The Real Power of Social Media
Just a quick post about Peter Shankman’s Help a Report Out (HARO) service. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a social network operating by Twitter and email of about 50,000 individuals. Reporters, journalists, authors, and other media tap into the collective knowledge by submitting requests for information, and receive responses from whoever feels that they can help out. A typical request might be, “I’m a reporter for the NY Times looking for individuals who have recently vacationed in Ohio, for an article on where to go when you can’t afford anything else.” HARO requests come out three times per day.
We’re launching a new feature at KidPub where we will feature an author of young-adult books, and the kids will have a chance to ask the author questions. Not terribly original, I know, but it’ll be a fun thing to do. I sent out a HARO request this morning asking for any authors who might be interested in helping out, expecting two or three, or if I was lucky, five.
In five hours I received just under 100 responses, including notes from executives at several well-known publishing houses. It’s going to take a week to sort through them all! This is social networking at its best, and it’s why the ‘Google Buys Twitter’ rumor is so persistent…real-time access to tens or hundreds of thousands of human brains is the ultimate search engine, at least for some classes of queries.
Hats off to Shankman and HARO!