It used to be that the only score you needed to really worry about post-college was your credit score. Today, with social media becoming such a large part of everyday life, is there an equivalent for your online life? Amy Jo Martin suggests how a social score — the level of credibility and influence in social media — is just as if not more important than credit.
Some of the biggest news events break first on Twitter, but how do we separate legitimate news from rumors? It’s not always easy to separate the signal from the noise. This online panel helps break down citizen journalism in the context of Hurricane Sandy and how social media spread both news and rumors. I’m highly curious to see how it helps and hurts the spread the truth.
While the rise of social media has taken the world by storm, one place that has seen growing pains is China. The youth has taken to Sina Weibo quickly, with now over 400M users add counting. The new Chinese government faces a delicate balancing act, having to temper wholesale censorship with the ability to speak freely and the ever constant drive to grow a market-driven economy. As I’ve mentioned before, social media is like a bar of wet soap. The harder you squeeze, the less control you have.
The 2012 London Olympics are officially over, the medal count tallied and athletes are returning home. While the U.S. topped the charts in overall and gold medals, and the U.K. scored more golds than ever before, the real story was how prominent a role social media played. In it’s nightly broadcast, NBC even had a segment that highlighted key activities that happened in the social sphere. It’s clear the “social olympics” were a success on many levels, so much so that increasingly, social measures are being applied to athlete and event popularity. Twitter now uses “tweets per minute” as an official benchmark for gauging consumer energy.
This NYTimes infographic is one of many superb data visualizations produced during the games. It shows the relative % gain in Twitter chatter of 140 Olympic athletes over the course of the games. It’s a small sampling, but the notable athletes are represented. The beauty is that because it’s relative gain over baseline, even lesser known athletes can stand out if they were able to generate conversation. Presumably, the conversation was about their performances in the games, but often it was the athletes themselves that stimulated conversation. From diving star Tom Daley outing a troll to athletes getting distracted on social media, it’s clear it played an important roll in their mindset.
For athletes that gained big new followings, it will be interesting to see how they use social media to interact with their new fans. Best to strike while the iron, er I mean gold is still hot.
We’re getting deeper into the London 2012 Olympics and the interesting thing is how much social media is impacting mainstream coverage. Much of the exciting action is actually taking place away from the field, track, court, or pool. It is happening on Twitter. From athletes being banned for controversial tweets to journalists being banned for criticizing TV coverage, we are truly experiencing the “socialympics” in full force.
Even mainstream media cannot ignore it and Twitter even is the official narrator of the games. Nearly every broadcast has some mention of athletes’ tweets or references to things going on in the social sphere. Some athletes even learn about what’s going on through the network quicker than traditional means.
Clearly, social media has become an integral part of the Olympics that is shaping our expectations and experience. And for many, due to tape delays, and our ever present mobile connections, the second screen is now the first screen we turn to to.
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