There was a whole lot of “Tweeting” going on at the recent NPC luncheon featuring Chris Silk. Member interest in social media communication was very apparent in the active question and answer period. Silk, social media editor for the Naples Daily News, treated the crowd  to a “Day in the life of a Social Media Journalist ", with a brief introduction to the tools the newspaper uses to stay connected to the community in the shifting media landscape.

“Twitter’ is a microblog which allows “Tweeple” to update their status using only 140 characters in a “Tweet.”
 
NDN, according to Silk, is actively participating in the social media experience using both Facebook and Twitter to involve community members in news stories. Facebook, he pointed out, has an audience of 60% women, and 60% of those are under 30.

Noting a typical example of a successful social media involvement, Silk said a “tweet’ from someone who saw a 5 car crash on I-75 alerted the paper about the accident.

At the holidays NDN decided to run a list of restaurants open on Christmas Eve. Within one hour,12 restaurants had chimed in. In two hours, 24 had responded and it continued to increase hourly. This is the type of interest social media can generate, he added.

Celebrities are active in using Twitter to communicate. Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher are two he mentioned.

Guess it’s time to start “Twalking”, Retweeting and not Mistweeting. Better than being “Twitterphobics.”