Can Social Media Save the Newspaper Industry?
Amid the bankruptcies, layoffs and budget cuts in journalism, one beat has prevailed. Behold the rise of the social media director.
About 200 social media directors now exist at newspapers, book publishers, magazines and television news stations. Most have taken on their positions in the last two years. Rarely offline, their job is to tweet, ping, blog and friend-find throughout the day, building and interacting with new audiences, promoting media brands and sometimes breaking news.
"It’s a tweetfest out there," Dirk Smillie writes, asking whether journalists should be so eagerly embracing Twitter, given that they can’t use it to make money. "Maybe it’s time marketers stop hyping social media as a newsroom moneymaker and admit it’s just a great conversation starter," he writes.
Read the rest of Dirk’s article at Forbes.com.
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As much as I enjoy immersing myself in the social web, I must admit that I haven’t yet determined how to process and share information as efficiently as I know that I should.
Thus I am naturally interested in tools or services that offer potential solutions to that problem.
Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet reports on a new iPhone/iPod Touch application announced this week at LeWeb Conference in Paris whose purpose is to allow you to read and share your most relevant content from your RSS and social streams.
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“Ever wish that Twitter was smart enough to tell you which tweets included content that was of most interest to you? While that’s likely a longer term feature for the popular social network, a company called my6sense has developed an iPhone/iPod Touch application called mytweetsense, that offers that content control now. The company is announcing mytweetsense at LeWeb Conference.
“my6sense is best known for its relevance rankings or “digital intuition” for RSS and social streams, and is applying that technology to implement mytweetsense. Think about creating a station on Pandora Radio and finely tuning the musical content over time based on your interests. Eventually, the station supplies you with songs that fit your aural interests. my6sense — and now mytweetsense — take similar action with your own social streams. According to the company, the service filters the tweets which contain links and intuitively recognizes what is important to each user, presenting the most relevant content first.”
Read the remainder of Jennifer’s article …
The Social Media Marketing Book
This book looks very interesting. I think I’ll add it to my Christmas list.
Are you looking to take advantage of social media for your business or organization? With easy-to-understand introductions to blogging, forums, opinion and review sites, and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, this book will help you choose the best — and avoid the worst — of the social web’s unique marketing opportunities.
The Social Media Marketing Book guides you through the maze of communities, platforms, and social media tools so you can decide which ones to use, and how to use them most effectively. With an objective approach and clear, straightforward language, Dan Zarrella, aka “The Social Media & Marketing Scientist,” shows you how to plan and implement campaigns intelligently, and then measure results and track return on investment. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or new to the social web, this book will take you beyond the jargon to social media marketing mastery.- Make sense of this complicated environment with the help of screenshots, graphs, and visual explanations
- Understand the history and culture of each social media type, including features, functionality, and protocols
- Get clear-cut explanations of the methods you need to trigger viral marketing successes
- Choose the technologies and marketing tactics most relevant to your campaign goals
- Learn how to set specific goals for your campaigns and evaluate them according to key performance indicators
Twitter Tips for Beginners [VIDEO]
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger graciously shares one of his educational Twitter presentations. Even though it’s targeted at beginning users, there’s real value here for experienced tweeters as well. Thanks, Darren.
Timesaving Features in Lightroom 2
There are a plethora of useful and informative web resources for Adobe Lightroom 2, but some of the best content comes from Adobe itself.
Here’s the latest episode of The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost, in which she discusses the little things in Lightroom that can really influence your workflow:
After a long time of totally ignoring my Posterous account, this video posted by Steve Rubel has led me back, and I think I’m already getting hooked.
No real surprise in the ultimate result of the investigation, but it’s interesting to note how the information that the police uncovered about Sahel Kazemi’s mental state differs from what her friends reported to the media immediately after the shooting.
How safe are college campuses?
My daughter is heading off to college this fall at the University of Texas, and except for the typical parental feeling of loss when your child leaves the nest, I haven’t felt much anxiety over it.
She’s a bright young woman, who convinces me more with each passing day that she is ready and equipped to begin this next great adventure in her life.
She took significant responsibility for the college application process and after accepting at UT, has been handling most of the little things that need to be done before school starts in August.
That said, there is a mildly gnawing concern over her safety – both on campus and around town – while she’s away at school. I haven’t thought much about it lately until something I read earlier today on the interwebs.
It seems that my alma mater – the University of Louisville – is having a bit of a crime problem on their main campus.
The article relates instances of students who, walking alone, have been randomly attacked. They’ve lost backpacks, computers, or worse. Crime, mostly theft, has doubled on campus from 2008 to 2009.
Unsurprisingly, these facts are not being brought up in UofL’s summer freshman student orientations, much as they were not when I attended the UT orientation with my daughter a couple of weeks back.
I’m not a worrier by nature, but I think I’m going to spend some time over the next few weeks researching crime statistics for the University of Texas campus.
I’ve got so much to learn …
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the final day of WordCamp Dallas 2009 on Sunday due to prior commitments. 
Though I was able to watch portions of Sunday’s sessions live on USTREAM, it was not nearly enough to replicate the experience of being there, and I look forward to the eventual posting of the session recordings at the WordCamp Dallas web site.
Having only recently made the decision to create a blog on WordPress.com, and not yet ready to host it myself (though I’m definitely going to learn how to do that), I came away highly impressed with the WordPress product and the ecosystem which surrounds it. Clearly the people who created, extend and use it truly love it, and the enthusiasm over the product was palpable all weekend.
I’m excited about ramping up my own WordPress skill set to see where that can take me professionally. Additionally, I look forward to engaging with some of the people I met at the camp and am now following on Twitter. I also have signed up for the DFW WordPress Meetup Group and plan to attend its next monthly meeting in July.
Thanks to all of the folks who helped put on the event, and I look forward to not only next year’s WordCamp, but many more conversations about it between now and then.
An early take on WordCamp 2009
We just finished lunch at WordCamp Dallas. After a fast start, the wheels have begun to wobble a bit.
Tony Cecala and Cali Lewis gave informative and energetic presentations that were very uwell-received by the crowd.
Then Liz Strauss began reviewing and commenting on organizer John Pozadzides’ blog in real time. Initially fun and snarky, it ran way too long and began to feel like a bad, boring project review.
First up in the PM is a presentation by Lorrelle Van Fossen on using categories in WordPress. I’m sure it won’t be as dry as it sounds. 
![Four in a Row [Explored]](http://static.flickr.com/7018/6782703137_25b3b3b811_t.jpg "Four in a Row [Explored]")
