There’s more to Twitter than just crafting a good Tweet, using the right hashtag and including links.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

These days, when we need ready answers to pressing questions, faster certainly is better. And in our mobile-media world, faster is also essential.

That’s why the question-and-answer website Quora may have added horsepower to the information race with the introduction this week of Online Now, a feature that puts likely experts and admitted novices together with just a click.

Online Now appears as a gray note by the names of frequent knowledge contributors who are online at that moment, allowing the inquisitive to post pressing questions by clicking a blue “Free to Ask” button that moves those questions higher in priority than general queries.

Details of the exchange appear only in Quora’s Ask to Answer section, which constitutes a list of contributors the site believes is best suited to answer particular questions. The Online Now feature can be tweaked to indicate who is the answerer or questioner, or can be turned off, in the user settings.

“This is especially fun if you are in the mood to answer certain topics,” explained Joel Lewenstein, a designer at Quora, in a blog post on the subject. “Maybe you saw a movie or a sporting event, fell in love with a new restaurant, or just finished a book. When you feel like answering questions about a specific topic that you know, Online Now will send people your way.”

Demand for faster responses on Quora has grown since the site released mobile app versions starting last year with the iPhone, said Marc Bodnick, a member of Quora’s business team, in an interview with PCMag.com. He says mobile use makes up about 25 percent of all Quora traffic.

David Sheets is a freelance editor, Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dksheets@gmail.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Note: This post appeared in the September/October issue of Quill. 

Pinterest might have a reputation as a social network for sharing recipes and fashion tips, but news organizations across the country are embracing Pinterest in innovating ways.

In case you’re not acquainted, Pinterest is an image-based social network where users post links and photos onto different topic boards. The posts show up as a stream of images, like photos pinned to a bulletin board.

Each user can create and pin to dozens of different topic boards, to share different types of content. Like with Twitter, you can follow other people – or individual boards – on Pinterest, to see what items they are pinning.

The simplicity and visual appeal give posters a different approach to attract interest for their content.

Several newspapers are using Pinterest for fashion, food and other features items. The New York Times, for example, started its Pinterest page in June with boards on shoes, food and fashion.

But the visual power of the social network can extend well beyond fluff stories, as the following examples show.

Front Pages: Several news organizations have boards that highlight their front page each day. The pins link back to the newspapers’ websites.

Quotes: Lack a photo? You can do like the Wall Street Journal and the Mercury News: grab wacky pull quotes from a story to draw a reader in. Pins link directly to the article.

User-Submitted Content News organizations have created boards for everything from prom pictures to engagement announcements, to share their readers’ content with a broader audience.

Staff Bios: Many news organizations are posting photos of staff members, with contact info and links to their content on the news site.

Illustrations: The Wall Street Journal has a board of its “hedcuts,” those dot-ink portraits that have become a signature illustration in each day’s newspaper. The illustrations are impressive on their own. But a sea of the illustrations on a Pinterest board is a fascinating back door to interesting stories you might have missed in print, or online.

Different twist on political candidates: The Washington Post has boards for biographical information about presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, for a different approach to profiles about the candidates, complete with childhood and wedding photos.

Outside content: The Guardian of London has a board called “On Our Radar,” in which the news organization links to news stories it finds from other sources.

Profiles: The Des Moines Register has a board called “Interesting People” that links to news stories, blog posts and other features about people in Des Moines.

Special projects: Digital First Media newspapers have a Pinterest board for their special reporting project on homecoming veterans.

Community Guides: From The Morning Journal’s guide to Ohio golf courses, to the Denver Post’s Favorite Colorado Places board, newspapers are using the visual ability of Pinterest to offer a public service to readers.

The key, as with any social network, is engaging your audience. Invite readers to contribute their own content to boards, as the Atlanta Journal Constitution does.

And make sure you aren’t spamming your readers with feeds of only your content. Keep the pins interesting – and don’t be afraid to share content that isn’t from your news site.

Want to learn more, or find other newspapers who are using Pinterest? Follow Joanne Phillips on Pinterest or Twitter. She’s tracking new newspapers that join in and has a great board with more than 150 different news Pinterest sites.

Jodie Mozdzer Gil is an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. She previously reported for the Valley Independent Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and the Waterbury Republican American. You can follow her on Twitter @mozactly.

