

6. Twitter
• People use Twitter in many ways
– As a newsfeed by following prominent people or
networks
– A pseudo-chat room by limiting their followers &
whom they follow to close friends and family
– As a microblog for updating people about the work
they are doing and their personal lives
• 200 million active users, most relevant social
network for journalists

7. Tracking on Twitter
• One Twitter tracking method is to find experts,
organizations, journalists, bloggers and
activists that you already know from their
work elsewhere.
• Once found on Twitter, conduct an
information excavation of who they talk to,
who they follow, what lists they are on, and
what lists they have created.

8. Twitter
Info
Excavation

10. Conversation
with another
user

12. Link to blogger
with blogger’s
username

13. Excavation
• Professional summary that
lists the blogger’s interest
and blog site
• 1.7k Followers
• 6k tweets
• Followed by shows others
like the user, whose
information can be
excavated

14. Following list
The following list includes everyone the
person or organization follows. Read
names and information to determine who
to follow. Select the username to learn
more information
• number of tweets
• number of followers
• what kind of information is tweeted
• and how often the user tweets
1,364 is a lot of accounts to wade
through, but it will yield thorough results
Another strategy is finding expert/official
accounts, who often only follow a few key
people or organizations

16. Tracking tweets with lists
• Twitter lists sorts users into common categories
• Lists are generally public, which means you can
track another user’s list and others can follow
your lists
• The larger the list, the more difficult it is to track
relevant information. The limit is 500 members to
a list, but I try to cultivate mine to 100 or less

17. My lists covering International Justice
• IntlCriminalLaw&Justice (there’s a character limit!)
– This list follows developments in international criminal law, justice
and the ICC
– I use this as an initial category if I’m not sure where someone fits
or if I’m in a hurry, I can go through and recategorize later
• IntlCrime&CourtOrgs
– This is a list of NGOs and other organizations that tweet about
international criminal law and the courts
• IntlCrime&CourtNews
– This list contains journalists and bloggers who cover issues of
international crime, wars and the ICC
– This is where a lot of news breaks

18. Lists, continued
• IntlCrime&CourtsExperts
– Lawyers, activists & academics with expertise &
experience in International Law, Courts & Justice
– This list has people who can be used as sources for
stories. It also includes people working at the ICC and
other courts and tribunals
• IntlCrimCourtsOfficial
– Official accounts of criminal courts, tribunals & their
spokespeople

19. Finding lists

20. Twitter Trial Monitors
• @icctrialmonitor
– Open Society Justice Initiative
– Monitors the International Criminal Court
• @KRT_monitor
– Asian International Justice Initiative
– Monitors Cambodia Chambers ECCC
• There should be more trial monitors!

21. Using Twitter’s Search
• Finding and using #hashtags in Twitter
searches will generally yield users who want
to be involved in the larger Twitter
conversation about an issue

22. Advanced Twitter search
• Twitter.com/search-
advanced
• Use to track specific
hashtags, exact words
and search terms by
location, by account

23. Advanced Search
• Twitter’s Advanced Search doesn’t search all
of Twitter’s archive, just most recent
• Topsy.com
– Provides an archive of all Tweets
• Monitter.com
– Sort and track tweets in real time, filtered by
location

25. Topsy.com

26. Monittor.com

27. Tweet Deck
• Once lists are created, good
search terms found, how do
journalists keep up with all
the information?
• TweetDeck is app that you
can download on mobile,
use as an extension on
Google Chrome, or use
online for monitoring real-
time searches, lists,
mentions and activities

28. TweetDeck Chrome Extension

29. Adding a column to monitor

30. Adding a list

31. Adding notifications

32. Adding a search

33. Outside Twitter, you
can see who has
tweeted a story

35. Facebook
• Facebook is a modern day phonebook that is
searchable by name, occupation, network
• 800 million active users
• Downside
– Limited search function
– Journalists and users have been slow to embrace
changes to make commenting more public

36. Efforts to open Facebook content
• Follow people (changed from Subscribe)
• Groups/Pages
• Facebook Interest Lists
• Graph Search (beta, English language only),
announced Jan. 15, 2013

37. Facebook Follow

38. Facebook Pages

39. International
Criminal
Court Group

40. Facebook
Interest
lists

41. Facebook Graph Search
• Four initial categories, phrase-based searching
– People
• People who like the international criminal court in Beirut
– Photos
• Photos friends of friends have taken in Egypt
– Places
• War zones covered by journalists I follow
– Interests
• International law and justice covered by journalists
• Search result page can be given a new title for the page.
This creates a custom view of the content on Facebook.

