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With news organizations beginning to create special positions to manage the use of social media tools, such as the recently appointed social editor at The New York Times, journalism schools are starting to recognize the need to integrate social media into their curricula. That doesn’t mean having a class on Facebook () or Twitter (), which many college students already know inside and out, but instead means that professors are delving into how these tools can be applied to enrich the craft of reporting and producing the news and ultimately telling the story in the best possible way.

1. Promoting Content Social media tools are bringing readers to news sites and in many cases are increasing their Web-traffic. This isn’t just through the news organizations’ own social media accounts, but those of their writers that tweet, post, share and send links to their organization’s content. Each writer has a social network, and using social media tools to promote and distribute content increases the potential readership of the article being shared. Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said this is one of the most basic and yet very important social media uses for journalists.

3. News Gathering and Research The power of real-time search is providing journalists with up-to-the-second information on the latest developments of any news, trends and happenings, worldwide. Jeff Jarvis, a professor and director of interactive media at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, said it’s important for students to know how to use real-time searches to gather information and keep up on what is breaking. This includes, but is not limited to, using search on Twitter, FriendFeed (), OneRiot, Tweetmeme, Scoopler, and SearchMerge.

All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims: Not all social networks are the same. You cannot assume network transitivity. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks. To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.

Sociological "personal" networks. Sociologists have been working hard to measure people's personal networks and much of the theory of social networks stems from analysis done on these networks.

Most sociological theory stems from analyses of these personal networks. Social capital, weak ties, homophily, ... all of those theories you've heard about are based on personal networks. Given that these are typically measured by eliciting people's understandings of certain categories (e.g., "friend"), there's a strong overlap between everyday language around social networks and the categories being measured.

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com. But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy.

Certainly, there is a powerful new force developing here. Citizens who previously had little voice in public are using cheap Web tools to tell the world about the drama that has unfolded since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's presidential election. The government succeeded last week in exerting control over Internet use and text-messaging, but Twitter has proven nearly impossible to block. The most common search topic on Twitter for days has been "#iranelection" -- the "hashtag" for discussions about Iran -- and international media outlets are relying on information and images disseminated by ordinary citizens via Twitter feeds. Yet for all its promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet do not represent the end of politics as we know it -- and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering is going to force Iranian leaders to change course, as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, made clear during Friday prayers with his stern rebuke of the protesters. In Iran, as elsewhere, true revolution can only happen offline.