NYU’s PressThinker Jay Rosen, in a BusinessJournalism.org podcast, cautioned journalists and news organizations against joining social networks without first forming a plan.

You need a very strong idea, and only that can tell you which of the networking tools, sites and technologies might be right. Otherwise you have technology driven projects. A company decides to go with Ning, or they’re encouraging us to use Facebook or the editor wants us to be on Twitter. Whenever I hear things like that I actually feel innovation failing at those organizations.

Rosen advises that journalists and news organizations should first figure out what they want to do with a given social network. There is a big difference between merely joining Twitter to get a presence on the social network and joining Twitter because you want to use it to send out live updates from court room trials, for instance.

A lot of news organizations invariably join Twitter and immediately turn their feed into an RSS feed. Those news organizations have completely missed what Twitter is about and will not be able to attract a strong following on Twitter.

But then there are other news organizations who use Twitter to do something unique. Some news organizations might use Twitter as a sort of public Page 1 meeting, while others might send out interesting links. Individual journalists might use Twitter to help find sources or to help report live events.

We’ve found at Beat Blogging that different social networks work better for different news organizations, beats and journalists. Ron Sylvester can’t really use Twitter for source development because not enough people in Wichita, Kansas are on Twitter. Sylvester can still use it, however, to help report.

Etan Horowitz, on the other hand, can use Twitter to find sources for stories because his beat is on technology. Twitter is filled with people in the tech industry and people who like technology. Sylvester and Horowitz are both successful using Twitter because they have a very specific idea of what they want Twitter to help them with.

Most of the beat reporters I have spoken with have found little use for Facebook. Yet, it’s a huge tool for Khristopher Brooks. Brooks, a higher education reporter, specifically uses it to find student sources for his stories.