42. LinkedIn
• Find international law
sources and their
professional
connections
• Searchable through
business, organization &
occupation
• 160 million active users

43. List of
groups
of
lawyers
working
in the
field

44. Search by
occupation
such as legal
officer or
legal intern

45. Mobile tracking
• Tweetbeep.com and nutshellmail.com can be
used to set up email alerts for multiple topics
at multiple frequencies
• Twitter for SMS

46. Contacting sources and building community
ENGAGING

47. Engaging sources
• Frequent, polite conversations build source trust
• Make sure your summary is clear & professional
• Find the active part of a community & add your
Tweets to their conversations using reply and RT
• Use Post/Tweet history and summary to check
initial trustworthiness of a potential source

48. Sharing stories to build community
• Share your stories through your personal
social media accounts in addition to having
the media organization distribute through its
official accounts
– Consider using Facebook’s public option
• Respond to comments, likes and retweets as
much as possible to develop relationships

49. Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing places some of the
newsgathering responsibilities on your
followers who might enjoy tracking down
information and being included in the
storytelling process
• Follows the ideal that many users will know
more collectively than a single reporter

50. Crowdsourcing tips
• Publish a “rough draft” of a developing story,
link it to SM and ask for feedback
• Expect 1-2 percent of your follow base to
participate
• Make it simple to participate and have a clear
focus on what you want users to find
• Reward the most active participants

51. YouTube Direct
• YouTube Direct allows
users to upload video to
a news organization’s or
a blogger’s web site
• Videos are
monitored, approved
and displayed on the
website
• Customizable

52. YouTube Direct Lite
• YouTube Direct Lite can be implemented
relatively easily on any website without
needing to know how to configure and
manage a Google App Engine

53. Instructions
• YouTube account, create or navigate to playlist
you want to use to receive video submissions

56. Direct Lite website
• http://code.google.com/p/youtube-direct-
lite/wiki/AdminInterface
– This website will launch the submission administration
interface, where you can get the code to put on your
site and review submitted videos to approve them for
display
– It also provides instructions and help
• This is the link directly to the admin interface
– http://ytdirectlite.appspot.com/static-
min/admin.html

57. This is the admin
interface with tabs for
embed codes for the
submission widget
and the display widget
Pending tab for
submissions that are
awaiting review
Approved and
rejected videos

59. Twitcam.livestream.com
• Twitcam.livestream.com allows you to live
stream video to your Twitter account
• Very simple to implement

60. Writing and posting strategies & curating content
DISTRIBUTE

61. Composing the message
• Posts, tweets, etc. should all be brief and have as
many of the following attributes as possible
– To inform: Timeliness, relevance, unique, credible
– To persuade: credible, generous
– To engage: pose questions, be provocative/evocative
– To entertain: occasionally funny, play on conventions
• Colorful observations of breaking or trending
news tend to get retweeted and shared more

62. Embedding Twitter on a web site
• Twitter provides the ability to embed code
onto any website
– Settings, Widget – Create new
– Stream all your tweets, your favorites, lists you
follow or manage, and searches

63. Curation
• To curate a topic is to grab news stories, images,
comments from SM and arrange them into a
meaningful narrative, site or context
• Curating content deals with the immense amount
of information available online
• Curating content is based on the idea of a
museum curator – presenting the most relevant
information to users who are interested but can’t
see or monitor everything

64. Curation Apps and Tools
• Spundge.com allows users to create “books” under categories of
information
• Two ways of putting content into a book
– Google Chrome extension
– Social media stream
• Other Spundge users can subscribe to your books, you can share
your books through social media, and you can embed the code onto
a website
• Some users of Spundge grow books, but updating daily with new
stories and deleting non-timely stories gives social media users a
reason to visit more often & not get overwhelmed

65. Curation tools
• Paper.li works in a similar fashion as Spundge,
but it creates news “editions” in an engaging
format that looks like a news site.

66. Storify
• Storify – Storytelling through social media
• Storify is just beginning to be used by
journalists and bloggers, and it is geared
specifically toward journalism
• Best use so far:
– Storytellers using Storify re-create a timeline of
breaking news as it unfolds via social media