Social media gain ground as next destination in reporting!

Activities on the social media in 2013 have further confirmed its place of relevance in reporting when compared to the conventional media platforms.

Some individuals who never thought that they could become popular suddenly became the talk of the town, no thanks to a very active social media following in Nigeria.

At the same time, some individuals and corporate brands have through social media acceptability and appropriateness, inched up by several notches in the outgoing year.

These have in no small measure, established the social media status as the next destination in reporting.

In the words of Alexis Caffrey who is a freelance writer with a focus on technology, new media, and design, 2013 may be described as ‘a banner year for social media.’

“Twitter went public, Google+ broke one billion users, Vine, Instagram Video and Facebook hashtags hit the scene. And there were tons of notable social media moments from brands around the world – both epic wins and total fails,” said Caffrey, who is also a former graphic designer in New York.

Both young and old Nigerians have leveraged on all of these social media networks to initiate discourse, react to issues, propose change and even promote objects or subjects as the case may be.

There have been several of such events in the year that went viral and enjoyed spurious patronage and referrals. It also goes without saying that these incidents had attendant repercussions for the actors in the issue.

Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State became the latest ‘victim’ in November as he became extra popular through social media, howbeit for the wrong reasons.

The incident that has come to be known as ‘Go and Die Widow’ episode served as a stage for him.

Within seconds of the appearance of a video of him speaking unkindly to a widow on YouTube, the social media space was agog with comments and reactions too hard for Oshiomhole to overlook.

The video showed him in company with some of his top officials, telling a widow and mother of four, Joy Ofije, to “go and die.”

He was said to have met the widow, a trader on the street, while he was on an inspection tour to change the face of the state capital by making the city beautiful.

Apparently irked by the deluge of negative reactions, capable of dwindling Oshiomhole’s perception in the eyes of the public, he quickly organised to redeem his image.

He not only apologised to the widow but invited Ofije and one of her sons, Bright, to the Government House to give the widow N2m to shore up her business.

Adams Oshiomhole and the widow

He also offered her employment, to enlist her in the fight against street trading, the offence she had been accused of.

He said, “When you put your things on the road, a vehicle can run into you and they have killed some people like that and that was why I said if you are a widow, do you want more people to be widowed? But when I said go and die, that one was said in a fit of anger. And I am really sorry.

“I want you to join us. We would employ you and pay you salary. You would help us to campaign to other women not to trade on road sides. We should not use poverty as a yardstick. We would also talk to taxi and bus drivers not to block roads when carrying passengers.

“For your child who is preparing to enter into the university, my daughters and I have agreed to support him. If he does well as we pray he does, we will assist the family. Maybe this is the way God wants it. That is why I asked them to look for you, so that I can personally offer my apology, and also to support you.”

Another intriguing issue that took over the internet air space earlier in the year was the ‘My Oga at the Top’issue.

The gaffe committed by the then Lagos State Commandant of the Nigeria Civil Defence Corps, Mr. Obafaiye Shem, during a live interview on Lagos-based Channels Television, became a spontaneous hit.

Not everyone watched the live programme when it was originally aired, but the online platform of the TV station helped the effect to reverberate for more than one month.

Shem, who was a guest on Sunrise Daily, a breakfast show,  goofed when he gave the website of the NSCDC without its top-level domain.

Shem, who was being interviewed by a team of regular crew of interviewers, kept on referring to the corps’ Commandant General, Dr. Ade Abolurin, as “my oga at the top” and unsuccessfully avoided the question to give the official web address of the NSCDC.

Shem had said, “We don’t have multiple websites. If you want to know more about NSCDC, visit, ‘ww.nscdc’. That is all.”

Critics on blogs and social media networks threw caution to the wind as they wondered why an official of his cadre could not correctly tell the website address of his organisation.

So strong was the effect of the trending issue that T-shirts were printed with that inscription to keep it fresh.

Although the television station online site enjoyed massive traffic due to the development, it was learnt that the heat of the trend resulted in Shem’s eventual transfer to another station.

After the interview, Shem became a celebrity of some sort as the social media networks feasted on the clip of the interview, and various hilarious pictures of him.

Apart from the hashtag, “MyOgaAtTheTop,  bearing various coinages, went gone viral on Twitter, there is a music video  of ‘My Oga At The Top’ by DJ Ziggy on YouTube. In fact, some creative Nigerians made a lot of money selling “My oga at the top” T-shirts.

