We welcome Boston.com links, but first we must write better Web headlines

Let me state for the record that if and when Boston.com expands its Your Town initiative beyond the immediate Boston area, and starts aggregating stories from our New England media groups -- Cape Cod, SouthCoast, Seacoast and Nantucket -- I will not consider it a threat and will not join Gatehouse in their suit against the New York Times Co.

(Others in the company might disagree, of course, so let's also state for the record that this point of view is mine, singularly, as we have not yet formed an official company consensus, much less a position, on this issue.)

Sure, I understand the competitive concerns on the advertising and branding front. Long-term, however, the opportunities are going to outweigh the challenges. And make no mistake: Such partnerships are tremendous opportunities. We should be seeking them far and wide, with all sorts of media, professional associations, government institutions, non-profits and more.

It's in exactly the same vein as content distribution and marketing programs we've been discussing, exploring and preparing for over the last 12 months, especially on the back end as we've prepped calendar, headline and business review widgets for placement on both partner Web sites and for everyday users to pick up and put on their blogs or other personalized platforms.

Bob Kempf, old friend, sign us up, and it has nothing to do with your Ottaway heritage. It's a simple PageRank equation.

• Boston.com's Google PageRank = 8
• Cape Cod's Google PageRank = 6
• SouthCoast's Google PageRank = 6
• Seacoast's Google PageRank = 4
• Nantucket's Google PageRank = 5
  

Now, I don't pretend to be the grand poobah of search engine optimization. In fact, our page ranks would indicate we've not paid enough attention to such things across the board for quite some time. It's why one of our major strategic planning items come January will be focused squarely on improving our visibility in the search engines.

That said, one of the basic tenets of SEO is that the more links you have back to your site, the more authorative you appear to be to Google, especially when those links come from a site with a higher PageRank than yours. Such links translate to having a greater chance of being more highly visible in Google -- depending on the keywords used, of course.

So we will take Boston.com's appropriately attributed links to our stories, especially if they continue to leave the "nofollow" attribute off of the link. I will thank them for the direct traffic they drive to us. I will thank them for general opportunity on many other fronts, too.

Meanwhile, we will redouble our efforts to decrease our bounce rate and convert that traffic into more loyal customers once they arrive at our articles. We will ride that wave of links -- in combination with other SEO-related efforts -- all the way to higher visibility in Google and other search engines, which in turn will also generate more traffic and more opportunities for conversion.

But before Boston.com or anyone else blesses us with such great opportunities, we've got some more basic blocking and tackling to do. For starters, Boston.com and any other future partners are not going to rewrite our headlines for us.

The headline is the first and perhaps only chance we have at magnifying the potential of any linking opportunity, and when we continue to leave print kicker headlines in place for Web placement and aggregation, we remain dead in the water in the customer conversion battle. From an SEO point of view, the dearth of keyword-rich headlines also means none of these back links is going to be worth very much in the race for increased search engine visibility.

We need to get in the habit of adding more context and keywords to our Web headlines. To illustrate, here is a sampling from around our empire today:

• Multiple crashes reported on ice-slicked roadways (Where?)
• Amtrak trains delayed by severe weather (Where?)
• Santa sisterhood (What is this story even about?)
• A Christmas stolen now retrieved (Where?)
• Wake held for slain teenager (Where?)
• Shop around the clock (What is this story even about?)
• Police say man pointed gun at woman, then fled (Where?)
• Ice storm shelter closed as power restored (Where?)
• You were good, for goodness’ sake. (What is this story even about?)
• Route I-495 North reopened, South remains closed (Where? 495 is a long road)
• Last-minute shoppers create 'horrendous' traffic (What kinds of shoppers? Where?)
• Community Update (Which community?)
• Roads are slick; freezing rain now will continue to noon (Where?)
• Stolen ferret report leads to two arrests (Where?)
• Universities, union clash on smoking ban (Where?)
• 'A Living, Breathing Celebration' (What is this story even about? Would it surprise you that it is not about Christmas, but instead about state history?)
• 'Empire Builders' series details local history (Where?)
• Charities do surprisingly well (Where?)
• Delivering the knockout (What is this story even about? Boxing?)
• A healthy reputation (What is this story even about?)
• Official says plans greener at stadium (Where?)

When blended like this, the home market for the stories is indistinguishable. In an aggregated content world, the more descriptive the headline, the more likely you will make it for your headline to be understood and attractive to the local audience seeking your content on other platforms.

The flip side, of course, is that using the town name in every headline that makes sense will create some overkill on our community pages. In fact, the redundancy will also be beneficial from a search-engine standpoint, and it will not significantly harm the user experience. If headlines on the Anywhere page all have the "Anywhere" in them, the keyword saturation of that page will help it rank highly for anyone searching for "Anywhere news" or anything else to do with Anywhere.

