Today is the three-year anniversary of UNC student body president Eve Carson‘s death, and Friday I asked readers on Twitter to share their memories of her or how she influenced them using the hashtag #EveToday. The response has been overwhelming, with an outpouring of Tweets all day long that is still continuing. I compiled the Tweets using Storify so that people could read through the dozens of messages at once. It struck me as I did so how much social media has changed the way we communicate even in the three years since she was killed.

In March 2008, I was still two months away from joining Twitter. I posted no updates about her death on Facebook, shared no links to any of the many stories I wrote about her death and only RSVP’d to a memorial service held a few weeks later. The Daily Tar Heel wasn’t on Twitter or Facebook either but let readers to submit messages to a Memorial Wall. In 2008 and in 2011 we tailored our approach to where our audience was, which is what we should be doing. Asking for #EveToday-style Tweets in 2008 would have yielded us few, if any responses. Our audience simply wasn’t on Twitter then, or even in 2009. Even last year I’m not sure if we would have gotten quite the reaction we did today. People are simply much more comfortable with social media and using it throughout their life.

I welcome this evolution. I remember feeling very cut-off from the rest of the UNC community when we all department for Spring Break days after she was killed. There was no easy way for us to mourn together. Reading through the Tweets today was comforting, an instant reminder that out there, hundreds more felt just like me – saddened by her death and inspired by her life.

In the past week, an as-yet-unidentified man has been entering unlocked homes in Chapel Hill and stroking the legs of women while they sleep. This is of course unwelcome and jarring news, particularly for those in the quiet college town that surrounds UNC, where three years ago this week the student body president was kidnapped and brutally killed (her door was also unlocked). The Daily Tar Heel has been on the story since the first incident last Friday, and since then I’ve mulled how I could use our social media accounts to make students aware of the potential threat.

I wanted to raise awareness without being alarmist, preach safety tips without being smarmy (or reminding students of their parents) and reach as many people as possible. Wednesday, day 6, I started brainstorming hashtags with other editors. The incidents have reminded folks of Antoine Dodson and his infamous “hide your wife, hide your kids” interview. We somewhat seriously considered making reference to that, in part to build off of what students were already tweeting and in part because we felt the viral video’s fame could help grab students’ attention to this issue. At the same time, we didn’t want to make light of the very real threat the victims had faced. We settled on #lockthedoor, snappy yet relevant, given that the intruder entered through unlocked doors each time. I’ve curated Tweets using Storify to show how I used the account throughout the day:

I typically use the @dailytarheel account to share links and respond to individuals. Rarely is it used to Tweet frequently on a single topic in a single day, but I decided this issue was important enough to dominate the feed for most of the day. But because of that, I tried to take a joke, hoping students would appreciate it and perhaps tuck away some of the useful advice as well. Any complaints about the hashtag so far are about equal to the amount of complaints we might generally get about anything. I’m not too worried that we’re offending followers, but it’s something I’ll be watching.

The intruder is still at-large, but I like to think that this campaign helped raise awareness at least a little bit today. From our analytics I know Twitter was a top referrer to our stories online, and the hashtag was trending in Chapel Hill at one point. I plan to continue with it until they catch someone, or until the incidents stop. Ideally, we’ll hear good news soon. What do you think? I would love to hear suggestions for ways we could make this reach and resonate with more students.

I’m giving a talk to DTH editors this week about ways they can use Twitter better and came up with these tips on what to do and what not to do. Anything else I should include?

Patrick Thornton asked on Twitter yesterday “what’s in your mobile kit?”

Here’s what I carry with me:

• Several pens.
• A reporter’s notebook.
• My Blackberry.
• My Olympus voice recorder and a pair of headphones.
• A Casio Exilim that shoots video, records audio and takes photos.

I wish I would get into the practice of keeping my Nikon D-40 with me more often so I could get better using it, but it’s so bulky for most of my everyday use. Eventually, I’d love to have a MacBook to take on the road with me, but I can send short breaking news text to Twitter or e-mail from my Blackberry until then.

