Social Media

The Haiti earthquake has launched a tsunami of sympathy, information and aid through social media such as Facebook, Flickr, Skype, YouTube and Twitter. The lightning worldwide response will likely reinforce what aid workers have known for years: Online media effectively get vital word out, often faster than mainstream media. "We have big presences on Twitter, Facebook, and of course on our blog," said Tom Foley, chief executive officer of the Southeastern Pennsylvania chapter of the American Red Cross, "and I know that today we've dramatically increased the number of people who check in with us through those sites.

Score a big one for social media. When plans to merge secular Abington Memorial Hospital with Catholic Holy Redeemer Health System collapsed Wednesday, many credited a social-media blitz. Citizen activists, who objected to the merger for various reasons, chief among them the possibility that it might curtail doctors' ability to provide abortions. organized meetings via e-mail, battered news outlets with information, hailed e-messages on doctors and administrators, fired salvos of Twitter tweets, and ran an incredibly potent Facebook page and Change.org petition.

MOST PEOPLE post what they ate for lunch, brag about their kids or lament a slow workday on their Facebook status. Omar Woods of Kensington confessed a crime: "I'm on da run for 3 attemed [sic] murders. " That status update, along with photos that Woods later posted of himself with a handgun jammed in his waistband, now could help convict him in a July shooting in Kensington that injured three people. As social-media use grows, more scofflaws, like Woods, are posting incriminating information or photos online.

Producing master plans to combat blight and revive rundown neighborhoods has practically become a cottage industry in Philadelphia. But comebacks, when they happen, rarely turn out the way planners script them. So it is with Point Breeze, which begins south of Washington Avenue on the west side of Broad Street, and extends well past Snyder Avenue. Once a working-class area of stalwart brick rowhouses, dramatically punctuated by cathedral-size churches that seem worthy of Rome, Point Breeze began coming apart at the seams with the '80s crack epidemic.

LeSean McCoy deleted the Twitter account he used to attack the mother of his child over the weekend. That was considerate of him. Unfortunately, he can't come around and scrub all of our memories, one by one. So we can't pretend we don't know way too much about McCoy, his character, and his personal life. You may feel that this whole thing is nobody's business and so shouldn't be the subject of a column. I would counter that it's the subject of a column only because McCoy inflicted his ugly personal business on the rest of us. When a college football player was very nice to a woman who didn't exist, it became the biggest story in the country.

Years ago a dispute would often get resolved through talking it out. That's often not the case today. With the use of social media, conflict resolution can be more difficult for teenagers. A problem can escalate past regular school hours and linger throughout the day. What a face-to-face confrontation could have resolved is now substituted with bullying through social media, which keeps the problem going. Social media have become a big part of an average teenager's life. Websites like Facebook make it easy to see what's going on in your friends' lives, without actually having to talk to them at all. However, this avoidance of physical communication also makes it easier for teens to bully one another through social-media websites.

As recently as five years ago, businesses small and large and nonprofits still seemed puzzled by the value of social-media platforms, then derided as a what-I-had-for-lunch frivolity. Even now, they struggle to quantify exactly what impact their investments in social media and Web content produce for their bottom lines. But the strategy is as much defensive as offensive, as it grows increasingly clear that companies with no digital presence are becoming invisible to many consumers.

The firefighters union's got their pants all in a tweet after the Nutter administration issued rules for firefighters' use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites this week. Fire Commissioner Lloyd Ayers issued a three-page memo Wednesday detailing social media guidelines that prohibit employees from using city property for social media while on duty, prohibit any comments or images about patients, racial slurs, any other defamatory comments and anything that may affect the efficiency or effective operation of the department.

BALTIMORE - The woman had just bought a new car at the Mile One dealership, but she was sad to see her old one go. So she let a dealership staffer take a picture of her with both - and Mile One connected her with the buyer of her old car online. "They became friends on Facebook," said Nicole Hayes, e-commerce director for the Mile One Automotive Group, based in Pikesville, Md. Hayes says that such interactions, which she sees as helping to foster a community around the Mile One brand, have convinced her that the company needs to double down on social media.

NEW YORK - Social TV was the buzz Wednesday on the famed set of Saturday Night Live . With the nation talking about tweets and tagging friends and other social-media jargon, NBCUniversal held a conference to showcase its social-media prowess. Highlights included the Bravo channel's "tweet tracker" and CNBC's 500,000 Twitter followers, which NBCU believes boost its relevance to TV fans and advertisers. The consensus was that social media have the potential, like Internet surfing and browsing in the 1990s and early 2000s, to radically alter the already-fragmented media industry.