The level of perceived credibility and trustworthiness on social media is becoming one topic of research currently being discussed in 2012. Articles and books like Return on Influence by Mark Schaefer have been written discussing this very issue related to determining and measuring influence on social media. Researchers and practitioners have discussed what are some of the possible attributes that are part of the influential equation that seems to make some organizations and individuals powerful and credible above others. I had worked on a research project along with some of my colleagues about the role personality played in determine influence among SMIs.
I would like to highlight two research projects and studies that have really put this topic in the minds of a lot of social media professionals, particularly crisis communicators. The first is the recent study produced by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon that looks at how to make your tweet updates more credible and trustworthy. Mashable had a great overview post discussing the research and the main findings that the researchers found. Several characteristics that were mentioned were the fact that individuals that had a URL, a profile picture, and the author is retweeted and mentioned are just some of the factors that came up in this particular study.
The other project comes from the University of Colorado called Project EPIC, which is a program and initiative to provide information about a crisis to the public. This is exactly what people want in a crisis situation – a centralized location where they can get a range of information about a particular event. What is also great about what the Project EPIC is the fact that they provide a guideline and feature called Tweak the Tweet on how to communicate and tag your tweets appropriately on Twitter for emergency managers and others to monitor. This feature allows users to be informed of how to use specific tags to get help, state where they are in terms of location (city, neighborhood, state, etc), and what information they can provide (ex. tree down, power out, flood, etc). This is a wonderful tool for both crisis communicators and community residents to have as a resource.
For crisis communicators, this is invaluable information to determine how we can strategically frame our updates appearing on this particular social media platform to be effective in reaching our audiences and be perceived as a credible source. However, while I think that these are important characteristics to consider – I do believe that the credibility and trustworthiness of the source comes before an incident hits. Plus, it all depends on the situation that is at the focus of the view of whether or not a source is credible or not. So, consistency of content and follower interaction along with subject matter expertise are other attributes that should be explored further in the lines of determining influence via social media. Education and awareness of the features of Project EPIC need to be shared across communities before a crisis occurs – we have to make sure that people are aware of this site and make sure that they have the understanding and information needed to be able to accomplish the task of writing tweets to appear in the appropriate format with the tagged information.
One thing to take into consideration for both of these research projects is the fact that both focused on Twitter – and each social media platform has their own equation to who is influential or credible on the site. Each platform has a specific audience they are reaching – some are larger than others – but this also has to be taken into consideration. I believe that there are variations of influence levels for each social media platform site – and the key that organizations may want to consider looking at is see what is their range of influence across social media platforms and determine what message strategies they need to adapt and frame particularly for the social media platform in question. We need to further explore other tools that would be helpful like both of these projects for other platforms and continue to discuss this growing issue in the professional and research community within public relations and crisis communications.
Hope you all are having a great day.
Best Wishes,
Karen
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