Social Media Primer

The April 6 "J-Flash" from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism contains a promo for "Likes and Tweets: Leveraging Social Media for News Sites." It's a learning module for journalists who want to explore using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the like.

I'm not all the way through it yet, but I think it could be a good tool - one in a series of tools - to help students navigate the beginning stages of social media use. My starting point was the section on Tumbr, a platform I considered using for this blog but decided against because I felt like I needed more knowledge on how it works. This would certainly have informed my decision.

I'm liking what I see in the section on maximizing impact, too. Journalists should understand the basics of Web analytics, tagging and such.

So far, I haven't come across anything about ethics of social media use by journalists. Luckily, I now know where to find such material.