The hullabaloo about “My oga at the top” joke, no doubt, highlights the power of the social media in driving public debate around issues in the country.

Since the hashtag, #MyOgaAtTheTop broke into trending topics, the phrase had literally crept into the vocabulary of Nigerians both at home and in the Diaspora.

Some policemen also met their waterloo because they were caught on tape extorting motorists at different occasions.

Clips of these videos were posted on YouTube and enjoyed strong following, thus compelling the police authorities to investigate the matters.

Eventually, the policemen were dismissed from the force to redeem the dented image of the force. One of them was Sergeant Chris Omeleze who was dismissed after being caught on camera trying to extort a N25,000 bribe from a motorist who was leaving the Lagos international airport.

“I want to gladly report that in less than 24 hours after we got wind of that story, the police officer was identified, arrested … (and) dismissed from the police force,” police spokesman, Frank Mba, said on Channels Television.

Omeleze had been a policeman for 21 years, according to Mba.

As at that time, the video had received 117,500 hits on YouTube, been retweeted and replayed on all Nigeria’s main TV channels.

Ejigbo Pepper sellers’ torture:

 

The Aluu four killing:

Aluu, a community in Rivers State, murdered four off-campus students of the University of Port  Harcourt (UNIPORT), pictured above and below in 2012.

Immediately after the students were murdered, they were accused of being Cult Members and when that allegation seems not adding up or not enough for such type of slow and horrific death, they were accused of stealing Mobile phones and Laptop computers. 

 Their brutal killing was recorded and circulated on YouTube, which generated public  outburst and government attention into the case. 

But just as the social media had been used to achieve corrective purposes, Nigerians have also had their fair share of social media hoaxes.

Many unconfirmed reports have found their way to the largely unregulated platforms by people who want to report at all cost.

Notable was the recent case of the recent crash of an airplane carrying the remains of a former Ondo State governor, Olusegun Agagu.

Riding on the open space of ‘report yourself’, ardent social media followers awoke to the news that the late governor’s wife might have died in the crash. 

The news waxed stronger with every additional post shared, comment rebroadcast and tweets re-tweeted, until the truth was known.

According to Samantha Murphy Kelly, “The Internet is a gullible place. Before you know it, you buy into a YouTube video, and you’re sharing Facebook posts and tweets with misinformation. If you haven’t done so yourself, you likely know someone who has. Some of the most viral stories of the year have turned out to be fakes.”

Some experts with speciality in social media technology explained how issues generate such wide following within the shortest possible time and added that business people could move on to leverage on those platforms.

The CEO, SumAll, Dan Atkinson, was quoted as saying, “With increases in fan/follower engagement nearly three times that of other networks studied, Instagram is the clear winner for 2013.”

SumAll is a business analytics tool, which currently tracks over 100,000 businesses on social networks, analysing over 290 billion social actions per year.

Meanwhile, Mark Scott, owner of DOC Marketing, a social media and Search Engine Optimisation Company, in a report recently published online, noted that there has been a lot of growth in social media websites lately.

It said that many observers are following this growth quite keenly for various reasons, with some looking for ways to invest in companies and build a better brand awareness.

Quoting a report on the five most surprising social media statistics from the year 2013, he said that of Facebook’s nearly one billion strong users, approximately 200 million are mobile only.

“In other words, nearly a fifth of Facebook’s user-base doesn’t own a PC. Therefore they are compelled to access their favourite websites through their smartphones.”

He said the report stated that YouTube has now become more popular than cable television.

“YouTube reaches more adults than any cable network. In the United States, the number of people who watch television has fallen behind the number of people who watch YouTube on a regular basis. This makes it clear that televised content is undergoing a decline, while on the other hand, online consumption of video is on the rise,” he said.

“Companies can expand their reach and presence in international markets quite effectively by using social media. Today, internet is easily accessible in most parts of the world. These new markets can be tapped by social media marketers who can directly reach out to their customers through the internet. These statistics reveal emerging trends in the social media space. However, we are still in the early stages of growth in social media and one will only have to wait to witness the far-reaching impact of digital media on businesses and their marketing efforts,” he said.

source: PUNCH