Pimp the good stuff!

Back in my projo.com days, Managing Editor for New Media Tom Heslin coined a phrase for on-site promotion that became our mantra in the last year of working together.

"Pimp that sh*t!"

We quickly shortened it to PTS, to make it a bit more professional in mixed company, and said it to each other with a wink and a nod during almost every meeting in which we were discussing what of our new efforts should get home-page promotion.

I was reminded of PTS as I was conversing with Yoni Greenbaum via IM today. One conversation was about Year in Review features I was encountering, both on Ottaway sites and elsewhere. In particular, I was touting an effort by our SouthCoastToday crew.

Straight from Google Talk:

Yoni: I don't see the year in review package on their homepage...
Sean: Under their special reports menu? (It was in the lead position yesterday afternoon)

Yoni: nah, all I see if their men and women of the year package.

Sean: Oy. I'll dig the link out of my history....

Yoni: found it through their search

A little later, I was checking out a Google Maps mashup done by TheLedger.com in Florida, showing where to find holiday light displays. Dutifully impressed by the effort, I decided to check how they had integrated it into their site. Another exercise in frustration ensued.

Again, straight from Google Talk:

Sean: OK, that Ledger holiday lights mashup? Am I missing something, or is not linked from anywhere on their main site?

Yoni: nope

Sean: By searching Google, I found this: http://whatsnewonline.theledger.com/default.asp?item=717201

I feel a blog post coming on....

What the Google Talk thread doesn't tell you is that I hunted -- I mean, really hunted -- through TheLedger's local news, community, multimedia, interactives and other pages to find how the map was presented or linked. I couldn't even surface via their internal site search. I had to go outside to Google, and come back in, and I still am unclear on exactly how they integrated it on their site, or even promoted it, when the feature was launched.

No user is going to go through the lengths I did to find your cool stuff. It's a disservice to your staff not to showcase their hard work. It's a disservice to the reader to have that kind of utility or interesting content, and hide it under a bushel.

PTS, baby. PTS!

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!

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?

Varsity 845 in-print Facebook promo

Hey, Facebook users and explorers,

Check out the in-print promo Matt Pepin, the Times Herald-Record's sports editor, crafted for the burgeoning Facebook application that Patrick Mullen has been building as an extension of Varsity 845. It's at the bottom of the PDF.

Patrick has been improving his development of the application daily for about the last week or so. His assessment is that developing for Facebook is easy once you get the hang of it, and what you build essentially is Facebook's equivalent of an iframe, something we're all practiced at using on our Web sites.

Patrick and I both agree we've not yet achieved the secret sauce with building social networking applications and widgets, but this is a great initial foray into the space for us. I'm looking forward to collaborating on future development.

Please share any ideas you or your kids might have. After all, much of the target audience is much younger than us. Who better to ask than them?

Sign Design

I'm sure you know by now how much I love these kinds of contests: Embassy Suites Launches Do Not Disturb Sign Design Contest

You can involve your audience in just about anything you try to do.

Toot Your Own Horn, Why Don'tcha

So for those of you who didn’t see it, earlier last week Hudson Valley joined Cape Cod in getting their work recognized in an Editor & Publisher column.

On Tuesday, Pauline Millard, online editor at E&P (who I’ve written about previously), wrote about the newspapers online bridge database project. Millard used the project to discuss the ongoing coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

By now, you may be asking yourself ‘hey, how do I get some of that sweet coverage?’ And if you’re not asking yourself that question, let me tell you, you should be. Because while there is no guarantee that it will work, it doesn’t take much to get the ball rolling.

Start by introducing yourself. As you will see in the piece on Hudson Valley, I’m quoted. Now that wasn’t my intention from the outset – I’ve been quoted enough in my life already -- but rather was a result of my being one to approach Pauline in the first place about the project.

All I did was send her a brief e-mail drawing her attention to the project (including relevant links) and explaining why I thought she might find it of value – in this case, an example of how you don’t need a 12-person Computer Assisted Reporting team to do high quality CAR projects.

I then made sure to stay in touch with her, as she emailed me throughout the day with various questions and comments. In some cases I had the answers and in others, I called on people at Hudson Valley to provide the relevant information. And finally, when she said the project would be the topic of her column, I made sure to send her a nice little thank you note.

Now it’s true that a piece in E&P is not like Fark or Drudge and does not result in a large number of visitors, but a piece in E&P or in Romenesko, brings industry attention and the admiration of your colleagues, if nothing else, it’s sure nice to be recognized once in a while.

So next time, give it your own shot, hey you never know just who might write about the hard work you do?

Pauline Millard pmillard@editorandpublisher.com

Big Bang For The MySpace Ad Buck - Forbes.com

OK huge caveat emptor here: A study conducted by News Corp. shows that setting up MySpace profiles can be a highly cost-efficient marketing method.

Of course the MySpace owner would say that. I'll be interested to see if minds more capable than mine challenge their math.

Even without the math to back it up, however, I'd believe it. How could word-of-mouth buzz generated in a medium -- with as substantial a mass audience as MySpace claims -- not have a positive impact for mass marketers?

Ergo, how can it not help you?

MySpace as a viral marketing tool

As a follow-up to this week's discussion regarding MySpace and other places we need to be playing...

I noticed on my MySpace page today that my "friends" Go! in Middletown and 209 Music in Stockton added blog posts in the last couple of days to their page. Because I have added them as my friends, I see their new material on my personal dashboard:

Voila! Content distribution in MySpace.



I'm guessing that we should add a session like "How to Create a MySpace page and Ways to Use It" to yesterday's brainstorm notes from the Online Editors' conference?

One of the sessions that got cut at the last minute from this week's conference was Ken and I talking about Web 2.0 and how to leverage others' technologies for marketing and content purposes. We talked about it some (YouTube players in story pages, for example), but I'll also hang onto that as an idea for an upcoming conference call/WebEx session.