Sheffield IMC and Corporate Social Media Sites

This page contains some ideas about how content can be pushed into corporate social media sites to allow anonomised Indymedia contributors to get their content onto these sites and it is also somewhere to work on a Corporate Social Media Site Policy. Once we have worked what we are doing and it's been implemented, we can then post a feature article to the site explaining it all...

Corporate Social Media Site Policy

Sheffield Indymedia is set up to act as an anonymising gateway to Twitter to enable news posted to the site to be seen by more people.

Sheffield Indymedia advises people to only post about protests to Twitter using gateways which can anonymise your identity, like indy.im, because there have been cases of the state targeting activists via social media accounts, for example in Egypt and Tunisia in early 2011.

Articles (and comments?) posted to Sheffield Indymedia are automatically tweeted at indy.im/sheffieldindymedia and from there pushed out via twitter.com/sheffindymedia.

The tweets are constructed from the author and title fields of articles (and comments?), so you can include any hashtags you want in these fields.

(Comments posted to articles, which have hashtags in the titles, automatically contain the articles hashtags in the tweet, the tweet links to the comment posted below the article.)

All tweets from Sheffield Indymedia automatically contain the #imc, #news and #sheffield hashtags and are posted to the Sheffield Indymedia Collective status.net group.

Currently content isn't pulled in from Twitter but we might in the future pull in a RSS feed of friends tweets or something...

Also in the future we hope to look at setting the site up to automatically post news into Facebook, photos to Filckr and videos to YouTube, again with the same aim and anonymising content generated activists and also enabling content to be seen by more people.

Tweeting Comments

There is a test of the tweeting of comments on this dev site. This could be improved by the comment tweets automatically containing any hashtags from the article title.

#shh4sheflib

This article's title contained a hashtag, Shhhhh In at Sheffield Central Library #shh4sheflib, so it appeared in the Twitter search for #shh4sheflib, and was then retweeted by others:

See also

• Indymedia London: Corporate Social Networking