If you’ve noticed some nudging and elbowing lately in cyberspace, it may be due to the crowded social networking field making room for yet another potential player.

That player is called GlowTrend, and though it looks and feels like Facebook, founder Michael Wellman Jr. promises much more.

“I wanted a social site that would bring everything that’s good in other social media sites into one place and still be able to work with the other places,” Wellman said in a news release Tuesday. “That’s why we let you connect to GlowTrend through the other major social media sites.”

Yes, GlowTrend intends to be all things to all comers, Besides incorporating thumbs-up “likes,” friend suggestions, an instant messenger, company pages, and an interactive event calendar, a la Facebook, GlowTrend also intends to serve as an iTunes-type music storefront, where musicians can upload and sell their own works, a Google Plus-inspired video chat interface, and a Craigslist-kind-of classifieds section that ostensibly would help the site generate income, among other features.

Meanwhile, a mobile app is in development, Wellman says.

The site used to be called “MyFaceZone” until Wellman decided to put more distance between his site’s identity and that of his chief rival. Though the official launch came Tuesday, GlowTrend has been gaining fans since the domain name went live in June.

And despite the official launch, a few kinks remain. Wellman’s own GlowTrend page contained more troubleshooting announcements than social interactions. (The site’s servers nestle near Wichita, Kan.)

“Sorry for the delay everyone for the photo issue,” the Wasilla, Alaska, native wrote regarding a days-long glitch in uploading profile photos. “We are trying to get resolved. You can still import (other) photos.”

GlowTrend’s privacy policy promises little better than other social sites, saying no personal information will be sold, though allowing that member content will be seen as “aggregated demographic information” worth sharing with “business partners, trusted affiliates and advertisers.”

But this is Wellman’s third try at launching a social network, he says. Maybe now he has it all figured out.

David Sheets is a former content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a candidate for Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dksheets@gmail.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, on Facebook and LinkedIn.

In my latest column in the Quill magazine about steps that college media can take to go digital first, I mentioned that you should use social media as an end in itself, not just the means to an end:

Social media drives lots of traffic to your website, no doubt. The CU Independent’s Facebook page is the source of half the page views to its website. But don’t treat social media as merely a marketing tool. That’s how newspapers thought of their websites in the early years, parking their online staff in their marketing departments or libraries. Since not everyone will click through to your website, be sure your social media presence has its own following.

I got an email today from Christine Jessel of WUOT, the U of Tennessee’s public radio station, asking for clarification about my point and what Facebook-only content I’d recommend posting. Here’s what I sent her in reply:

One way to make a Facebook page a destination in itself instead of just a pass-through (hopefully) for people to click on to your paper’s website, is to expand your “coverage” and include links to not only your site, but also to stories from your competitors.

So, here in Boulder we have the metro daily papers in Denver and Boulder, as well as the irritating “youth-oriented” daily that’s published by the Boulder Daily Camera that people think of as the CU school paper, and of course the local TV stations. When news happens that of interest to students, not only about the campus but in the larger community, I think it’s an opportunity for us to tweet and Facebook about it and link to other sources, including competitors.

I think readers appreciate that you’re being generous and willing to become a hub of news and information that’s of interest to them, and will become trained to come back to your Facebook page to keep up with news. That’s an easy way to cover more stories than just what runs in the paper or website.

Like the last comment I made in my Quill column, this advice about linking to your competitors is advice I’ve given to newsrooms for a decade or more now, not just advice for college papers or radio stations. I realize it goes against the grain of newsroom staff, especially management, to acknowledge your competition and — gasp — even send traffic their way!

But you know what? It’s 2012, and your audience doesn’t just read your stuff. Your audience reads your news stories, or watches your station’s newscasts, and then does what we all do: Click to other sites to read more, to see what other sources are saying, to get a fuller picture of the news they care about.

If you think you have an exclusive relationship with your readers in this networked age, you’re dreaming. Dreaming of an earlier media era.

The truth is, if you link to your competitors, your readers will apprciate the step you’re saving them, and appreciate your open-mindedness. And like I said to Christine, they’ll soon come to your site (or Facebook page) first, and visit the other sites you direct them to, but click the “back” button and return to your site because you’re shown them you’re a onestop hub for the news that matters to them.