For the breaking news kits I hope to build at the DTH, I think some version of the above is a good start. We use Flip video cameras, and there’s no debating their ease. A microphone for the audio recorders would be useful to gather audio for publication and not just internal note-taking.

Because The Daily Tar Heel’s strategy next year involves social media more than ever, we felt it would be helpful to establish a policy to guide reporters on how to use it. My goal was to create a policy that emphasizes the value of social media while sets some standards so as not to embarass the paper.

In general, we plan to trust our reporters to know what is acceptable and what is not. We’re going to accompany this policy with training at the beginning of the year on how to use social media.

10 rules for using social media:

1. Use your own name and photo. If you using your account for DTH reporting, identify yourself as a DTH reporter in your profile.
2. Tell your editor if you plan to tweet as a DTH reporter. Likewise, let your editor know if you plan to livetweet something.
3. In general, do not post something online that would not be appropriate to run in the paper or on dailytarheel.com.*
4. You must disclose yourself as a DTH reporter to potential sources the same way you would if you were meeting face-to-face.
5. Do not disclose political affiliation on profiles and do not write about your political preferences in updates.
6. Do not criticize a colleague’s work.
7. Promoting your work via social media is encouraged.
8. In the interest of transparency, staff meetings are considered open unless otherwise stated.
9. It is acceptable to “friend” sources, but do it evenly. For instance, if you cover the Chapel Hill Town Council, if you wish to follow one member on Twitter, you should follow all of them.
10. Respond to people who contact you via social media. If you aren’t the appropriate person to answer their questions, refer them to whoever is.

In making this list I looked at several professional papers’ guidelines on social media. Most missed the mark with the limits that they placed. I want to make it as easy as possible for readers and sources to contact DTH reporters and place a high premium on transparency. My experience with social media is that it’s expanded my reporting capabilities and made me more responsive to our readership, and I wouldn’t want to limit other reporters.

Feel free to comment with suggestions/improvements. I’m also interested to hear if other college papers have social media policies or are looking to create them.

*Added after a suggestion from Jason Spencer.

I joined Twitter just over a year ago, after the early-adopters but before the masses. Connecting with professionals and college media gurus online opened up a world of things for me to read and learn.

It’s also changed how I do journalism. I’ve used Twitter to livetweet a presidential debate; update students at UNC during a bomb hoax; provide instant updates from a court appearance for six men charged with murder; and gather story ideas. Part of dailytarheel.com’s redesign process has included gathering feedback from Twitter followers.

Twitter’s invaluable, and if you don’t like it you probably don’t use it enough. There are people out there tweeting what they had for lunch, but if that’s all their feed offers, I don’t follow them. There’s more to Twitter: If you focus the community of people you follow on those with like interests and thoughtful updates, it’s worth the time and effort.

Three to 5 inches of snow is predicted for Chapel Hill on Tuesday — exciting because of how rare snow here is and because it’s a chance to try some collaborative journalism. 

Inspired by the recent efforts in Washington state following flooding, I’m really interested to see what Chapel Hill’s online community of journalists and residents can do. In situations like this, where news organizations have a public service responsibility, it makes no sense not to do as Ryan Thornburg suggests: ”Collaborate on commodity and breaking news; Compete and crowdsource on analytical and accountability journalism.”

I plan on Twittering (@saragregory), uploading photos to Flickr and saving other weather-related articles to Publish2. I’m going to use a #CH-snow hashtag for it all. If you’re in Chapel Hill/Orange County, I invite you to do the same and see what we can come up with collectively.

And of course, it’s quite possible — it being the South, after all — that nothing will happen, and grocery stores will sell out of milk and bread for no reason.

Public Policy Polling’s most recent poll (conducted Sept. 27-28) shows that younger N.C. voters aged 18-29 haven’t decided who to vote for beyond the presidential race.

