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Nothing new here

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 9, 2011)
The headline on the new Pew study, Navigating News Online, was “Where people go, how they get there and what lures them away,” but it would have been just as accurate and more to the point if it had been “Every trend we’ve reported in the past few years is still true.” There also is no recommendation on what any news organization should in light of these trends (it says, “All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them,” which might be more accurately translated as, “We don’t know for sure what you should try”). A summary:

Most folks who visit news sites are infrequent visitors and don’t stay very long at all — less than five minutes a month. Yes, A MONTH. A small group — very small, in some cases — comes more often and spends more than an hour a month.

Google continues to be the top place driving traffic to news sites, but social media, and Facebook in particular, are growing fast as news referring sources. The study confirms, however, that Twitter barely registers as a referring source. (Note that is a general observation; if you are getting great results from Twitter, by all means keep using it.)

The “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links on news sites.

One bit of good news: The age of news consumers online is on par with Internet users overall. In other words, not the mostly older (I won’t say “dying”) group that is the audience for so much traditional media.

5/17/11 UPDATE: Some people have pointed out problems with the Pew study, among them Steve Buttry. Steve lists five problems, but each of the five is a lengthy complaint. They fall generally under the headings of methodology and sloppy stats. Perhaps the most damning criticism for most journalists would be No. 5:

“Whatever validity this study has is heavily skewed toward national news because PEJ studied only the top 25 news sites, based on unique visitors for the first nine months of 2010. Of the 25 sites studied, at most six could be described as local news sites, the sites of the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and Chicago Tribune. And some, if not all, of those have significant national audiences, at least for a sports franchise they follow. With that heavy a national sample, the study is nearly worthless for local news sites.”

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Own that hashtag

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 3, 2011)
The Lost Remote blog offers a reminder of why it’s a good idea, when you are using Twitter in your coverage of a big and/or ongoing news event, that you have a hashtag and to be sure your audience is aware of it. Also, an example of a use for hashtags I hadn’t seen before:

“Over on ABC News, they displayed a counter of #RoyalWedding mentions on air. But more interestingly, ABC used hashtags as a poll: #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess, with 82% concluding that Kate’s dress was a #RoyalSuccess.”

UPDATE: Maybe it’s a coincidence of timing, but here’s more on the subject from Twitter Media:

“Many news organizations —ABC News, CNN, BBC, ITV, Sky— amongst others —used the royal wedding as an opportunity to launch new Twitter integrations and to experiment with novel reporting approaches.

“Here are some new best practices that have emerged:

“Tracking total Tweets and Tweets per minute about a major story has surfaced as a state-of-the-art news metric (@ABCRoyals’ Tweet tickers). A nod to MTV for first employing this for a pop culture event in their 2010 MTV VMA visualization.

“Hashtags as polls capture the audience’s opinion while also shaping and driving the conversation. (ABC News with #RoyalMess vs #RoyalSuccess and @SkyNews with #GoRoyals vs #NoRoyals.)

“For a shared story, using company-specific hashtags helps drive and identify your own audience’s tweets (#CNNTV, #BBCWedding).”

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Keeping an eye on different audiences

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on April 26, 2011)
An article from emarketer.com (Nicole McMullin of Richmond.com pointed it out) points up differences in the reading habits of two audiences: those who find content through searches, and those who find it through links in social media such as Facebook. Links from social media are far outnumbered by search, but social media is much more likely to link to news and entertainment stories, which happen to be an awful lot of what we do.

The issue is that people who come in via links in social media “have fewer page views per session and a higher bounce rate” — they are less engaged than people who come in from a search link.

It seems that the lesson in this simply is to pay attention to both your social media links and what you are doing to optimize your site for search engines to find your content. You can’t drop social media because that’s the forum where people are most likely to want to share what they find interesting, but you can’t ignore SEO because that’s how people who might be the most interested in a particular topic you are covering will find your story.

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Case study: What NOT to do on Facebook

Posted in Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on April 11, 2011)
WABC in New York unintentionally served up a great lesson Sunday in the wrong way to use social media in newsgathering, posting a cryptic question seeking anyone who knew someone on a specific flight. There was no mention of what prompted the request, but it doesn’t take a nervous disposition to envision, oh, a plane crash, for instance. When the station’s fans pointed out the needless panic the station was causing, the station didn’t help matters much, posting only “Everyone is safe.” The station took a beating online, and you can bet it will take a while for its fans to get over the sting and for the station to regain whatever level of respect it had in their eyes before this.

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Counterintuitively, the Web seems to push you into the world

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Jan. 18, 2011)
It hasn’t worked this way for me, but one of the many branches of the Pew Research Center says that Internet users are far more likely to be active in real-world social groups. And I think most of the groups they’re talking about don’t involve dressing up in medieval garb. So why am I posting this is a news blog? Just as a way of reminding us all that people are active in their social networks, and people talk about things casually among friends, including topics in the news. Besides, I had to update this blog. I’ve had a cold and been away a while.