It’s amazing the things that we see people tweet about. Personal beliefs. Private conversations. Elicit behavior. Groundless criticism. Uneducated perspective.

Yes, I’m talking about journalists, too.

Sure, some genuine news seeps through to the Twitterverse — the brilliant coverage by Andy Carvin of last year’s “Arab Spring” foremost among the examples. (Remarkably, a year later, his work still sets the standard.) Otherwise, what remains on that social network largely amounts to boorishness and self-aggrandizement, impugning and assuming, snobbery and effrontery.

When I came up through the journalism ranks, any sort of spotlight-hogging was frowned upon as ethically dubious, if not forbidden by company policy. Today, a persistent and effusive social media presence is considered essential to one’s employment, if for no other reason than to continually trumpet a media “brand.”

This deep bow to branding waxes ominous, thanks largely to such popular social media measuring sticks as Klout assigning a manufactured importance to digital socialization — an importance weighted in favor of quantity instead of quality. If we agree to hold up these sticks as accurate, then news reporting via social media is bound not to be.

Why? Because there’s a certain assurance news consumers get from a journalist’s professional detachment, and we see that assurance petering out now as news providers strive to be heard above the loud partisan polemic drowning rational thought — a polemic they help stir up.

The solution, short of wiping social media off the map, is greater attentiveness toward distinguishing personal from professional content. Though there are claims that a personal touch demystifies media and as a result makes news more consumable, personalization also blurs the line separating judgment from fact. And when journalists apply it, they put their profession at risk of being marginalized by “citizen” journalists who insist they’re merely following the example.

So, then, make that example an admirable one:

Separate personal from professional tweets — If this means creating separate Twitter accounts, so be it. And try not to use the company logo or any derivative as a personal avatar.

Exercise care with criticism — Do you love “50 Shades of Grey”? Do you hate the movie remake of “Spider-Man”? That’s fine, but keep those opinions off all professional social media accounts, unless it has a discernible job relevance. Otherwise, inserting opinion only waters down what little objectivity a journalist can muster.

Keep company matters inside the company — There may be discord between management and staff, or personnel matters that prove irksome, but venting discontent via veiled insult on social media not only undermines others’ faith in you, it also could prove actionable in a court of law. In the same vein, honesty regarding one’s own reporting or editing errors may evoke pangs of guilt and frustration, but it  reinforces credibility and respectability as well.

Rein in the urge to be defensive — By its nature, journalism invites criticism, warranted or not. Certainly, some of that criticism can be mean-spirited and vindictive, instead of constructive. Avoid driving a conversation further down the same dark road. As humorist Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with stupid people; they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

Resist posting vacation and food photos — It’s always good to get away from it all when possible; it’s bad to drag readers and viewers along. That beach picture with Diamond Head in the background, while pretty, smacks of braggadocio, and may even suggest to others a laxity at work — especially if the picture puts you in one place while the calendar says you should be somewhere else. Food photos, on the other hand, pose a different problem, one rooted in esthetics. Put simply, food never looks as good in social media as it does in person.

Avoid posting sales pitches — Ensure personal brand integrity by not promoting other brands in tweets through sales pitches or links to special deals. Leave that up to the sales people who are supposed to market those products.

David Sheets is a content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, a candidate for Region 7 director, and past-president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Wow, Pinterest truly is the fastest-growing social network: Poynter reports that according to comScore, Pinterest users increased by 52% just in February, to almost 18 million people posting pins to boards covering all kinds of topic.

And according to KQED’s Mind/shift blog, journalism instructors are finding ways to include Pinterest in their lesson plans. Because it’s such an easy-to-use visual platform, it’s ideal for aggregation, especially of images.

More and more media companies are expanding into Pinterest too. Although the bulk of its users today are women, the demographics are sure to balance out as more men, and more media companies, brands and non-profit organizations find their way onto the service.

In our hyper-connected world, journalists are bound to think their jobs can’t get any better, what with social media filling communication gaps once considered too broad to hurdle.

That’s because it’s possible now to reach out from 10 miles or 1,000 miles and see what others see, hear what others hear — in effect, be where they are while we’re where we are. All that’s required is a smartphone, a tablet computer, and insight or a sense of humor quick enough to capture the crucial moment.

