The Nowledge

If you’re finding it hard to convince your business and newsroom about the merits of social media, here’s some help.

Chris Goddard from Affilorama has a wake-up call for companies: Generation Y is growing up, and like it or not, they will be your core market sooner than you expect.

That means if you want to reach out to this group, you’ll have to come to terms with their habits. Goddard’s advice: Don’t bother with newspapers, TV or radio (Gen Y is all about illegal downloading!). Instead, get in touch with your users directly through social media.

One journalism school is getting into the social media act.

In a recent move, Australia’s Griffith University made Twitter classes compulsory for journo students.

The surprise was in the reaction by some students weren’t convinced that there was much use in learning about social media in a formal education curriculum. Oddly, some of these journalism students even had no idea what Twitter was.

Huh?

Facebook today rolled out a new version of its home page — and like all changes to consumer habit, brought a storm of complaints and cheers.

The redesign is a compromise of sorts, bringing back the ‘old’ news feed and reworking the Twitter-like feed that the company introduced in March.

Many users didn’t like that March update since they couldn’t figure out interesting updates from the trivial. So the biggest change this time around is the addition of a ‘Live Feed’ tab which is meant to help users figure out what’s happening right now.

This is an important test for the ‘now’ revolution — how best to surface and filter out the noise from the information overload of real-time streams. It also represents a huge opportunity for innovators: we need platforms that are better at figuring out how to deliver relevance.

The jury is still out.

Here’s something for those of you who feel Twitter and this whole social media thing is just a phase and will soon pass.

A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that some 19 percent of internet users in the U.S. now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about other people.

This is a massive increase from the previous survey earlier this year, in which 11 percent of users said they used a status-update service.

The median age for a U.S. Twitter user is 31 — little changed from the previous year. Facebook appears to be graying just a little, with the median age moving from 26 to 33.

This presents plenty of new challenges for news organizations as the user profile evolves. What are you doing to target your audiences in specific age groups?