The number of undecideds is higher among that age group than any other in the gubernatorial race between Republican Pat McCrory and Democrat Bev Perdue and in the senatorial race between Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democrat Kay Hagan. In that age group, 18 percent say they don’t know who they’re supporting for governor, and 14 percent don’t know who they’re backing for the Senate. By comparison, the undecideds in the presidential race at that age is only 5 percent.

Tom Jensen, who runs the poll, writes that overall the numbers suggest about one-third of the electorate is up for grabs in the next four weeks. And since so many young voters are up for the taking, that could bode well for the candidates who can attract that youth vote.

Several are campaigning this weekend to that end. There’s a Students for McCrory Web site and students were Pit-sitting for him at UNC-Chapel Hill on Friday.  N.C. State’s The Technician reports that McCrory is campaigning at a barbecue before Dole tailgates with students before the N.C. State football game Saturday.

The ultimate arbiter of all things youth – Facebook – breaks the candidates’ Internet support down as follows (as of Oct. 3):

McCrory – 1,951 supporters

Perdue – 811 supporters

Dole – 896 supporters

Hagan – 1,416 supporters

Hagan, for what it’s worth, has the broadest Facebook support by far. In addition to her supporters, there are Republicans for Kay Hagan, UNCC Students for Kay Hagan, Duke Students for Kay Hagan, NCSU Students for Kay Hagan and a Kay Hagan for US Senate group with 1,025 members. She also updates a Twitter account (62 followers). Whether any of this translates to numbers at the polls remains to be seen.

Q: How does tweeting an event differ from, say, live-blogging an event? Is there a difference?

A: I’ve never live-blogged an event, but I feel the principals of it vs. Twittering are similar. You’re trying to do updates as quickly as possible and as thorough as possible as the time allows for. Twitter imposes an additional space restriction because you only have 140 characters. You’re required to focus in on the key points.

Q: Do you think that something like Twitter is going to alter in any way how news is broken, does it fit in with the 24-hour news cycle of TV news networks and Web sites?

A: I think Twitter’s already altered how news is broken. The earthquake this summer was broken on Twitter before the Los Angeles Times had anything. And it’s not just Twitter that’s changing how news is broken – Wikipedia had Tim Russert’s entry updated to include his death before any news organization released the news. Social media in general makes it a lot easier for non-journalists to break news (and for journalists to break news). Twittering doesn’t give the full scope though – it’s great at announcing the news but hard to fit context into the space allowed. One of my favorite Tweets is this one by @lonelysandwich: “To be fair, if CNN could get away with HOLLYF**K EARTHQAKE!!!1! as the extent of its coverage, they’d likely have scooped your a**, Twitter.” (** mine).

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and running mate Joe Biden spoke at the depot Saturday. Both men emphasized the economy. “We can’t have another four years like the last eight years,” Obama said.

From the press risers overlooking the crowd of nearly 20,000, I was struck by the number of supporters taking cell phone pictures and videos of the speech. Search on Flickr for Obama and Greensboro, and a fair amount of photos from Saturday’s rally are posted. These amateur photos add to the wealth of content from the traveling press corps and the in-state crowd that showed up to cover the event. Greensboro’s News & Record has a really nice slideshow of photos from the rally (and audio and text of the speech), but there’s no interactive feature to let reader’s submit content. It only goes one way.

The event was also another try at live-Twittering an event. I liveblogged the first presidential debate with DTH State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick on Friday, but Saturday I Twittered for myself and not the DTH. I didn’t have my computer with me, so my updates were text only, which limited my speed. And I don’t get Tweets sent to my phone, so I wasn’t able to see or respond to all the @ replies I received until I got back to the office. That made it very much a one-way street.

I think my strategy – Tweeting mostly one-liner quotes with a few describing the atmosphere – worked better for this style of event than for the debate the night before, when all of America was watching and didn’t need the blow-by-blow account of what they watching. In that case, more analysis would have been appropriate.

The DTH plans to liveblog other election events this semester via Twitter, and I’m looking to experiment with different Tweeting styles to see what works best. What do you think? What do you want from live Twittering from an event?