On Monday 28th July, July, BAKE and Pawa 254 held a workshop at the PAWA Hub. The workshop was to focus on blogging and social media tools in journalism. Our Chairman Kennedy Kachwanya and Sam Wakoba from Techmoran were the facilitators of the 3-day workshop.
Here is a summary of what was discussed on day 1
Kennedy Kachwanya – Understanding Social media
The first thing you need ot do is define social media. Social media is the social interaction among people in which they create, share or exchange information and ideas using mobile and web-based technologies. A few of the technologies used in social media are Magazines, Microblogging, Internet Forums, Wikis, Weblogs , Social network, Social blogs and Podcasts.
He talked about how you use these different technologies to spread a message to the public. You can choose to use blogs and do blog posts, use social networks and do wall posting and share pictures or join forums and other social network communities.
He also talked of the Honey Comb of SM – Kelley School of Business. It explains what social media is all about as is seen in the image below. Once you understand this, then you will understand social media and how it operates.
Sam Wakoba – The age of Social News
Sam Wakoba chose to focus on how people are using social media as a platform to share news. He said that media houses are now shifting to using social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to share news items. What drives this content is a mix of attention, emotion, and reaction.
He also made a comparison between traditional media and social media as a source of news. Social media is –Shallow, unverified, not original, has lots of rumors while traditional media is in-depth as stories are researched, it is authoritative and deals with facts rather than rumors.
He also pointed out that we should be careful about what we share because despite claiming a retweet is not an endorsement, once you retweet some news, people will assume you support the thought in the tweet.