New Secrets: All media are social- Presidential Edition

When the second edition of Mass Communication: Living in a Media World came out as a CQ Press title back in 2007, one of the biggest new features was the introduction of the “Seven Truths They Don’t Want You To Know About the Media.” Other than the switch last year to calling them the Seven Secrets, they have stayed pretty much unchanged.  But lots has changed in the media world over the last decade.The old secrets are as relevant as ever, but we’re ready to think about some new ones.

There will still be just seven secrets, and most of them will stay the same, but I’ll be trying out a some candidates here over the next few weeks to see what you think. 

New Secret: All Media Are Social

I was fortunate enough to go hear President Obama speak at the Baxter Arena near the University of Nebraska Omaha campus Wednesday, and predictably, I spent a fair amount of time sharing my experiences on social media.  I did quite a bit of my Facebooking and Twittering using my iPad as the battery on my phone checked out fairly quickly due to age and cold.

I got the expected reactions from friends to the selfie of my wife and I standing in line and of the crowd coming into the arena.

I also was passing on news about the president’s visit from social media guru Dr. Jeremy Lipshultz, and while I was on his Twitter page, Omaha World Herald weather reporter Nancy Gaarder got a great photo of me at work:

Now in this case, we were interacting because she was sitting behind me and we got to talking face-to-face.  But this was only the first of many social interactions for the day based on social media posts.

University of Nebraska President Hank Bounds was an opening speaker on the program, and since he’s the head of the university system I teach in, I sent out an image of him on the stage, which was then followed up by a favoriting of it by President Bounds while he was still at the event:

Again, a pretty reliable connection as I indirectly work for President Bounds and we’ve met in person on a couple of occasions.

As we all waited for the president to appear, I tweeted out a photo of the press corps area on the floor of the arena, along with the hashtag #POTUSatUNO, one of several in use at the event, and before long I picked up a response Marjorie Sturgeon, a multimedia journalist for Omaha’s Action 3 News, who had not been previously following me:

Meanwhile, as I was sharing my photos and observations, I was also sharing news from the Omaha World Herald, UNO student journalists, and other observers.

So this brings us to another New Secret candidate: All media are social. By this, I mean that no matter what media you are using – whether it be a legacy newspaper or television station or a social media channel like Facebook, we are always interacting with news through multiple forms of social media.  Media recall research tells us that one of the best predictors of the news we will remember are the news we talk about.  So nothing is going to make news more salient to us than sharing it socially – whether face-to-face, with friends on Facebook, or with the entire world via Twitter.

In the end, of course, it was all about getting to hear and see the president in person, but it was also a great opportunity to interact with media people at a wide range of levels.

(Yes, President Obama is there on the right hand side of the stage, thus illustrating why real photographers use big telephoto lenses!)