Us kids these days and our social media, right?
I’ll admit, I have fully succumbed to the trend. I check Facebook so often it’s like a tic, and I too think that my thoughts are witty and inciteful enough to share with the whole world at my whim.
However, it’s times like the recent shooting incident at Virgina Tech that remind me, and hopefully everyone else, that social media isn’t just a time-wasting fad; it can be really beneficial as well.
I happen to know the girl that is going to be the editor-in-chief of The Collegiate Times, the VT newspaper. We met at a journalism conference this past summer, and it was through that conference’s Facebook group that I found out about the shooting.
Someone posted to the group mere minutes after the alerts to VT’s campus came in.
As soon as I saw that post, I immediately jumped on Twitter and followed @CollegiateTimes to see if they had any information, and I was more than right. They were updating minute by minute.
And Virginia Tech was already trending too, which did pose a tricky situation for those who were trying to find out what happened. When people start talking about things like this on Twitter, correct information gets diluted and all but lost in the flood.
Luckily, though, The Collegiate Times stood strong in the frenzy. They sent out their individual reporters and had them tweet in what they were watching at the scene. One even broke first that the man the Virignia Tech police apprehended with his hands in the air didn’t match the police description of the suspect.
Their Twitter followers increased from around 2,000 to over 20,000 that day. And their site had so much traffic it crashed multiple times, leaving Twitter and Facebook the quickest means of communication.
And to make matters even more impressive, their newspaper office had to be evacuated because the shooter was possibly outside of the building — but that’s the beauty of social media — they could continue informing the locked-down VT students from simply their smartphones.
Smartphones are also how the students of Alabama University knew where to find food and shelter after the devastating tornado in Tuscaloosa. Their student newspaper editor (who just happens to be from Columbus), shared with us his chilling, but impressive story at that same conference I mentioned.
Those students were trying to send out information using just phones after the devastation, and they were camping out in various relatives’ houses to use electrical outlets for the chargers.
They did such a good job, in fact, that the city paper let them print their paper, The Crimson White, in the city’s printing press, for coverage of the tragedy.
Obviously, these situations are all extreme examples, but I think they still clearly show the value of social media today if it is used correctly.
I can only hope that Otterbein360 and the Tan & Cardinal never have to step up in terrible situations like these to inform the campus.
But, just in case: It’s @Otterbein360.