But while we’re hearing and seeing these other people’s experiences, we’re at the same time not actually hearing or seeing these people. One can have thousands of “friends” via Facebook or tens of thousands of “followers” via Twitter without actually knowing who these people are, a dichotomy that over time is bound to redefine what friendships and followings mean to us.

This dichotomy has spawned a wealth of analyses about the value of social media and whether humans are losing a key quality about themselves by not often meeting face-to-face, because these in-person meetings provide a wealth of information that digitized discourse does not.

Journalists coming into the profession today need to realize this, as this realization may mean the difference between producing good stories or great ones. By meeting interview subjects and sources in person, and not relying so much on technology, a journalist can:

Watch body language — Fear, happiness, anxiety, anticipation, these are traits not even Apple’s FaceTime can accurately detect. The casual twisting of one’s wedding ring, or tugging on a suit coat, or the bouncing foot at the end of a crossed leg, all show that the interviewee probably has other thoughts vying for attention between answers to a journalist’s questions. Pay attention to these quirks; they could point the way to the truth of the matter.

See the other side — Experiencing what life is like from other people’s perspectives opens one’s mind to their reality far better than a text or tweet or phone call. The government official begging for more funds from behind a marble desk likely won’t generate the kind of sympathy from readers as would the official who shares desk space with one or more colleagues, or has no desk, due to budget cuts. The welfare mother living in suburbia is sure to have a different if no less poignant story from the one who lives over a heating grate in an urban sidewalk. Often, knowing the story means knowing where the story comes from and seeing it for yourself.

Find common ground — Face-to-face meetings give both sides in an interview the opportunity to size up one another. They also provide journalists a means to finding common interests — favorite films, football teams or food, for example — the discovery of which can introduce a degree of trust that distance and technology can’t. If, say, the interview subject is a Packers fan (as I am), that key personal detail may stay buried unless I see the person walk up wearing a team jersey or swinging a Packers keychain. Otherwise, the journalist misses a chance to connect at a deeper level and the interviewee misses out knowing that reporters can be Packers fans, too.

Make good impressions — Along this line, face-to-face meetings break down barriers that interviewees presume always exist between journalists and the public. My entire career, first-time interviews have started out stiff and hesitant because neither of us is sure how the other will act initially. Convening over coffee or lunch gives journalists the opportunity to make a good, friendly, professional first impression that could be the catalyst for regular exchanges of information.

Learn secrets — In-person interviews also can be where people feel more comfortable, and safer, revealing off-the-record details. We never know for sure who’s watching or reading our electronic correspondence; a face-to-face meeting far removed from sources of tension opens conversations to more detail and color than a hushed or vague exchange via phone or email.

Technology has made talking to one another easier than ever, but it hasn’t necessarily made us easier to understand. Take time to meet people face-to-face and reduce the doubt and uncertainty that have sprouted like weeds throughout our digital world.

David Sheets is a sports content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Just about everywhere these days, chances are good you’ll see walkers, talkers and (unfortunately) drivers with their faces tilted toward their smart phones as they text and tweet their every move. A byproduct of our digital lives has been an urge to let the world know where we are every moment, whether the world is interested or not.

This is a bane to the digitally uninterested but a boon to everyone else, particularly journalists, who are in the business of finding and talking to people. And topping the list of socially invasive tools with serious people-tracking capabilities is Foursquare, the 3-year-old location-based social networking site for mobile devices that now claims well over 15 million registered users worldwide.

Foursquare utilizes a mobile device’s global-positioning hardware to report where members are at a given moment when they “check in” at venues listed in the application database. The member can acquire “friends,” leave “tips” or advice about each location and post photos. Frequent visits earn travel points and the possibility of becoming “mayor” of that location. Furthermore, Foursquare awards “badges” for patterns of behavior, whether it’s visiting several coffee shops, seeing lots of movies or participating in product promotions.

The useful aspect for journalists is the digital trail Foursquare leaves; they can monitor member movements if they are “friended” by those members. In following this trail, it’s possible to track:

Frequent visitors — Foursquare lists real-time data on location, the current mayor, the latest tips posted by visitors, and the Foursquare identities of frequent visitors. Journalists can sift those lists for potential interview subjects if, say, it’s important to find interview subjects who are knowledgeable about particular locations or the clientele who visit them.

