Plug your blog into Facebook

While spending some time with Deb Cram at Seacoast Media Group yesterday, I walked her through how to plug her smgphoto Twitter feed into her Facebook profile. I realized later that we have many bloggers -- and a few Tweeters -- around Ottaway that also have Facebook accounts who could benefit from the same tutorial.

At the very least, it will help you share your blog with friends and family in addition to anyone else you're connected with on the social network.

Here are the steps to follow (Note to those reading this via the e-mail post to our onlineeditors listserv: You'll want to click through to the Ottaway Online Editors blog to see the screenshots embedded in this post):

1. First, grab the URL for your blog's RSS feed. In the case of our Mzinga blogging platform, there is an XML button at the bottom of each blog's entry page from which you can grab the URL. Right-click on it and in Firefox select "Copy Link Location," or in IE select "Copy Shortcut:"
   
2. After logging into Facebook, choose Notes from the Applications toolbar:
   
3. Once at the Notes page, click on the link to "Import a blog" under the heading "Notes Settings:"
   
4. Paste your feed URL into the "Web URL" text field, and click the square box to affirm to Facebook that you have the right to post the feed. Finally, click the "Start Importing" button:
   
5. Voila! Instant RSS success!
   

There are other, more elaborate ways to accomplish the same goal, especially if you are active on Twitter. You can create a Twitterfeed account, and plug that same RSS feed into Twitterfeed so it will update your Twitter followers when you post a new item. In turn you can add the Twitter application to your Facebook profile, and allow it to update your Facebook status every time there is a new item posted to Twitter.

But if you're not yet feeling that adventurous, just sync up your Facebook Notes with your blog feed, and you'll be on your way to being a practitioner of viral marketing and content distribution.

Back to basics: Our bloggers should link to related materials

In reading Cape Cod Times' photographer Steve Heaslip's blog post about working at the firefighter awards ceremony in Boston yesterday, it occurred to me that Steve's very good blog posts are missing links to related items within our product suite.

Let me be clear: My intention is not to pick on my old friend, Steve. There are many blogs throughout Ottaway where the practice of linking -- especially to related items on our platform -- is conspicuously absent.

The missed opportunities in Steve's post:

• We could link the words "Firefighter of the Year awards" to the main story
• Link the words "Christopher Brown" to the magnified photo showcased in the story.
• Link "document this special event" to the photo gallery.
• Link to the related video -- currently embedded in the article but missing from the video roster, by the way (maybe it could be anchored so the link could jump right to it?).

Likewise, from the main story: Put in Steve's blog post as a related link.

Other examples of missed link opportunities in Ottawayland:

• Mail Tribune Sport Insiders blog had a post on Oct. 4 about the multiple hoops they had jumped through to get a freelancer to cover out-of-state Oregon and Oregon State football games. Unfortunately, they missed a chance to link to the actual Beavers and Ducks stories the blog post references and lauds.
• There's a mixed link bag at Cut for Space, a blog covering Montgomery, Walden and Maybrook, NY. The good: In her latest post about the upcoming meetings on the Central Hudson power line project, Meghan Murphy linked off site to a project overview. The missed opportunity: She did not link to the excellent power line landing page on recordonline.com about this long-running regional issue.
• Pocono Record Editor Bill Watson wrote a very good post about recent cleanup operations along I-80 in Stroudsburg, PA, and how it was essentially lipstick on a pig of highway in need of modernization. But he did not link to stories that had been done by the news staff about the cleanup and the resulting traffic jams, nor did he link to his very good Commuter/Traffic landing page with its up-to-date traffic map and promo to sign up for commuter text alerts.
  
• Seacoast's Frank Coppola wrote last night about the fantasy baseball impact of Javier Vazquez going to the Atlanta Braves. He linked to an ESPN report, but missed an opportunity to direct readers to our version of the AP report.
• SouthCoast's Jennifer Lade had a fantastic post last month containing all of what she could not fit in her article on the Wareham town meeting, but there was no link to the original article, and no link was added to that article nor a subsequent one to showcase Jennifer's supplementary material on her blog.
• Stockton city hall reporter David Siders has had three recent posts about candidates jockeying for attention so they can be appointed to fill a soon-to-be vacated city council seat. None of the three links to Siders' Nov. 19 article on the city council accepting applications to provide some much needed context.
  

To be fair, we also have bloggers who do seize upon internal linking opportunities:

• Michael Fitzgerald at The Record in Stockton has many internal links.
  
• Mike Sadowski's PopRox blog for poconorecord.com mixes in both internal and external links.

