In my lectures and workshops, I've used the experience built over eight years of doing social media at the BBC to (hopefully) help students and staff learn about some of the exciting opportunities to use social media to find contacts, stories, and engage with audiences in ways not previously possible.
With the future of print journalism, in particular, hanging in the wind, it's increasingly important that media organisations, and those they employ, learn to embrace, rather than fear, social media.
Clay Shirky, a keen observer of what's happening in the mainstream media, explains that the once unthinkable - that newspapers and other mainstream media products would cease to exist:
"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem."
A few years ago, the debate between journalists and bloggers, some of them describing thmeselves as "citizen journalists", raged fiercely. That debate has shifted, with journalists and bloggers now largely asking the same question: how to get paid for their craft.
All is not lost for journalists, content providers and their distributors who adapt - and that is exactly what many of my students are learning to do by learning about and experimenting with social media.
Social media provides tools and techniques that allow those who use them creatively to do things on a scale, and at a depth, which better focuses their efforts - both in terms of reaching out to audiences and practicing their craft.
Here at Headshift we strongly believe that social media is a vehicle for change and that this change can be good. And we're helping a number of forward thinking media organisations, newspaper publishers and niche publishers find their way through the fog. We also, through the courses I teach, and those taught elsewhere by some of my colleagues, are getting to know quite a few journalists and future journalists who are proactively utilising social media in their craft. We offer a number of unique consulting and training opportunities for our partners - if you'd like to know more.
Whether you're interested in simply learning more about social media, or want to drive participation around your content or broadcasts using innovative social tools and techniques, we're able to help. Get in touch if you'd like to find out how we can help you make your media propositions more social.