In an effort to harness social chatter and integrate it with traditional reporting, In Context, a strategic business consultancy, has acquired the rights to Crowdynews, a social media aggregator. A first for South Africa and Africa, the Dutch technology amplifies the user experience of online media, converging both the conversation of crowds with professional reporting.
Marí Lategan, In Context's founder and managing partner says, "Citizens are the world's largest editorial team. They are on the ground, creating and sharing content via social media - just consider when news of Oscar's Valentine's killing broke. This creates a conundrum for editors: risk publishing unreliable citizen sources in breaking news stories, or disregard the social media wire and report 'old news'."
The technology addresses this by adding a new dimension to the editorial eco-system. It works by intelligently aggregating social media conversations - both local and international - and then filtering them into a real-time feed tailored to an editor's preferences.
"It's impossible for newsrooms to be everywhere. This balances the tussle between professional reporting and citizen journalism. For instance, on reporting about the conflict in Syria, the most relevant and popular public perspectives can be shared, in real-time, alongside an article of the same topic. This greatly enriches the publication's readability, as users receive a snapshot of views from both factual and actual sources," says Jeroen Zanen, co-founder of Crowdynews.
He goes on to say that since being developed in 2010, it has become the technology partner to some of the world's biggest news agencies in the US, Russia and Asia with successful integration into the editorial offering of Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Denver Post, The Malaysian Insider and Montreal Gazette.
Very recently, GateHouse Media, headquartered in New York and one of the largest publishers of locally-based print and online media in the US, signed-up to use the technology to implement social media integration on all of its websites.
From a South African perspective, Lategan says, "We see it as a game-changer; a state-of-the-art product that takes publishing from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0." Displayed on-screen as a widget, it can be filtered to track specific topics and trends in three different ways:
• Article widget: filters and displays most relevant tweets to an article;
• Breaking burner: searches the social media web and aggregates conversations from YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr and YouTube around a specific topic;
• Amplifinder: based on breaking burner technology, tweets around a specified topic are ranked based on engagement e.g. retweets and shares
It also engages users to increase time on site and directs traffic from external sources into the publication via shared links. "This is extremely beneficial for publishers who are looking for innovative ways in which to retain their audiences," explains Lategan.
There are no set-up fees; instead, it works on a shared revenue model based on advertising performance. Monthly revenue is not fixed and is split 50/50 with the publisher and, the more pages on which the widget lives, the higher the revenue will be.
"Social media is here to stay. This is proven by the fact that 200-million tweets are sent every day. Publishers cannot keep up with this pace, but they cannot rely on it as a reliable source either. This intelligently balances this dynamic by integrating professional reporting with the social media wire," concludes Lategan.
For more information, go to www.crowdynews.com and follow @crowdynews on Twitter.
