Leadership Fairfield County 2013 Concludes with Talks on Social Media

 Many of The Business Council’s initiatives build programming with a mind toward helping members build their personal and professional networks. With such a focus on how businesses and individuals connect with their peers, it was only natural for Leadership Fairfield County 2013 to center its final session on social media. Meeting at Sacred Heart University’s new Graduate Center in Stamford’s Landmark Square, the 2013 LFC class examined the impact social media marketing company of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter on the landscape of business, news, the economy, and individual privacy. SHU’s Assistant Professor of Marketing David Taylor opened the morning with a huge statistic: there are now approximately 500 million tweets published every day, and 53% of those users are tweeting brand marketing—which could mean they’re marketing a physical product, a service, an experience, or even themselves (also known as personal branding). This is evidence, he said, that the advent of social media has brought with it a major shift in how companies get people to buy what they’re selling. “Instead of getting the message to consumers,” he said, “businesses now have to have conversations with consumers. Instead of advertising on a ‘Marketer to Consumer’ model, consumers are marketing companies’ products to each other…Tight brand control doesn’t really exist anymore.” Because of social media, news too will never be the same. The individual Internet user’s ability to share interests and discoveries has changed the timeliness of news, and dictates, to a degree, what’s actually considered news in the first place. Jonathan Krackehl, CEO & President of hyper-local online news station It’s Relevant, explained. “Social media creates a constant need to have something interesting so viewers [or readers] will share,” he said. It’s Relevant’ s response to the trend is to provide a different editorial focus than traditional TV. “We largely don’t cover crime, car wrecks, or the police blotter social media marketing tips unless those events affect a large portion of the community,” Krackehl said. Instead, his station covers stories on human interests and policy decisions at the local level. And, of course, the Internet and social media have altered how consumers receive their news. It’s Relevant is purely an online news source, delivering content both through its website and as channels on digital entertainment hardware Roku’s streaming service.

Iraqis on Social Media Fight Extremists Online

“The first one is comprised of educated locals who already have well-established social media accounts and who may also have done some blogging,” he told NIQASH. “These people have been able to leave a clear record and in fact, many have been diarying events around the country, using social media for marketing presenting facts about what’s happening from on the ground.” These sites include the blogger known as Mosul Eye – which seems quite likely to be a group of people operating together – and Anbar Daily. A further category consists of online Iraqis who have partisan interests at the heart of what they’re posting and the information they’re sending out. Often they promote inaccurate information and propaganda; for example, they may only publish information that is in complete support of Shiite Muslim militias, who have played a valuable role in fighting against extremists but whose behaviour has also been problematic in some cases. A third category of Iraqis online are those who mostly re-tweet or re-post news. They mostly use official news sources – which again, are not always unbiased or completely accurate. Nonetheless these locals could be considered mostly as promoters of news, al-Hashimi suggests. Indicating how seriously Iraqis are starting to take the online battle against how to use social media for marketing the extremists is another organisation, Iraqi Media House. In February the media monitoring organisation, headed by respected Iraqi editor, Mushreq Abbas of the Al Hayat news agency in Iraq, released a report on how the IS group has managed to use the Internet to disseminate its messages.

Social media usage grows among business journalists

Four out of five business journalists use Twitter during their workday, while half are blogging, according to an informal survey of business journalists conducted by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. And more than three-fourths of the business journalists social media marketing job description who responded also use Facebook and LinkedIn for job purposes. The survey results show the growing usage of social media and other new technology among business journalists in addition to the traditional tools of the job such as a computer, a telephone and a notebook. For example, Bloomberg News, one of the largest employers of business journalists in the country, recently hired a social media director to train its reporters and editors on how to use Facebook and Twitter more effectively. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who covers television and digital media, has more than 62,000 followers on Twitter. “The day when business journalists could simply report and write stories about business and the economy using traditional resources have long passed,” said Kevin Noblet, president of SABEW and managing editor of wealth management coverage at Dow Jones Newswires. “Now they have to be constantly online, looking for and soliciting information in new and unique ways and providing business news consumers with information in multiple formats throughout the day.” Social media technology is also changing how business journalists interact with their sources and how business news is first reported. Last month, Pacific Investment Management Co. co-founder Bill Gross posted on Twitter that The Wall Street Journal was working on a story about the management company’s losses from investing in Lehman Brothers — a full 10 days before the story appeared in the paper. Still, nearly half social media marketing news of the business journalists who responded to the survey said that the new technology had made their job easier. Less than a third said their work was now harder, while 20 percent said there was no difference. More than 73 percent of the business journalists who responded say they use social media to find story ideas and sources. Another 69 percent said they use these new tools to contact sources they already know, while nearly a third use social media to interview sources.