Not every blog post has to link to something else on the site. The live blogging Russ Charpentier did from Gillette Stadium on Nov. 13, for example, for Cape Cod Online's Sports Buzz blog simply doesn't lend itself to that practice.

But when the opportunity exists, linking can only help more deeply engage the readers and provide them with more context, which are the two most important outcomes. In the Steve Heaslip example that led off this post, I guarantee every single Cape Cod firefighter who comes across either our main story or Steve's blog post would love to click through to the related items. They'd even likely share some of those links with their peers, friends and family. One of them might have a blog, too, and would love to know there was more fodder for their linking druthers.

There are lots of things that go into good blogging. I'll posit that linking is the most essential distinguishing characteristic. Otherwise, an unlinked blog post is just another column.

Note: If creating links in blog posts is something that requires more training in our Ottaway newsrooms, please let me know. I hope that's not the case, but if it is, we should address it immediately.

xFruits aren't ripe yet

Just a quick update on my weekend experiment with xFruits: Though I did successfully mash the feeds and republish content from other feeds to my personal blog, it did not turn out to be an automated result. I still needed to manually update my xFruits settings to get things to flow from feed to blog. The API that facilitates the republication does not appear to be "always on" -- at least not the way xFruits interacts with it.

Witness my post on CommuterDaddy, which I have purposefully not pushed through manually to see how long it takes to jump automatically from the feed through the API, if it does at all. Some of the comments on the xFruits blog seem to indicate it happened weekly for some early adopters. Of course, that would not be nearly frequent enough for our purposes.

More to come....

Tossing an xFruits salad

Please pardon this interruption in content- and marketing-focused blog posts as I dabble in technology a bit and test the feed republishing from the Ottaway Online Editors blog to my personal spolay 2.0 playground.

If successful, this was accomplished using xFruits, something Yoni discovered earlier this week that I've now had enough time to dive deeply into this morning. If not successful, well, it's back to the drawing board....

The idea behind xFruits is to mash up feeds for almost any purpose you can dream up. It's basically another flavor of something like FeedDigest, which we used to combine our football feeds for NewYorkVersusNewEngland.com.

So far, FeedDigest was easier to manipulate in terms of mashing feeds dynamically into an html page with other elements.

xFruits has proven quite capable, though, of mixing multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, and essentially walked me though how I could use the Blogger API to pull feeds from this blog and my CommuterDaddy one into spolay 2.0. For blog aggregation, it seems to be ideal.

The only drawback so far has been that when I first set up the feeds, it republished everything that was available in the feed, and Blogger republished everyting using the time stamp at which the items were received. So I had to go back and reset time stamps -- and weed out older posts when I got tired of redoing timestamps one by one. Not xFruit's fault, I don't think. The bugs seem simply to be Blogger functionality drawbacks.

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Now playing: KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See
via FoxyTunes

Fun with photos, and engage your audience at the same time

Have you seen Photogamer?

There's a lot to like about this site/concept, and half of its beauty is its simplicity. It's essentially a blog and a Flickr group, melded into a fairly engaging social media experiment. It's highly addictive, both as a viewer and as an amateur photographer.

The concept is simple: Once a day, a photo subject is proposed via the blog. Then, those who are playing along upload their submission to their own photo account, and add the photo to the Photogamer group.

It's not a contest. It's intended simply as a medium through which amateur photographers can showcase themselves, and see how their peers tackled the same subject.

Not a photographer? Well, we already know our users love to peruse photo galleries. What better way to further engage that interest by providing them with more community photos without severely tapping your resources. Put the content expansion in the hands of your audience.

In doing the latter, you're tapping into the wide swath of users who already play in the digital photo space -- using everything from fancy, expensive SLRs to the cheapest camera phones and disposable digital point-and-shoots.

Sure, we've been soliciting user-generated photos online for years. We've even published some in the paper (we should do this more, too, by the way). Our normal m.o., though, is to ramp up the effort when there is breaking news. We need a more continuous flow, especially to foster more aggressive audience growth in those wide gaps between the really big stories.

I've been participating in Photogamer. You can follow my very amateur progress on my Flickr account (I also posted about the experience here and here on my personal blog). Come join me, and spend the rest of January on Photogamer. Then leverage the experience to create a local version for February and beyond.

You could even take Photogamer a step further and turn it into a mobile-phone-photo-based scavenger hunt for a younger audience set, for example. The possibilities are fairly limitless.

I'm sure C.C. Chapman won't mind if I transmit one of his concept's here (helping you speak outside the fishbowl in 2008, C.C.!): The goal, from an editor's perspective, should be to play on the new media playground, and gain insight and experience from the endeavor. By encouraging you to participate, I am hoping you, as my audience, will not only learn from the experience, but also have fun doing it. After all, the best way to learn anything is by doing -- and doing it continuously enough until it becomes second nature.

