The New Social Search Engines: Useful for Your Health Reporting?

Recently, I participated in a Poynter NewsU webinar to learn how to search social media more effectively, hoping to glean some tips for journalists and others covering health issues. Like many of you, I can search Twitter and Facebook, but Time magazine reporter, journalism educator and search whiz Jeremy Caplan offered some tools that go well beyond those platforms.

Here's the tip sheet from the seminar, which discussed new sites like Kurrently, which searches Facebook and Twitter in real-time, Aardvark, which asks questions of your social networks, Qwerly, which finds people on multiple social networks, and Searchtastic, which searches Twitter's history.

"Some of these will survive," Caplan said, and clearly, some will not. 

After playing with these sites for awhile, I'm not convinced they're of much use to health journalists on deadline. (Sorry, Jeremy.)

Simple searches of Twitter, Facebook and Google seem more likely to yield useful information more quickly (check out these social media tips from Career GPS blogger Angilee Shah).

It may be that these tools are less suited to the health beat than technology or business beats, seeing as how a good number of them are designed for corporations to monitor, minute-by-minute, their reputations on social media networks.

And here's a thought: closing your laptop, going outside and doing some old-school shoe-leather reporting might yield better information still.

Here's an example:  I searched Kurrently to see who was commenting on a recent study linking coffee consumption to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. After wading through a lot of garbage from purveyors of weight loss products, coffee and get-rich-quick schemes, I did find a few random Facebook postings from people I might contact to quote in a story, sure.

But wouldn't it be faster and more relevant to go to a local café if you needed "real people" for your coverage?

I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If you have examples of how you've used second-generation social search engines in your health reporting, please share them in the comments below.