The alternative, though, is an outright gamble. Leaving off the place name and hoping the ambiguity will inspire the reader to click and consume some portion of the story to get the full context is tantamount to cold calling the entire phone book and hoping to hit your monthly sales number before you run out of time.

Looking beyond our core platforms, we should consider a keyword-rich, fully contextual headlines as a lead qualifiers. It's one thing to get a bunch of traffic from a punchy headline linked from Fark or Drudge, and hope to convert some small percentage of that flood into a second page view and beyond, but we all know our primary goal is to attract local audiences. The more local information that can be stuffed into a headline, the more likely it is that the person clicking is from the local audience, and we have a much greater chance of converting that consumer to engage with our local advertising and other local content.

Which approach -- cold calling from an unqualified list, or prequalifying and prioritizing your leads -- is more efficient, and more likely to lead to revenue? Well-written Web headlines are the equivalent of the latter, and are more likely to lead to audience retention, which in turn increases our online revenue prospects.

Online content and audience development is not merely about page views and unique visitors. It's about increasing our share of the local online audience to a significant enough scale that our advertising solutions will generate enough meaningful results for local business that invest their marketing trust and budgets with us. If we can't capture a bigger piece of the local audience pie, and don't retain users once we've captured them, we can't very well expect to retain advertisers.

It all starts with the headlines.

The blog is alive! Now, let's go tweet.

The Ottaway Online Editors blog is back! Ready or not, here we come in the name of audience development and other business causes. To that end, we've also invited Kari Richards to join us in blogging here, focusing on best practices regarding e-mail audience development. Look for her posts soon.

So with the formalities out of the way, on with the blogging! This post has actually been sitting in my Drafts folder for a month, so it's time to push it into the spotlight.

Check out BusinessWeek.com's slideshow "Tweet From The Chiefs" (maneuver through it via the thumbnails at the bottom of the introduction) and imagine the local possibilities. What personalities and dignitaries in your market are on Twitter? What are they saying, and how are they using this social media tool? Publicity? Customer service? Conversation? Chances are, it's some combination of those things and more.

Of course, better start by making sure your brand is represented and polished on Twitter. So far, we're doing pretty well along those lines: CapeCodTimes; HVMG; MailTribune; ThePoconos and PoconoRecord; Recordnet and 209Vibe; and SeacoastOnline. There appear to be accounts for sharpmag and southcoasttoday, too, though no activity yet.

Then experiment with ways to use the accounts in addition to pumping out breaking news. Engage readers, subscribers and advertisers. Promote your Twitter presence, so you can converse with existing members of those groups, all while drawing in more readers, subscribers and advertisers.

Next, encourage individual reporters to participate in locally based Twitter conversations by starting their own accounts and "following" the personalities that you've highlighted in your slideshow. Have them search for others using Twitter's search functionality (examples: https://twitter.com/tw/search/users?q=cape+cod or https://twitter.com/tw/search/users?q=stockton). Seek out brands that have physical presences in your market, too, such as Comcast, Whole Foods, Panera Bread (not much activity yet), and Starbucks. Peruse the Social Brand Index for more.

Once reporters get a feel for the medium, please encourage them to interact. Social media usage is only as successful as the relationships that are built on it. Reporting on a one-way conversation has never been as compelling or as thorough as what's derived from shared dialogue. One-way relationships rarely work out very well.

And isn't that the essence of what we're trying to accomplish as a company and throughout the industry? Jobs-to-be-done interviews, customer-focused product development and consultative selling are in the end a means of building better relationships with our communities and facilitating open and ongoing dialogue.

Social media tools like Twitter can only help.

We've mastered YouTube, so let's tackle Flickr

I visited with Anne Brennan at the Cape Cod Times yesterday, and the conversation turned to placing our content in front of local audiences on other platforms. To follow that up, I shared with Anne some of my ideas about how Flickr could be part of the mix.

So with apologies to Anne, who will receive a second copy of this when the blog post gets redistributed to our online editors listserv, I thought it might be helpful if I shared my thoughts with a wider audience.

Here's what I would do first with Flickr. Have the photo staffs create their own accounts, and upload their favorite photos. I'd aim for daily, but would be happy with weekly intervals for now. Just one photo per interval is all we ask. Then in the caption, in addition to describing the photo, I would put a link to your photos page, something like:

See these and more photos of the week from my colleagues at the <a href="http://www.capecodonline.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=MEDIA01">Cape Cod Times
</a> and other galleries on <a href="http://capecodonline.com/
apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=MEDIA01">our photos page.</a>

The html code will render, so that the captions will actually link. Here's an example:

http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/2226368564/

I would then make sure to add each photo to the most appropriate Flickr group or groups, where the photos can be targeted to specific interests and gain wider visibility among a more engaged audience. That will translate to a greater potential for click throughs. The photo example linked in the previous paragraph has been added to Cape and Islands Life and Photogamer, an amateur photographer exercise and group I've been participating in.