Personal behavior — When members check in at a location, all their friends can see where they are at that moment. Foursquare also displays lists of member badges, mayorships, tips, favorites and approximate arrival time at the last check in. Accumulated points hint at how often members are out and about, so it’s possible to guess an individual’s travel habits.

Trends — Besides seeing where people go, Foursquare shows how many other members are at a location. By clicking “Explore,” and then “Trending,” Foursquare shows potential social hotspots by listing all current check-ins, not just those by members’ friends. Want to find the most popular restaurant, the busiest nightclubs, the best concerts or surprisingly heavy traffic? Just watch where the Foursquare crowd is going.

Location information — Foursquare tips provide reasonably good detail from members about what’s going on at each location, whether it’s bad service at a restaurant or gridlock on the interstate. And Foursquare compiles the tips it receives, helping indicate whether a pattern of activity or potential news is breaking.

Foursquare isn’t the only geo-tracking social medium available, just among the most popular. Other tools worth trying are Gowalla, Loopt, Where, Yelp and, of course, Facebook, which added location-tagging about a year ago.

David Sheets is a sports content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Lately, social media mavens have pinned their hopes on Pinterest as the next big thing in remote engagement because of the site’s stated goal to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.”

Pinterest, its name an amalgamation of the words “pin” and “interest,” which you probably could have guessed, launched in 2009 and gained traction after its invitation-only wall came down in 2010 and prospective members were allowed to ask the site to join. Since then, Pinterest has garnered Facebook-level traffic, approaching 12 million new visitors a month.

The attraction: Pinterest is a picture-driven, digital cork board, a place for visual expression with themed “pin-up” boards where users can put up just about any digitized image or video they like. Member “followers” can also re-pin images and videos posted by others, thus trumpeting and spreading their interests and vision.

Certainly, Pinterest’s key attraction is its eye-candy appeal, but the site sports some versatility of a kind journalists may find useful. Among the ideas possible through Pinterest:

Breaking news and advancing stories — Journalists can pin on-scene images and video clips via iPhone to themed news boards, which can be linked to websites and other social media. Pinterest also works well as a place to post advances for upcoming news coverage.

Trend stories — Users have created themed boards on subjects ranging from fashion to pets to favorite jokes. The general topics are broad but Pinterest permits creation of narrowly focused boards. Even Pinterest’s traffic portends to trends — its chief demographic groups to date appear to be women, who make up about 58 percent of users, and people ages 25 to 44, who make up about 59 percent.

Storyboards — Pinterest’s boards can be rearranged, besides being customizable, so photographers, film editors and spot-news editors can organize their content into sequences that tell stories or send messages.

Portfolios and showcases — Pinterest can serve as a place to store, organize and display images for job applications, or as a storefront for selling those images. It’s also a good place to spotlight a publication’s best recent work.

Of course, everything that shows up online could show up on Pinterest regardless of whether anyone wants it pinned there, and this has stirred criticism that the site violates copyright law despite a “safe harbor” opening in that law. In the safe harbor, legal liability is limited or waived if a site either performs in “good faith” or adheres to agreed-upon standards.

Pinterest allegedly has received copyright challenges, but so far no one has pulled the pin in part because the site hasn’t taken egregious liberties with contributor content, like reselling it behind contributors’ backs. However, Pinterest seems to have found a way to turn re-pins into profit by modifying links to pins for commercial content, so that the pins link back to the image source. If the site has an affiliate-marketing program and Pinterest is part of it, then Pinterest profits from relinking to the affiliate, and the affiliate in turn gains a broader audience.

Pinterest has managed to avoid assessing fees, including sidebar ads, or allowing sponsored pins. But as Pinterest evolves, so too could its perception of fair use and right to reuse to pinned content unless members opt out, akin to Facebook. Prospective users should consider this before making Pinterest into a platform for their businesses.

Pinterest is a visual medium unlike any we’ve seen, but it’s still in a nascent state. Journalists should be careful: all the promise it holds has time yet to turn prickly.

David Sheets is a sports content editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, and president of SPJ’s St. Louis Pro chapter. Reach him by e-mail at dsheets@post-dispatch.com, on Twitter at @DKSheets, or on Facebook and LinkedIn.