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.

More media-related Twitter observations

Check out the widespread Twitter adoption at the Austin American-Statesman.

Came to my attention via Steve Buttry, a tweeting editor in his own right.

As I've written before, Twitter success is about doing much more than blasting headlines at followers. There is a place for that, and there are users who appreciate that. So I'm not suggesting our newspapers fold up the tents on the accounts that were created for that purpose.

Twitter use, though, is much more about community conversation and making connections on the platforms the audience is already on.

I've not yet spent a lot of time clicking through all of the Statesman staff's Twitter profiles, so I'm not sure how successful they are achieving engagement and making connections. The first glance is mighty impressive, though.

By the way, speaking of tweeting editors, Ottaway's Bob Hunter and Paul Pronovost have been dabbling in Twitter recently, too.

(Also, in other Statesman news, check out their recent ad that shows how their Web site is a better breaking news option than local TV news. Came to my attention via Lost Remote.)

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/

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.

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.

Your Guide to Virtual Worlds

I think this would have to be considered a 201 course: Your Guide to Virtual Worlds

Not Your Father's Press Release

So it appears that the business world is starting to realize that a press releases doesn't have to simply be a piece of paper or e-mail and a few posed photos.

Ford Motor Company recently announced the 2008 Ford Focus with what might just be the very first Social Media press release. In addition to the traditional text release:

their site (yes a website!) also included an rss feed:

a Flickr photo gallery:A YouTube gallery with an embeddable player:

Suggested Tags:
And much, much more.

I think it is worth noting that this is FORD, not the most forward-thinking company out there and one that has been struggling financially. To me this effort indicates their recognition that there is now more then one way to get your message out; that you need to maximize your distribution; that what worked before won't work now. Is it selling more cars? I don't know. But it does have people talking.

So what do you think?

How we measure up on socialmeter

Found via StephKerchner on Digg: socialmeter

Here's a quick look at our scores:
ack.net: 229
capecodonline.com: 4,841
dailytidings.com: 717
mailtribune.com: 3,170
poconorecord.com: 3,059
recordnet.com: 5,600
recordonline.com: 8,105
seacoastonline.com: 9,438
southcoasttoday.com: 9,288

Note: The tally for something called Shadows wasn't loading for me, but neither was its Web site -- and before today I'd not even heard of it.

It's also missing counts for StumbleUpon, Shoutwire, Magnolia, Newsvine, Reddit, Twitter and I'm sure others. Nonetheless, it's an interesting view of our visibility to potential audience in our markets that traverse elsewhere.

Facebook Group | Jersey Shore 2007

Advance has got some groups going on Facebook, including one for fans of the Jersey Shore.

I know a couple of shoreline areas where a similar social networking idea would be worth exploring for us.... Tie-ins with Beachcomber and OnCape Beach Guide products come immediately to mind.

Update: I found out about NJ.com's Facebook group from the tippy top of their Jersey Shore Blogs page.

Just How Far Can a Video Go?

As a follow-up to my recent post on the video “sneezing” site Hey!Spread, I wanted to share with everyone the results from just one site.

I uploaded two videos, the “How Not to Break a Baseball Bat” video from Southcoast and latest of the “Golf Course” videos from Pocono and after barely four days on MetaCafe, the baseball bat video has been viewed nearly 300 times and the golf course video about 2,000 times.

Across all the sites that Hey!Spread distributed to, the Baseball Bat video was viewed nearly 600 times and the Golf Course video 2,500 times. And all I had to do was upload the videos just once.

So if you haven’t already, check out Hey!Spread. And, if you have the time, explore the sites it distributes to as they each have their own features, some of which you might find valuable. For example, Blip.TV has its own distribution effort that will further the reach of your videos (they’ll even post to your twitter stream when you’ve posted a new video).

Have fun and if you have any questions or thoughts, give me a shout.

More Twitter

Not that you were wondering, but here's who I'm following on Twitter, so far:

Biz Stone (Twitter founder)
Boston Globe (set up, but not yet in use)
Boston Herald (hasn't been updated since May)
C.C. Chapman (podcaster and new media marketing guru)
Mary McCauley (web developer at Pocono)
ESPN
JetBlue
Nashua Telegraph
New York Times
Opinion Journal
Pocono Record
Boston Red Sox
RocketBoom
SeacoastOnline
WSJ.com
Yoni Greenbaum

In the case of NYT and ESPN, Twitter has supplanted my RSS reader as the means by which I most frequently interact with their content. That's especially true of the New York Times. I still have their Media & Advertising feed in my Google Reader, but their latest news now pops up on my IM via Twitter, and I am finding myself clicking into the stories from there almost daily now -- visiting their site much more frequently than was the case before.

Are you on Twitter? If so, who are you following? Come to the Ottaway Online Editor's blog and share your list in the comments below this post.

Twitter / OpinionJournal

Hey, speaking of Twitter (as we were on the noon call today, look who else is using it: OpinionJournal.

Why Join Another Social Network?

Interesting take by Chris Brogan on the value of being a part of burgeoning social networks. I lean more toward the Rocketboom camp, in case you were wondering. I'm certainly of a mind that we need to be everywhere, though it should all connect back to our main product(s) via our profiles on each network.

Twitter / redsoxcast

Check out the Red Sox Twitter page. Play by play, which you can follow online, or receive each "Tweet" as a text message.

Comes courtesy of new media guru C.C. Chapman. Wouldn't you know I learned about his blog post via his Twittering.

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?

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.

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?