social media

look at me, looking at them…..

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

I’ve just read a really poignant piece by Paul Carr over at TechCrunch on the dangers of citizen journalism and how ego-fuelled reporting not only loses us our humanity but also does not necessarily equal the truth:

“…the cameraman was not a professional reporter, but rather an ordinary person, just like the victim. And what did he do when he saw a young girl bleeding to death? Did he run for help, or try to assist in stemming the bleeding? No he didn’t.

Instead he pointed his camera at her and recorded her suffering, moving in closer to her face for her agonising final seconds. For all of our talk of citizen journalism, and getting the truth out, the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”

I wrote a post a while back on digital rubbernecking and James Governor captured the feeling for me then in his comment.

With the widespread availability of technology for reporting is the race to capture “the” footage making us lose our humanity? Could you watch a girl die to be the first to capture a story or would you run for help? I know what I’d do.

Cross posted with my employer’s blog

google wave – it tastes a bit like chicken

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

….and the other 9 things I noticed when having my first play with it….

  1. No one knows what they’re doing which immediately makes messing about with it good fun
  2. There’s a lot of high brow comments such as “can you see me typing” “is this working” when you first have a play with it…..and slightly stranger “what are you wearing” but perhaps that is more about the people I was waving with that the actual app
  3. People can see you typing and therefore truly appreciate how shocking you are at spelling etc.
  4. You can embed video into waves and er share YouTube clips etc.
  5. You can talk rubbish with strangers, er, just like any other comms tool or in fact real life
  6. You can work on docs together and then download them
  7. You’ll have no contacts and upon starting to import/build them, you’ll realise your address book needs sorting out as your Google contacts don’t contain anyone useful or who has heard of Wave
  8. You won’t be able to find the lightbulb for a while
  9. It’s hard to figure out how it will all fit together with the other communication apps you use/have open all day – I have started googling to see what others say, see mashable as starting point
  10. So far, I’d say it tastes a bit like chicken….

Tagging Jon Silk, Ged Carroll and Dom Whitehurst as other Wave newbies to see what you think / potential uses for PR etc.

new tool helps PRs search for URLs as well as brands on Twitter

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

PRs are often responsible for managing listening campaigns or monitoring programmes to see who’s saying what about a client, brand or product online.

There are great tools around for searching on names and also RTs but what about where links/announcements/press releases are discussed / shared without the client name or a direct retweet?

It is hard to monitor what is being said and also to pick up on any issues that may be being talked about.

A new tool called Backtweets let’s you search for whenever your URL is tweeted (doesn’t matter if it is shortened using BIT.LY etc) and adds another, more thorough search element to any monitoring campaign. Definitely worth trying.

This is cross posted on my employer’s blog.

(Spotted via  Steve Rubel )