Recently, Nasa used Twitter to break the news of the discovery of what appeared to be water-ice on Mars by the Phoenix Mars Lander.
Recently, Nasa used Twitter to break the news of the discovery of what appeared to be water-ice on Mars by the Phoenix Mars Lander.
The portable platform in which Nasa chose to ‘break’ this news is slowly evolving to potentially assume giant proportions. The well-worn term social media is now actively contributing to another conventional forum of ‘breaking news’.
Breaking news primarily has two connotations: The urgency and scale of impact being one of them; the exclusivity in releasing the information being the other. The phenomenon started with CNN disrupting normally scheduled programming to convey issues of utmost importance, usually in real-time. The recent dilution of this once-effective, eyeball grabbing tool, however, is not my present concern.
The points I want to talk about are:
- Democratisation of the concept
- Proliferation of the platform
- Portability of content
- Measurement of merit
- An equivalent of Google proportions to opinion building?
CNN’s Tori Blasé is a regular ‘tweeter’ and admits to receiving fresh news from her followers along with reviews and responses for her work. This gets translated into news, but the source is no longer the ‘traditional’ journalist. People are getting involved in the process of creating the content. Social capital (a term associated with Twitter again) is slowly but surely, gaining currency.
The platform of the breaking news innovation was the TV. But now, along with provision of content expanding its sources, there is also a proliferation in platforms.
The Internet and the mobile phone are the most popular entrants. News at any time can be relayed to channels through SMS and updates can be posted for public viewing on websites like Twitter, Jaiku and Yammer.
The most important point I think, is the portability of the content. The within-140-character posts on Twitter or short messages over the phone have more potential to maintain interest than long articulated discourses on blogs. Whenever, wherever, you can post a short message on your account for your ‘followers’ to mull over.
The biggest innovation in this respect and the reason why I became interested about this exciting prospect is the new tool on the API (application programming interface) of Twitter — ‘twInfluence’. It gauges the reach of tweets and the people who read them. It analyses velocity (how quickly you’ve gained quality followers) and social capital (how many high-influence people follow you) and a comprehensive listing is provided. It is sure to encourage creative competition.
Google is the messiah of our age, delivering us from confusion in the rapidly expanding digitised information superhighways. But what sites like Twitter are doing, is building opinion and packaging it in an effective way.
Along with fresh content, it invites intelligent response and hyper-linking for substantiation of arguments made. Popular tweets recently have been ‘tweetsfromgaza’; a very opinionated forum about the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks tweet. No invasive red alerts of ‘breaking news’ when there is actually none. But serious issues, serious discussions. All with real-time updates. That’s the beauty of it.
The writer is vice-president and head of knowledge, Mudra Radar, a media planning and buying agency. He can be reached at i.datta@mudraradar.com
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