I’ve been to a couple of advanced social media and online journalism training sessions in the past few weeks, and the mantra that keeps resounding in my mind as a starting point isn’t from either of those. It’s from a talk at Atrium studios by Suffolk County Council arts development manager Jayne Knight. She said to the art students:
“You need to be on social media. Otherwise people can’t read up on you secretly and you’ll never be invited to any meetings.”
The advice from the training was mostly oriented to people in situations where their performance is measured in follows and retweets. If you’re one of those people, you will have to echotweet soundbites along with the herd, lard your words with @handles and #hashtags, court any and all interactions, construct an appearance of being always-on. That is the conventional instruction on social media for journalists today. There is also a case for microblogging as a quality medium, for deliberately being unpredictable so that your stream remains unique and irreplaceable with another, but I haven’t heard anyone else make it. Although I have seen people do it.