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
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
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.
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
15.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Editor's Notes
It’s also good to know bloggers, journalists and experts by nameI’ve read Mariana Rodriguez Pareja’s blog entries on the Huffington Post, and she writes about many international crime and justice issues.Google’s faithful Spanish to English translation tool has changed her last name to “couple”We see that she is on Twitter with @maritaerrepeYou can go directly to someone’s Twitter account https://twitter.com/maritaerrepe. Be sure you are logged into Twitter
This is Mariana’s Twitter page. It lists her tweets and the total number of tweets.20k, and multiple times throughout the day. She Tweets useful information that doesn’t necessarily show up in her blog.It shows how many accounts she follows, and how many follow her.
I did a search for #ICC from the user account
Although you can find a lot of good sources of information looking through tweets, it can be time consuming.I prefer to look through the list of who the user is following.
If possible, open Twitter and go to Geraldine’s account, Show them the following – scroll to the bottom and look throughICJ Project doesn’t have too many followers and doesn’t tweet often
Show @_CICC (Coalition for the ICC) the lists that the org subscribes to and the lists that they show up in
These follow the events closely and observe
Also Topsy: use Topsy for older tweets because Twitter limits the results for searches based upon timeLink is to http://monitter.com/ does location searchers as well
Also ability to set email alerts
Set a specific location and track in real time
Once you get TweetDeck up and running through the Chrome store, you will see your timeline, your mentions and new follows in interactions, what people you are following are doing in activity, your direct messages. As you can see, there is a fifth column, which is a list that I created that follows tweets from official accounts.
Outside Twitter, see who has tweeted a storySearches Twitter by the URL of the story
Some journalists prefer to promote themselves as a page
International Criminal Court Group is open so you can see all the members of the group and what they publicly postIf you select about, it takes you to a list of members that can be used as possible sources
Facebook interest lists work in a similar fashion as Twitter listsTake them to my list, how to create and how to add pages to the listAdd Walk Free organization pageFacebook.com/follow – follow people and add them to an interest list
Content is still private, so what shows up depends on your social network and what people have made public
You have to join to browse members if they are locked.Just put in a request. I was given permission to join the ICC – ICTR – ICTY groupGo to the LinkedIn group and search members for
From this search, you can use the follow to keep up with any new information and activities of the peopleYou can also join LinkedIn for Journalists and use it as a resource
Of course, this is for initial checks.
I don’t like the aspect of crowdsourcing that puts individuals into competition with one another over monetary awards --
This takes a little web development knowledge to implement, so if your news organization has the resources this is the way to go
This is a playlist for people to submit videos to the Houstonian new site
Grab the code and place it anywhere on a web page and you will get a submission area and a display areaVideos sometimes take a while between the submission and the pending
Play on conventions
Show them the widget
Take them to your spunge set up and show them the process of using News.google.com
Take them to some users on Twitter who are using Paper.li to cover international crimes and courts