Blogroll

Thursday 29 November 2012

NYT appoints Mideast journalist social media minder over controversial musings


                                                      
Social media crisis management
While in Gaza reporting on the recent Israeli attack there, Judi Rudoren, the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the New York Timeswrote several Facebook entries that caused substantial controversy.
 "When I talk to people who just lost a relative, or who are gathering belongings from a bombed-out house, they seem a bit ho-hum," she said on her Facebook page.
The comments came off as insensitive and the reaction was sharp, not only from media pundits, but also from dismayed readers.
A critic wrote: "It's been observed that war makers can dehumanize an enemy by making their cultural values seem bizarre. The specific notion that Muslims love death and thus don't grieve their civilians has long been used to justify violence against them and to dehumanize them."
Rudoren reacted by extensively engaging her critics on Twitter and denied the meanings attributed to her. 
Ironically, the journalist had previously been criticized by Israel supporters such as Jeffery Goldberg who demanded that Rudoren stop using Twitter based on concerns that she was engaging Israel critics too much! 
And now her paper, concerned about correspondents airing unfiltered and unedited thoughts, is ” taking steps to make sure that Ms. Rudoren's further social media efforts go more smoothly. The foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, is assigning an editor on the foreign desk in New York to work closely with Ms. Rudoren on her social media posts.
Is this overreacting? sugarcoated censorship? Do they have a right to stifle the field reporter who is giving her readers first hand candid accounts?
I understand the Israeli-Palestinian issue is a hot tin roof. It has already cost two top journalists their jobs over comments made on Twitter and elsewhere.
You are also told that journalists should not come through as activists taking sides. Yet such decisions take all the fun out of social media by turning otherwise authentic thoughts into clinical, overly PC exhausted lines which could have been uttered by anyone, even a machine if you will.
I think the fact that Rudoren herself engaged with the critics in healthy dialog was enough to handle the crisis and the paper did not have to single her out over social media postings. They could have said that everyone is getting some orientation, and worked on a social media policy for the staff to avoid future blunders.
As long as her published reports are balanced and cover both sides of the conflict, the paper can step aside and watch its ambassadors work the virtual room and mingle with the crowd. Reporters of such caliber are not kids on the playground. They are responsible grown-ups and can handle criticism. The paper just needs to issue a disclaimer and say the opinions aired outside the paper are their own.
But then, they mainly owe their allure and influence to the job. Is there a safe shade of gray somewhere in between?

(Disclaimer: the reference to 50 shades of grey does not mean the blogger is a fan. In fact, she has not hated a mainstream hit so intensely in a long time. And she is not a prude, nor a sniffy highbrow. She loves Belle de Jour and Marian Keyes.)


Saturday 24 November 2012

The only thing worse than being talked about, is...


Not being talked about? Or not knowing who's saying what to whom about you?

There are plenty of free tools to tell you just that 

Pure platform metrics
 Twentyfeet aggregates your activity from various social media platforms and services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google analytics and bit.ly, so you can get the full picture of your online presence. Then, you can determine which of your activities are most valuable.

                                            


It provided stats on when your account received significant attention, and alerts account owners – by email for example -- when attention and activity have dramatically risen or dropped. It makes the decision based on the size of an account’s following, so one person’s five is another’s 500.

So the best advantage is that you will not miss important changes.

It does not provide instant gratification, as it takes time to build data, good for checking weekly or monthly to have insight into your activity and influence over a period of time.



Narrow down and zoom in 
 Socialbro, a quick and easy Twitter sauce, shows your new followers, recent un-follows, people who are not following you back, or whom YOU are not following back. It also tells you who is not active on Twitter.
The dashboard is a time saver.
                                           

Get down to business
Kissmetrics $$$ is a lot like Google analytics.

·         How people are coming to your site

·         Which channels are bringing you the most people who convert to customers

·         What your conversion rate is

·         Where people are falling out of your signup or checkout process

·         How successfully customers are onboarding and getting started with your site

·         Who the customers are who start a trial and never start using your product

·         Whether your customers are really using the core features of your site

  
                                                 


According to this article, nearly every company these days uses some form of analytics tool to figure out if its business decisions are working. But Google Analytic is limited by the timeline of data it can analyze. When you sign up for Google Analytics, it begins gathering insights on all current and future information. But it cannot pull in past data for evaluation. KISSmetrics hopes to fill that gap with Database Sync, which pulls in all of the information from a company’s entire database to find trends.