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7 deadly sins

Posted in Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 30, 2010)
Gina Chen, who among other things contributes to the Nieman Journalism Lab, has a post on her own blog listing what she calls the seven deadly sins of social media use for journalists. It’s just another way of saying the same things about “do this” and “don’t do that,” but if you are someone who is still looking for guidance and “best practices,” every different way you hear these things is helpful. In summary:

Pride – If you’re proud of yourself for having social-media presence, don’t be. Do you have exchanges with your audience? If there’s not back-and-forth going on, you’re falling short.

Greed – On Twitter, do you like having a lot of followers but don’t follow that many people yourself? If so, you’re greedy.

Envy – If a “competitor” beats you to a legitimate story, link to it. I’ve explained this one just recently.

Wrath – That would be responding to the trolls who bait you in site comments. Gina quotes some advice from the Bible: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.”

Lust – Another term for this would be linkbaiting — posting or tweeting something trashy or vapid that will get a rush of traffic but does nothing for long-term audience engagement.

Gluttony – I think she was stretching on this one, which she defines as having too many overspecialized sites or feeds. I’m not sure that’s a big issue nowadays.

Sloth – Just what it sounds like: Not taking time to try to make social media useful.

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Call it beating a dead horse if you must

Posted in Social media, tagged , , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Dec. 28, 2010)

Poynter.org turns a spotlight today on a smallish TV station in Arkansas (it’s in the 180th ranked market) that has managed to gather nearly 20,000 Facebook fans. The news director offers four suggestions for news organizations to improve their social media presence (all of which should by now sound familiar):

1. Get everyone involved. Use the expertise in the room. Almost everyone in the 40-person KAIT newsroom has taken on a role in publishing online or on social media, from the news director himself to part-time studio camera operators. Producers, weather staff and newsroom managers are the most consistent contributors.

2. At a minimum, post items four or five hours before the news begins to push to the newscast, “but if you’re going to do it right you need to be there all the time, especially for breaking news and weather events.” Mid-morning, a poll — often related to local news — goes up on the station’s website and on Facebook, and often gets about 75 comments. The early evening newscasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. include website, Twitter and Facebook comments at least a couple times a week, as does the 10 p.m. newscast.

3. Find an internal social media guru, and let that person lead the charge. Ryan Vaughan, the station’s chief meteorologist, has embraced social media but has also told others in the building to run with it and see what they could figure out. New employees get training in KAIT’s three-screen approach (TV, Web, mobile).

4. Make sure your website is updated often and the stories also get shared on the appropriate social media. “If we think it’s something that’s going to get passed around, it goes to Twitter; if it’s going to get commented on, it goes to Facebook.”

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Facebook – it’s everywhere you want to be

Posted in Online media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Nov. 23, 2010)
On Monday business and marketing strategist Brian Solis posted an analysis of Facebook’s explosive growth, and his thoughts on the larger social implications (plus the implications for Google). It’s indirectly a good argument for the importance of Facebook for a news organization’s audience engagement. Within the piece are some stats that drive home how many sites of all kinds have added Facebook features:

More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform.

150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.

Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.

According to comScore, Facebook traffic soared by 55.2% in the past year, hitting 151.1 million in October.

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Some news organizations use Facebook well

Posted in Broadcast media, Print media, Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Oct. 19, 2010)
And then there is The Star-Ledger in New Jersey. I don’t mean to pick on that paper, but the blog Journalistics posted a listing of the number of Facebook fans of the nation’s largest newspapers, and The Star-Ledger had just 372 (although today it’s up to 381, probably people who saw the list). You as an organization have got to be making a serious effort to avoid using Facebook to have numbers that low. For example, the Facebook page of The Weekly Observer in South Carolina shows 1,167 fans. (TBO.com, the site affiliated with both The Tampa Tribune and WFLA, ranks 17th on Journalistics’ list.) Examining these two actually shows a lot about what to do and what not to do.

On the not-to-do side there is just one, but it’s a biggie: The Star-Ledger simply does not post very often. Five times all year, as of the time I’m writing this. The only thing they are doing write is including links.

So what does The Weekly Observer do right? A lot of it is the opposite of The Star-Ledger: frequent posting. From 12:30 p.m. Monday to now, there have been four posts. The paper is a weekly, but this fan page gets daily attention. And everything has a link. As noted yesterday, posts carrying images and links not only get more clicks, they elevate your posts in the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine whether your fans even see what you posted.

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Retweeting the competition

Posted in Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on Oct. 13, 2010)
Lost Remote posted a survey:

“Last week we posted an entertaining Twitter exchange between competing TV stations in Seattle, and ‘Zhendirez’ left the comment, ‘Heck, I retweet the competition when they have something interesting that I know we won’t.’ So what do you think? When (if ever) should a news organization retweet something from a competing news organization?”

For the record, I’ve always believed in the soundness of the theory that retweeting the competition (all competition, all platforms) tells people you are plugged into the news, no matter where it comes from, and they come to think of you as the premier news source. No one, however, encourages retweeting mere rumors.

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