In the autumn of 2009, a group of exchange students in the University of Applied Sciences of Utrecht got a task to make a research project on the current situation of Social Media. The group consisted of 5 people with really different backgrounds and opinions. Two Finnish, one Austrian, one Belgian and one Taiwanese put their heads together to explore the enormous world of Social Media. In this paper, Social Media stands for Online Social Media in other words: websites that allow people to communicate with each other, share opinions and ideas, public or semi-public profiles for the users and possibility to view those profiles. Most known examples of Social Media at this moment (2010) would be Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, flixter, LinkedIN, Tagged, Twitter and Plurk. There are hundreds and hundreds more of Social Media websites and each of them has its own purpose and idea. Some of them concentrate on one topic or subject and some websites are more expanded. Most of the Social Media websites give the opportunity to their users to upload pictures, videos and other data but the most important thing is that social media allow people to communicate ‘one-to-many and many-to-one’ and not as the old fashion media ‘one-way communication’ only.
In this paper we discuss the general approach and choices we made in developing a prototype of a social media monitor. The main goal of the museum monitor is to offer museum professionals and researchers better insight in the effects of their own social media usage and compare this with other actors in the cultural heritage sector. It gives researchers the opportunity to consider communication within the sector as whole. In the research project “Museum Compass” we have developed a prototype of a social media monitor, which contains data of current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch museums. We discuss – mostly in a practical sense – our approach for developing the monitor and give a few examples as a result of its usage.
Wereldwijd onderzoek: Hoe gebruiken nieuwsmedia social media? Jongeren lezen geen krant meer, ze kijken op hun smartphone die ze altijd bij de hand hebben. Binnen het lectoraat social media en reputatiemanagement van NHL hogeschool te Leeuwarden heeft een groep internationale studenten in 12 landen onderzoek gedaan. Hierbij hebben ze meer dan 150 social media sites bestudeerd van nieuws media. De resultaten maken deel uit van een internationaal onderzoek van NHL Hogeschool en Haaga Helia University. De onderzoeksvraag was: Wat speelt zich af in de nieuwsmedia? Persbureaus kunnen het overzicht gebruiken om hun social media te optimaliseren. En voor ieder die journalistiek een warm hart toedraagt is het interessante informatie over de nieuwsmedia in een overgangssituatie (2nd edition)
