Easy steps to becoming a social media adopter

Prof Berger addressed journalists, trainers and media specialists from Africa gathered at Rhodes University on the various tools to push and pull information at this, the largest gathering of media on the continent, annually.

It is important to remember that the fact that South Africa does not have high speed broadband Internet access (no matter what our Internet service providers try tell you, our Internet, wireless or grounded, is not anywhere near the speed of European or US internet access and speed). So our growth is stymied to a certain extent.

However, when we do have high speed broadband and mobile content becomes cheaper as the cellphone companies start sharing real revenue with content providers, we will see an explosion in how we use, consume and deliver news and information via the Internet and mobile phones. So, there is still an opportunity for anyone in South Africa to upskill and become an ‘early adopter' of these social media skills and technologies for your own career, work, for your clients and business.

A ‘Digital Day'

Are you ready for your Digital Day?

Berger explains that a “Digital Day” will include a day in which you consume your news and information and push out information, advertising on many many different channels which will reflect the absolute change in media. From multimedia, open-source networks where mainstream media and journalists collaborate with bloggers and ‘citizen journalists' to producing news on all types of platforms – to personalised radio, communities and broadcast channels that include mobile phones, satellite, podcasts and via RSS, wikis, widgets, etc, to organise those news flows.

We are in fact, currently all involved in building “value-added networks” or communities.

Says Berger: “To me, it's helluva exciting, whether we like it or not, we have to be ready for a Digital Day. Ten years ago, someone said the cellphone was a unique instrument only for use in cities, and only for the rich. Look at it now!”

He's absolutely right: stats alluded to at the conference predict that there will be 400 million cellphones in use on the African continent by 2010. South Africa alone has 40 million cellphone users…

Social media aggregation toolkit

Anyone who needs to be kept informed on a daily basis, whether in media, communications, marketing, advertising or any business, cannot possibly rely on traditional media sources only, any longer: print newspapers and magazines, TV and radio. If you are business-savvy, you are connected to the Internet via your computer and/or mobile phone and you are consuming some of your news and information needs online, by getting email newsletters from various media, such as Bizcommunity.com, or you are searching for it through Google search engine or other like Yahoo.

There are many tools online at present to make it easier for information to be personalised, packaged as you want to receive it and sent to you, all your choice.

“The new Internet is about database fields rather than a series of documents, therefore you can separate things out as different fields and cross-link – all automatically. With search tools like Google and others, one can now customise how one searches and receives information,” Berger explained.

Here is Prof Berger's easy-to-use startup kit to set up your news and information feeds, which he shared with delegates today:

1. Google alerts: go to www.google.com/coop/cse/ and create your “own” Google search engine to push and pull information towards you. Google alerts push information to you daily without you having to do anything except specify your key search words or tags. Remember when, for example, putting an alert on your name, to always put “quote” marks around your name to get the alert in its entirety, ie, “name surname”; “company name”.

2. RSS feeds: RSS feeds carry updates from sites you are interested in consuming news and information from to your desktop in whichever format you want. Set up Google RSS Reader in your browser: www.google.com/reader then package your news how you want it. Sites like www.newsgator.com and www.netvibes.com can take your RSS feeds and you can create a one-stop home page to manage your news feeds. The whole point about the new Internet, so-called social media, is that there are communities being formed: communities of interest. They are surfacing, you're in touch all the time. Particularly blogs – the beauty about blogs is that they are Internet-based and are searchable in fields. You can use RSS to get that stuff sent to you. As far as aggregation is concerned, there are local and African blog aggregators categorising blogs, ie, www.amatomu.com, www.afrigator.com . You too can tag (key words) your RSS feeds. Go to the Technorati site, for example, www.technorati.com to put in your tags. Convert an old site to RSS feeds using www.feedity.com.Create RSS for any web page.

3. Firefox: can save RSS feeds as bookmarks on your browser: www.mozilla.com .

4. Get RSS headlines sent as email alerts: www.rssfwd.com, ie, type in the blog or site you want or simply cut and paste their URL/RSS feeds link.

5. Yahoo Pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com, are a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mash up content from around the web. Simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. For example, you can create your own feed on the South African media to ‘fetch' your news.
   

The future?

Roland Stanbridge, a founder of Rhodes University's New Media Lab and now director of the Global Journalism Masters at Orebro University in Sweden, noted during question time in this presentation by Prof Berger, that there has been a total paradigm shift in media in the last 12 years.

“Mainstream media are certainly taking blogs seriously – and using them in news sourcing. There are so many factors changing the media landscape. Primarily, it happens with broadband access. What happens in Europe and America doesn't take long to get through to Africa. We are at a transitional period where very exciting things are happening with media.”

Stanbridge, along with other speakers, has warned that when South Africa gets access to high-speed broadband, the Internet will explode in access and usage.

• For more from Highway Africa, go to our blog:

• Highway Africa: Monday [Zoopy videos]
  
• Highway Africa: Bloggers versus columnists debate [Zoopy videos]