Check it -it’s a rundown of news and notes on social media innovations, more pay model plans and why you shouldn’t look silly on the internets.

Take Note

  • According to the internets, More Employers Use Facebook To Vet New Hires Than LinkedIn, hence why I keep stressing why you should A. Be on these networks and B. Be doing it well enough to not look dumb.
  • And not that it should be news to anyone here, but Twitter is The New Way Mainstream Media Breaks News. I can’t preach it enough around my paper – let’s break news on Twitter first, then worry about the links. We do this at my paper every day – and sometimes I won’t even bother tweeting a headline if we aren’t first in our market or it isn’t original. The traffic from Twitter isn’t much anyway – so it’s better to be first than first with a link. Of course, we still want to be factual, too (that one’s for you, Bruce).

Keeping News Alive

  • The Online Journalism blog asks if the (UK) Times’ Culture subscriptions is a potential model for charging for online newspapers. Why? It’s more than just a newspaper subscription – it’s a membership with incentives like ticket deals, exclusive access and more. It’s just one way to make a pay wall worth it if this kind of model would move to the web.
  • Speaking of paying for news, a CUNY project sought to find New business models for journalism to answer, “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?” There are four total – some of which have been panned and a couple of others that have real legs (though none are really earth-shattering).

Innovations in Social Media

  • Mashable reports that our friends at TweetMeme are working on Retweetable Comments. Huh? You’ve seen on several blogs and articles where you can tweet article from a button, but this would allow people to tweet individual comments on those blogs. A very cool way to get comments to go viral (and encourage commenting in the first place).
  • Speaking of Twitter, Patrick Thornton has been hard at work at Bringing engagement to an old, one-way medium. His marketing plan for a new novel is exactly what social media marketing should be – fun, creative and original. While his exact approach doesn’t exactly work for a news entities’ needs, using social media as a customer service platform is a must. Why else even be on Twitter if you can’t answer questions?
  • If you haven’t checked it out yet, the Huffington Post has embraced the  age of “My” news with a new Facebook Connect hookup that allows interaction between Facebook profiles and user activity on their sites.  The sync is  a no-brainer for an operation of their kind – and a lot to live up to. Something like this takes a lot of work, but it would be great to see more news orgs (and yes, smaller ones) jumping into a forward-thinking arrangement like this.