Then pay it all forward by having fun with your audience.

Social media cuts both ways

I very much enjoyed Matt Kinsman's article about online self-promotion on a numbers of levels, not the least of which is a perspective added near the end that pertains to us as new media managers when we are hiring:

It cuts both ways—not only should potential employers be considering your online presence, you should evaluate theirs, including LinkedIn and Facebook profiles of would-be managers.

I hired Yoni Greenbaum last year after we got reacquainted via LinkedIn. He utilized that channel to network through me to follow a lead on another job, and I steered him toward my opening instead.

You'll have to ask him to confirm, but the connection definitely would not have happened had I a.) not been on LinkedIn; b.) not been connected to someone he was seeking to meet, and c.) not had additional online profiles that aided his decision-making, such as this very blog, not to mention my personal blog, and other online presences.

How many of you -- personally or professionally -- are on LinkedIn? Facebook? Flickr? Twitter? YouTube? A blog? If a talented, web-savvy candidate were considering you and your organization for employment, what conclusion would that candidate reach about your organization's Web savviness and commitment to trying new platforms and technologies?

It really amounts to a Golden Rule corollary: Portray for yourself what you might look for in potential employees.

Blogs can be sources, too

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Twelve types of effective blog posts

Rich Gordon offers up a Blogging 101 in his Readership Institute post: Twelve types of effective blog posts

Please share with anyone blogging -- or thinking about blogging -- in your newsroom. We're all never too old to go back to school.

Kapler's corner -- Gabe Kapler offers his thoughts on the Red Sox in the playoffs - Boston.com

Nice idea, Boston.com: Kapler's corner -- Gabe Kapler offers his thoughts on the Red Sox in the playoffs - Boston.com. There's some nice inside-baseball (pardon the pun) stuff in there that only someone like Kapler could provide. Love that!

One nitpicky critique: Where's the RSS feed? How can I subscribe to the blog in my RSS reader, where I consume most of my blog-like interests, if you don't allow my Firefox to automatically detect the feed in the page, nor offer me an RSS link somewhere in the sidelines of the blog? Or how can I add it to Facebook? Or my iGoogle? You know... the platforms where I spend a significant portion of my online time these days?

For what it's worth, the feed is not available on their sports RSS page either.

Maybe my standards are too high, and I'm too much of a stickler for these details. I suppose it's nice to know we're not alone in trying to corral the basics. Boston.com has some basics to tackle, too.

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."

Blogging the Presidential Debates

As newsrooms throughout the country prepare to cover tonight’s Republican Presidential debate on CNN, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at some of the online coverage from Sunday’s debate.

While most newspaper websites offered the usual crop of blogs, cnn.com also had Republican strategist Mike Murphy and Democrat columnist Arianna Huffington providing live color commentary via streaming video. If you tuned in to the coverage on CNN’s Pipeline service, what you saw was a split screen with Huffington and Murphy on one side sitting and watching the debate on TV while offering commentary, as the other screen showed the debate itself. I thought it was an interesting approach since it acknowledged that some people can walk and chew gum at the same time and that for many viewers, the commentary was just as important as the debate itself.

On washingtonpost.com’s The Fix, Chris Cillizza used video excerpts to increase the impact of his blog entries. So in addition to four or five paragraphs about Senator Chris Dodd getting applause, he included video of the exchange. If you look at his entire coverage of the debate, you’ll see that while he didn’t include video with every entry (ok, only four times), he did it often enough to enrich his reader’s experience.

Meanwhile on politico.com, Ben Smith made what I thought was a valuable point at the start of his coverage.

“A brief note on the strangeness of covering these debates: Hundreds of reporters are assembled at Saint Anselm College in Manchester watching the same debate on nice flat-screen televisions that we could watch on cheaper televisions at home,” he wrote.

It is a good point to note that for the many newsrooms that don’t or can’t send reporters to actual debates, there is no reason why you can’t still offer live coverage. For example:

• Get a group of local political observers together to watch the debate and let a member of your staff serve as their online moderator for a live conversation via a blog about the debate.
• Create a forum and encourage readers to post their thoughts or comments about the debate as it's happening.
  

My only caveat is to be honest with your readers about where you are and make sure you promote the coverage both online and in-print.

What did you think of the online coverage? Were there any techniques that you thought worked? What are your plans for future debate coverage?

Technorati Mini

Here's a handy popup window (finally... a popup that's handy!) in which you can plug in your domain, and keep track of what bloggers are commenting and linking to on your site.