(Speaking of groups, I found a New Hampshire one that would make a cool project in any one of our markets: http://www.flickr.com/groups/nh/discuss/72157600349063566/)

Down the road, I would try collecting UGC photo efforts on Flickr, asking people to "tag" their photos with "cctstorm" or "cctpatriots" to collect their work in a Flickr slideshow, selections of which you'd republish in the paper and could fairly easily pull back into your site using a Flickr widget (they call it a badge).

Tags, by the way, is a means by which users can categorize their photos with their own folksonomy. The cool thing is it's a way to connect the dots across multiple accounts. I'll walk you through an example:

Start with my tags: http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/tags/

When you click on a tag like "sandwichma" from there, you get a screen that shows all of my photos with that tag: http://flickr.com/photos/spolay/tags/sandwichma/

Then, there is a link to see all public photos tagged the same way: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/sandwichma/. The first couple of pages this morning are actually my photos, because I recently uploaded a large batch from our family's Christmas card outtakes. Starting on about page 3 of this set, though, you can see photos from other users: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/sandwichma/?page=3

Flickr is among the most popular photosharing sites out there, and it's a mystery to me that so few newspapers -- at least to my knowledge -- have tried to avail themselves of such a highly engaged and enthusiastic audience to any great degree. I recently polled some colleagues from around the industry, and the only similar efforts I could unearth are at fresnofamous.com (http://www.flickr.com/groups/fresnofamous/), nh.com (http://media.nh.com/) and delawareonline.com (http://flickr.com/photos/tags/delawareonline/clusters/).

Such an effort will take some time to build awareness and momentum. One thing we've learned this past year is that success from this type of outreach will only come with consistently applied effort. I firmly believe there is a long-term payoff, both from the standpoint of reaching a large concentration of Cape Cod photo enthusiasts from far and wide who prefer the Flickr platform to ours, and the search engine optimization benefits of creating meaningful links back to our site from a visible, credible, high-ranking site.

The other thing we have learned time and again is that such an effort needs an owner. If no one owns the initiative, it will wane quickly, if it gets off the runway at all. This is the ideal opportunity to really expand a photography-based virtual beat, so that either the photo editor, one or several of the photographers, or even one of the image technicians, really owns, cares for and feeds this outreach effort.

(Full disclosure: Mike Conery and I undertook some Flickr experimentation with Discover Nantucket (http://flickr.com/photos/discovernantucket/), but I don't think we did enough, especially given that we never fully implemented photo galleries on discovernantucket.com, something that will likely get addressed down the road as Nantucket takes back ownership of the site. So we had nothing of added value to link to -- not a challenge most of our other sites will face. The bigger weakness, however, is that the Inquirer and Mirror staff was never fully invested and involved in the project. We failed to clearly communicate what we were trying to accomplish, and the staff in turn was uncomfortable with the platform and the content we were pulling from it. Water under the bridge, but valuable lessons were learned all around.)

We're obviously never going to supplant Flickr, and the odds of us being the "Local Flickr" are pretty long. So let's try to be involved and visible among our local audience that is already on Flickr, offering that audience some of our high-quality photography while also receiving some benefit for the investment of our time, interaction and conversation.

"People form tribes with or without us," Seth Godin wrote recently. "The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better."

I've only scratched the surface on how to utilize Flickr to your benefit. Here's some additional reading that will help:

http://www.doshdosh.com/comprehensive-guide-to-using-flickr-for-traffic-building/

http://sensiblemarketing.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/promote-your-company-and-drive-traffic-to-your-website%E2%80%A6with-flickr/

TV is killing us with convergence and self-promotion

At one point during Game 3 of the World Series last night, there was a trivia interlude, asking viewers which of four Rockies held the franchise record for home runs. To participate, viewers were told to text their choice to Fox, or log onto FoxSports.com to vote.

Now, at the time, I thought that was pretty silly. Vote for something you could first find the answer to with a couple of clicks on the Web?

While the specific question might have been silly, the aim was not: Leverage the strengths of other mediums to further engage the audience, and expose them to other Fox products.

(Oddly, though, I could not unearth historical stats on FoxSports.com. Had to learn elsewhere that the answer is Todd Helton.)

I have been struck lately by how well TV sports broadcasters do, through spoken words, tickers, on-screen bugs and more, to tout their online and mobile products. The Red Sox pregame show on the local Fox affiliate last night included viewer comments scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Watch any Sunday morning football preview show, and they are answering viewers' fantasy football questions via the ticker, and actively seek such questions through lead-ins or close-outs of segments. A local Patriots weekly magazine show included promotional spots for online-only programming during the week and on game days.

