The power of the press release and two-tier social media.

Our lesson on Thursday was about local and national newspapers. I made the point that local newspapers are (I'm making a huge generalisation here based upon no evidence) underfunded, and have underpaid journalists. These journalists have little time to check sources and tend towards just re-writing press releases. This bad journalism actually can work in the favour of certain groups.
For example, in December last year I was involved in a movement which sought publicity about an event, to achieve this they sent a press release to the Oxford Times and the Oxford Mail. The Oxford Times dutifully printed the main details about the event in their following edition.
On Thursday evening I went to another meeting with a different group who also proposed using this tactic. I've now recognised that press releases are a powerful tool and when combined with a lazy journalist can be used to achieve free publicity.


Second interesting thing was the comparison between my audience on Twitter and on Facebook. The people who follow me on Twitter follow me primarily because of my content. A perfect example is that when I complained about a BBC Have-Your-Say debate relating to gay rights I was followed by Attitude magazine. But when I tweet I don't just tweet for my followers on Twitter, my message is re-published on Facebook as a status message. It's on Facebook that the conversation grows in detail with comments under each status. This means my social media is a two-tier system. My Facebook audience follows me because they know me in real life.
Here's some information about the two audiences:
Of my 44 followers on Twitter 10 of them live in Oxford.
Of my 174 'friends' on Facebook 88 of them go to the Cherwell school.

Conflict between the two is clear when I want to post something relevant to Cherwell and I know it would be inappropriate to post it to Twitter because it's not relevant to the audience.
Also most activity I see on Facebook takes place outside of school times. On the other hand the tweets by people I follow carry on pretty evenly throughout the day (and night) because of the differences in time zones.

From that I can conclude that Twitter is a global network and Facebook is a local one. Then again that was probably obvious from the start.

Now I think I have a 1 hour timed essay to do for Tuesday (on the local/national thing) which will be up here shortly.