On the Socia Media Marketing workshops that I run, we spend a fair bit of time looking at Twitter and how it can be used by businesses. Then I ask people to do some tasks on Twitter – reply to someone, Retweet, shorten a URL and carry out some searches. What, I hope, will become apparent to them is that the standard Twitter interface has its limitations and other applications add that ‘turbo’ element to what is a superb, business tool. The tool that I introduce them to is Tweetdeck and so often you can see their eyes opening to the new possibilities of using Twitter – especially as a listening tool.
Mashable runs an interesting article today, entitled Tweetdeck Infiltrates The News Room, and which informs us that
Sky News — a 24-hour UK news site owned by News Corp. — is changing up their entire newsroom to focus more on Twitter. The organization is installing Tweetdeck on staff computers to stimulate news gathering via social media, according to reports from a UK blog.
And it further says that:
The Tweetdeck rollout to staff is scheduled to be completed within the month. While journalists using Twitter is pretty commonplace, an organization-wide rollout is significant. The decision signals a change in ideology around conventional news gathering, and points to the need for journalists to use Twitter to keep pace with the flow of news.
Here’s a screengrab that I just did of my own TweetDeck open on my machine.
As you can see from it, there is one main stream of Friends’ tweets in the first column and a number of other columns made up of tweets from around the ‘Twittersphere’ on topics that I deem of importance to me: “social media”, “digital marketing”, “twitter” and “madrid”. It allows me to keep up to speed on these topics in real time and decide whether I want to learn more, reply or write about what I have seen. This article, by the way, was spurred on by a tweet I picked up on Tweetdeck, here it is:
It’s pretty interesting what’s happening here. News companies like the BBC, Sky and CNN will NEVER EVER be able to have as many people on the ground as Twitter does. Twitter, quite possibly will always break the story before these news organisations but by listening in to conversations they can now get to the news or the source of the news that much quicker. I suppose I’m surprised that it’s taken them so long!
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