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.

----------------
Now playing: KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See
via FoxyTunes

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/

Earth to publishers: Stop trying to exert so much control

The headline alone on this AP story on NJ.com is enough to send me into orbit: News Web sites seek more search control

When, oh when, are publishers going to realize that the more we try to exert control over our content, the more likely we are to lose control.

By the way, losing control over the distribution of our content is not a bad thing, people. The easier we make it for readers to access our content -- regardless of platform -- the more likely it will be that we gain and retain readers via whatever channel our content was acquired.

Roadblocks are exactly that. Pretty hard to grow audience when we throw up a bunch of stop signs and detours.

Twitter your br(e)aking news

Some may recall the idea I've floated in various conversations about how Twitter could be an effective tool for commuter traffic updates online?

Steve Outing expands on the idea in his latest E-Media Tidbits post: The Twitter Disaster

Amen, Steve. The end game, in my mind, is placing our content on the platforms where our current and potential audience prefer to consume us. This is something I've been advocating since 2005, by the way, but is all the more true in the social networking, Web 2.0 world in which we're operating as we head into 2008.

This will seem like sacrilege, coming from a person whose success is measured by the audience metrics of our Web sites, but when it comes to content distribution, driving traffic back to our core newspaper.com sites is a secondary benefit (not that there's anything wrong with that benefit, mind you). The more important result is that by pushing our content in ways that makes it easiest for many different audience segments to consume it, we've performed the ultimate "job-to-be-done."

If I put on my user hat for a second, I'll repeat my point from an earlier post that Twitter has become my primary means of following news updates from New York Times and ESPN, not to mention our own Pocono Record. I wish more sites were on the bandwagon.

Ads as widgets (or vice versa)

While reading a story on Wicked Local Bourne this evening, I encountered the following ad (RSS-based readers should click through to see the ad):

Get this widget!

Of course, I clicked on "Get this widget!" first, because I have widgets on the brain lately. That made me wonder whether the ad was really that effective.

I quickly realized that it was more effective than a "standard" ad. Get some good creative in that widget, and you have enabled it to not only be clickable for more information on your brand, product or offer, but you've also turned the ad itself into a viral marketing mechanism.

Now how much would you pay!

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."

Feeds: How Much Can You Eat? [ClickZ Internet Marketing Solutions for Marketers]

Feeds: How Much Can You Eat?: I'm with Kristin Darguzas of ParentDish, who was surprised to hear that 120 is a “managable” number of RSS feeds.

I just checked my Google Reader, and I'm at 130. That's after trimming a few real estate ones that I had added earlier this year for product research, but really wasn't reading. There's likely more than a few others I can cull from the list.

I have many sports-related ones (Gregg Easterbrook, Peter King) that I love but seem to rarely make the time to read. I create the same conundrum for myself with books, too. Like last night, for example, I sacrificed my before-bed reading time to spend more time catching up on some blog reading (thanks for the insights, Howard Owens).

No wonder a study is saying we've reached a saturation point with media.

Therein lies our challenge. Tom Heslin, my former colleague in Providence, describes it as competing for media time. I've borrowed the phrase from him frequently since. I conjured up a calculation last year to show local newspaper Web sites were at the time 1/33rd of an ever expanding media landscape. Stop if you've seen me write this or heard me say this before, but success with growing our portion of a person's media time is rooted in reaching that person on the platform he or she prefers -- rather than hoping to draw them to us more than twice a week.

The good news is the expansion of our RSS feeds to comprise all content categories -- not just our top level categories of News, Sports, etc. -- is already in progress, and is one means by which we can gain a greater share of users' media time. That expansion will also enable several other distribution programs moving forward.

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.

delawareonline is social networking

I'm traversing the Web, looking for Camp Guide examples (the reason will become apparent soon), and in doing so I came across a nifty three-tabbed social networking teaser widget on the delawareonline home page.

Those who have heard me advocate playing in the audience's spaces will know I'm a sucker for this stuff. I wholeheartedly endorse the concept.

So far, there are 151 photos on Flickr and 34 videos on YouTube with the delawareonline tag, and they have 30 MySpace friends.

It's clearly not a mass medium for them yet, in part because it's hard to tell how often they are updating and inserting their own content. I'll be so bold as to suggest that they're not doing it enough. Looks as if the front page of the paper they use as the main photo of their MySpace profile is from early March.

At least the folks at Go! at the Times-Herald Rcord are updating their cover photo and blog weekly (1,641 MySpace friends and counting). Ian Hill, a.k.a. 209 Music, has been caring and feeding his MySpace profile since 2005 and has 1,845 friends to show for it (music is a natural fit on MySpace, by the way... if you have a music critic on staff and he or she is not on MySpace, shame on that critic).

You get out of these efforts what you put into it, and as the old lottery adage goes, "You can't win if you don't play."

Anyone using Flickr or YouTube, either to post your own content or network with others?