Twitter is the new headline: how blogging and social messaging are complementary

Recently, media critic Jay Rosen mocked this post as dumbest newspaper column about Twitter ever. In the column, a game critic blogger at the New Orleans paper attempted to parody Twitter by writing his review of an xbox game in 140 character increments. The reason the reviewer’s approach is silly is that the columnist misses the complementary relationship between Twitter and blogging. If you are writing an article, you don’t write the article itself on Twitter. You write a normal essay, and then share the link on Twitter with a catchy phrase.

Is Twitter really killing blogging?

There is a common meme Twitter is killing blogging, since bloggers are now spending their time and sharing their ideas on Twitter. As Robin Hamman observed last fall in this Headshift post, Twitter (and Facebook) are siphoning off a lot of the energy from personal diary blogging – the proverbial post about what I ate for lunch – or blogging for simple link sharing. Anecdotally, some bloggers observe that they post less frequently because they tweet ideas more often.

While Twitter may be siphoning blog energy from very short posts, Twitter also increases interest in more substantive blog posts and discussion around blog ideas. An increasing amount of blog traffic is driven by status updates from Facebook and Twitter. Through link posting and “retweets” – the social custom of forwarding a link or quote to one’s Twitter followers, , the social network is used to share and spread interesting posts and call attention to good bloggers. Essentially, Twitter is the new headline.

Professionals use social messaging to develop ideas.

On the public internet, reactions and conversation about blog post ideas are taking place in Twitter, in comments on Facebook status updates, and on FriendFeed, a site that aggregates and enables discussion about links and updates from many social media sites together. A number of online journalists are developing rich processes for developing ideas using these social media. Journalism professor Jay Rosen uses phased process, using Twitter for mindcasting short thoughts and links, Friendfeed for assembling links and ideas together with discussion, and his blog to publish long-form essays based on the ideas. Scientist and science blogger Bora Zivkovic writes about a similar social journalistic workflow, carrying the process from ideas shared in Twitter through composing articles and books. Yahoo social design expert and blogger Christian Crumlish has used the workflow starting with Twitter and extending through writing a book, using a wiki as a tool for book editing and feedback for O’Reilly’s Designing Social Interfaces. Using these workflows, these professional journalists and bloggers are developing higher quality ideas and documents through turbo-charged idea sharing and peer review.

Value in the Workplace

The relationship between social messaging and blogging can be particularly valuable in the workplace, where social messaging is used to call attention to timely and relevant work-related posts and updates. Sharing blog posts, links and wiki updates using Socialtext Signals enables timely discussion without interrupting people’s work day.

Making it easy to share and discuss motivates people to write useful posts, and update information on wiki pages, because they know they know the content will be shared, discussed and used with colleagues – they are not just contributing content into a black hole. Socialtext Signals is designed to facilitate this sort of sharing – when adding new content, writers are prompted to share a summary of the update on Signals. And we’re sensitive to business confidentiality – only people who have permission to see the content can see the Signal about the new content.

In summary, social messaging and blogs are highly complementary. The role of Twitter and Socialtext Signals isn’t to limit thoughts to what can can be expressed in 140 characters or less, it’s to call attention to longer-form writing, and to improve those ideas within the social network. Using the techniques of turbo-charged peer review being developed by professional bloggers and journalists, organizations can use social tools to be smarter and more responsive.

Facebook, Socialtext Signals, Twitter

---

Comments (0)