STL Social Media Guy

Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, debating (courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

This is the story of a Twitter hashtag – how it was born, how it grew and how it exploded.

To me, it’s a fascinating tick-tock on the power of social media and the multiplier effect as the network grabs hold. The hashtag was #vpdebate, which our newsroom conceived as a way to follow the tweets from the vice presidential debate in St. Louis last night.

We wanted non-Twitterers and Twitterers alike to benefit from what viewers had to say, so we planned to display “vpdebate” tweets on STLtoday.com’s politics page.

Fresh off the Online News Association conference in September, including a session on the use of Twitter in journalism, members of our newsroom discussed using a hashtag, settled on #vpdebate, and set about trying to see if we could get it to catch on. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fascinating look at the many places conversation can happen in the social web. It’s a representation written from the perspective of public relations professionals, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting or useful for journalists. Because, obviously, they’re having conversations about us and the work we do as well.

And, they’re talking about the stories that we want to cover.

This chart was developed by Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and Jesse Thomas of JESS3. They call it the “conversation prism.” (Click for a larger version on Flickr.) Among his points on his blog, PR 2.0: Read the rest of this entry »

In the middle of last week, all my Twitter friends started buzzing about the new service that had just launched. They all wanted to try Plurk. And they wanted to know who else was trying it. Since then, it has been almost as much fun to see how other people kick the tires as it has been to kick the tires myself.

In the style of Twitter, Plurk is a playful microblogging site with a few different bells and whistles and more attractive interface — some might say more complicated — that puts your “plurks” onto a timeline. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a hearty hello after about a weeklong hiatus, thanks in part to the visit from my parents. It was great to see Dave and Ro for several days. And it would have been flat rude to sit around blogging while they were visiting. I’ll tell’em you said hi.

Second, during my hiatus, I noted Jack Lail’s recent post about the Twitter account “RU4Real” and the thousands of people it is following — as an experiment to see how many people pay attention to what they follow. (As an aside, that account is now following 5,911 people and has 163 followers.)

After about a year of Twitter membership (four months of which was trying to figure out what it was all about), I now have 122 followers — and I’m following 105.

Obviously, the more people you follow and the more people who follow you, the more often you get followed. What I’m finding, however, is that I’m getting followed more and more often by Twit-spammers, which means I’m spending more time investigating the people who follow me. Read the rest of this entry »

I loved checking in on my Twitter stream in the moments and hours after the Eliot Spitzer story broke in the New York Times. The cries of “say it ain’t so” and other similar tweets have given way to some of my favorites in the past few hours:

“Spitzer: No condom? Seriously?” from whogotthegravy.

“Wonkette points out that Spitzer could have bought a 30-inch Viking range for less” from JPaventi.

“What’s the difference between a Republican sex scandal and a Democratic sex scandal? Democrats have sex with women” from billstreeter.

I had the same feeling while watching the Oscars. Watching the comments about the speeches, the clothes, the acts — it was like watching “Best Week Ever,” but the week wasn’t over yet.

There’s got to be a way to expose more people to that kind of running commentary, without expecting people to put a hash mark in their tweets. Searches don’t necessarily do the trick. Billstreeter didn’t include “spitzer” in his tweet.