140Char

Sky News is installing Twitter client Tweetdeck as default software across journalists computers to encourage and integrate social media for newsgathering and reporting, as revealed by Journalism.co.uk.

It will be on all staff computers within a month, and as part of the move, Sky’s ‘Twitter Correspondant’ Ruth Barnett will move to Sky’s Westminster bureau. Since her appointment, around 90 staff have their own Twitter accounts, and the idea is to no longer ‘ghettoise’ it as the role of one person.

Sky already publish a feed from Sky News @SkyNews, and @SkyNewsBreak, which reveals breaking news before it’s even made it onto the main website.
“There aren’t so many users as Facebook, but they are deeply engaged and it can be applied in so many ways,” Executive Producer Julian March told Journalism.co.uk.

What’s interesting is that this is an official announcement and policy for all staff – many organisations are already using Tweetdeck or similar tools on an unofficial basis – usually requested on an individual basis. Certainly many of my colleagues at Absolute Radio have been using Tweetdeck for ages, while I currently use Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop together for two different purposes to avoid mistakenly cross-tweeting. Still others I’ve spoken to are using web-based solutions such as Splitweet, removing the need for downloads and installation.

The announcement is also good timing for Tweetdeck, which has just rolled out a new version of its iPhone app, countering some of the publicity around the acquisition of Ping.fm by Seesmic. Official corporate adoption is going to be just one of the measures in the popularity and success of Twitter clients as we enter a period of serious consolidation by the main players.

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Magpie Network advertising service for Twitter, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. Such as ReadWriteWeb, Jeremiah Owyang, and Techcrunch.

I bet the Twitter team are looking at the responses with interest!

But James Cridland picked up on an incredibly effective and authentic Word of Mouth event on Twitter. I’ll summarise, so you can go and read the full article, ‘Word of Mouse – @stephenfry sells bucketloads of Tweetie‘. Hugely popular celebrity and ‘proper’ Tweeter Stephen Fry mentioned some Twitter clients, received a recommendation for a paid client for the iPhone, posted a positive review of it, and gained a huge number of responses from people who appear to have paid for the client on his recommendation.

Who would have though that an influential celebrity who is authentically using a service could have a direct effect on a product? I’m off to persuade U.S. basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal he should be promoting 140char!