Today a tweet appeared on the Austin American-Statesman Twitter account that read:

Mention this tweet for Buy 1 Get 1 tix to area’s #1 haunted house - offer ends Sept 30. http://www.mansionofterror.com (Ad).

My immediate gut reaction was to recoil at the sight of advertisements on my newspaper’s twitter account. It’s journalism, dammit! The lines shouldn’t blur. But that’s also the idealistic part of me that doesn’t always realize news sometimes has to make money (not that it always does - rimshot!)

The Stateman’s advertising plan was laid out in this article. The ads have to be tailored and offer something — a specific discount — to the viewers. They can only be for food, drink, or local entertainment, and they’ll only run twice a day. I was most impressed that it had to be a service, hopefully so that followers will feel like their being offered an additional service instead of spammed.

The Statesman’s social media head, Robert Quigley, said these factors were very important to him when picking an ad.

“I really care about the Twitter community, and I know the community well. I won’t jeopardize that, and that’s why we are strictly limiting this to two tweets a day per account,” Quigley said.

Full disclosure: I know Rob and consider him a friend, and I can believe him when he says this stuff. I think that the Statesman has picked the best way they could to run this experiment.

That said, I’m not sure I would ever consider doing it on a news account. I feel that news accounts can deliver much more light-hearted feel on Twitter while still being informative, but you’re still providing a service and gaining your follower’s trust. I don’t want to feel like they are being mislead or being offered something they may not actually want. I even have problems retweeting things on my personal account if I feel it wouldn’t best serve my followers (or annoy them). And trust me, while I love my PR friends, this happens a lot. It’s up to each account owner to run their account as honestly as possible.

The Statesman has over 13,000 followers, and the Mansion of Terror paid $150 to reach them for Thursday. It’s not a bad deal, and from what Quigley says, he’s gotten a lot of questions, but mostly positive feedback.

“It has been mostly positive. People seem to understand that we’re a business and that we’re trying innovative things to remain strong,” he said.

I’ll be trying to get updated numbers on how well the ad worked from the Mansion of Terror, so stay tuned.

I finally had the chance to sit down with Fast Flip, the newest news reader creation by Google, and my feeling after 30 minutes of use was: why? But after another 30 minutes, it turned to: Ooooh, hey!

Google is trying valiantly to release software that will help the news industry, and I have to respect them for such a noble pursuit, but I can exactly understand how Fast Flip does that.

I started browsing on the general view, and ended up skipping over half the articles. That’s easy enough, but I don’t know how you’d keep people’s interest with that view. So I switched to just the view by publication, which was a lot cooler in theory, until I wanted to read more than two paragraphs of an article. I don’t mind being redirected, but why wouldn’t I just read the publication’s website? And if I’m using the mobile version, redirecting is a pain that I think would annoy some users (especially since Safari is one of the iPhone’s worst features).

Browsing by topic is again, nifty, and I suppose it offers me more of a preview of an article than Google news would, but what’s allure of not using Google News? I can hypothesize that you’ll get a wider variety of topics than Google News, which sometimes can narrow our worldview by only showing the top stories. It can also feature enterprise stories that magazine has worked on that will fly under the radar of top story aggregators.

It also has the ability to search on random topics. Some of my suggested topics included “Seattle”, “Japan”, “Beatles”, and “Politics”. It was kind of a different mix.

So overall, it’s mildly cool. The problem with tools like this is they need to be applied correctly in order to flourish. Hopefully Google will expand the number of publications using Fast Flip, and publications will figure out how to promote their Fast Flip presence, or better yet, figure out to make a similar technology for mobile apps of their own. That’d be swell.

To the bosses at the New York Times;

Two months back, you appointed Jennifer Preston as your social media editor. The internet was abuzz with excitement as to this progressive step on your part; as a flagship newspaper, it’s important to be a trendsetter in your field and to jump on the bandwagon, right?

Whatever Preston has been doing, I don’t know if I’d call it social. There is over a month-long gap in her personal twitter timeline (from here to here.) It’s almost if this Mashable post that called her out on her lazy Twitter behavior made her (or her bosses) realize that internet has her under its gaze. (Note that post coincided with the day she started tweeting again.)

Now with the New York Daily News‘ interest in hiring their own Social Media Editor, I have to wonder if these posts are actually being used to improve strategy. Has Preston improved social media relations for the New York Times that name recognition alone couldn’t do? So far, I haven’t seen evidence to prove so. (Meanwhile, my hometown paper is kicking butt with social media, after appointing Robert Quigley as the Social Media Editor.)

But I think, and popular opinion agrees, that a social media head should be visible on and offline. They should engage in discussions, follow people back, come to tweetups, and post thought-provoking tweets and blog posts. After all, the first word here is “social”, and if you take your personality out of it, what do you have? A glorified online editor sitting behind a desk who doesn’t know who their community is.

The internet is exploding with talk of the election protests in Iran. The information is almost inescapable on Twitter, yet many noticed the absence of updates on the story on CNN on Saturday and Sunday as it was breaking.

Really, CNN? Where were you? The problem with this is that is that if people revolt against CNN’s coverage (and some of the backlash was huge), then they’ll stop trusting their coverage and begin moving to non-traditional media outlets, like Twitter, Youtube or Flickr, to get updates on a fast-moving, riveting story like this. The problem with trusting sources like this is that some of their information can be unverified. One of the few major values of news networks is the fact they *should* have verified information; something like Twitter could be easily used to spread propaganda by both sides.

For all the moaning the mainstream media is doing about losing revenue, you’d think they would try to do a better job of covering serious issues, not dropping the ball perfectly into the hands of citizen journalists, practically sealing their fate as a dinosaur with little relevant to add to the story. Instead they should be combining both the new media tools, the technology and personnel at their disposal, and their access to tell the best story that clears up the facts and brings this situation into everyone’s homes.

That’s not to say that there is media fail across the board; the New York Times is doing a commendable job compiling the most interesting bits from the internet and converging it with their own reporter’s coverage. (Read some from their blog). A couple of notable twitter accounts include Change_in_Iran and PersianKiwi.