Contrast that with my experience with reading the November/December issue of Yankee Magazine this morning. There was a good story about the transformation of Pittsfield, MA, into a can't-miss city on any visit to Western Massachusetts. Once I reached the end of the story, I made myself backtrack through the pages, because I was sure I must have missed a tease to go online to see more photos or share my Pittsfield travel stories. No such luck.

That would have been the elementary step. An interactive map might have been an intermediate step, showing all the different locales discussed in the article (there was quite an extensive list at the end of the print story). Pulling in ratings and reviews from Yelp and other sites might have been the more advanced step. Bonus points could have been achieved if they had their own ratings and reviews system and they solicited users to participate.

So I went online, to see if the Yankee staff did anything to enhance the online version of the story, and maybe just missed the opportunity to tease from print. Nay. The story is not even online yet.

I throw up my hands in disgust. How can we expect our audiences to engage with us and our products if we won't engage ourselves in stretching our thinking and leveraging the strengths of our platforms?

YouTube invitation

I believe I received a YouTube invitation from fitnessfactor overnight because I already subscribe to another fitness video channel (if only I was better at making time to stay fit!). I am betting that they scoured related channels, and invited subscribers of those other channels to check out fitnessfactor.

A bit spammish in practice, but it did entice me to click through and check out the videos.

One weakness of the fitnessfactor invite was it was not personal. They just used the default YouTube text:

Hi Sean,

I've been using YouTube to share personal videos with my friends and family. I'm inviting you to become my friend on YouTube so I can easily share videos with you in the future.

To accept my invitation, please follow this link and login. If you're not already a YouTube member, you can sign up first.

Thanks,
fitnessfactor

I've got social networking profiles all over the Internet. It's not that hard to learn a little bit about me, and a personal touch would go a lot further when it comes to recruiting me to subscribe or otherwise participate in what you're trying to accomplish.

An alternative approach:

Hi Sean,

We noticed that you subscribe to cbtrainer's videos, and as a busy executive and father of three, I am sure you are looking for any tips you can get to stay healthy and fit efficiently, while resisting the urge to indulge in fast food and unhealthy snacks, especially when you are on the road.

Check out our videos by following this link, and if we can fit into your video and fitness life, we'd love to have you as a subscriber.

Thanks,
fitnessfactor

Now, not every potential user is as visible as I am on the Internet. But take out the executive and father details, and it would still be a lot more personal than the default text.

Don't forget what you're up against. I received another YouTube invitation last week that was much more like a typical MySpace invite. "Hi, you looked interesting to me, and you should come over to this other Web site to check me out." They've become so numerous, it's become just noise. The fitnessfactor invite was a lot closer to that noise than it needed to be.

It's all about the signal-to-noise ratio. You need to amplify your signal to rise above all the noise. A little extra effort and a personal touch can go a long way to achieving that.

For related thoughts, check Lee Odden's "Blogger Realtions 101." While it refers to bloggers specifically -- and bloggers will be a specific focus of a chapter in the Audience Development Playbook -- Odden offers some pretty good tips on outreach in general that will be helpful regardless of platform. Also see his more recent post, "How NOT to Pitch a Blog."

Writing a playbook

As I alluded to during the online content call on Monday, we're in the process of crafting an audience development playbook, which like iTunes Essentials mixes, will break down both everyday and unusual content situations into three sets of steps:

1. The Basics
2. Next Steps
3. Go Deep

So, for example, today there is a story in our Cape Cod Times on public defenders still waiting for FY 2006-07 paychecks from the state. We started the day adding it to Digg/Twitter/StumbleUpon/Reddit, and if we had a midday update e-mail there (it's coming, right?) we would have made sure to include it among the highlighted items.

Next, as I pause to write this blog post, I am in the midst of reaching out to public defender blogs -- some local, some beyond -- to offer it as blog material, and make a connection with those bloggers to see if they are interested in receiving periodic notifications from us on stories they'd be interested in and how they'd like to receive those notifications.

There are other steps, too, that we hope to flush out as part of this, and once Version 1.0 of the playbook is completed, will have crafted a resource from which a training program can be developed. Our aim would be to take it on the road to our newsrooms, and as I mentioned Monday, spend some of our online editors conference in January focusing a workshop on specific situations and doing actual distribution and outreach for live stories while we're at the conference.

If you have categories of content you'd like to see included in the playbook, or any thoughts on the concept at all, please give Yoni and I a shout. We're already looking forward to the January conference, and think the practical workshop element will be a great addition to the program. We hope you agree.