Being the savvy, well-connected PR pro that you are, you just helped bring about a great piece of editorial coverage in a major media outlet. The client is thrilled, you’ve won the praise and envy of your colleagues, all is well…except that online the article is behind a paywall so hardly anyone will ever see it. Doh!

There is a lot of discussion these days about paywalls, metered models, paytags for individual articles and the like. Publishers are desperately trying to come up with new business models and hopefully they’ll figure out a system that works. But from a media relations perspective this reminds me of the “if a tree falls in the forest” saying:

If an article about your company or client is behind a paywall and no one is around to read it, does it make an impact?

The credibility that comes from positive coverage in a respected media outlet remains, but a significant decrease in exposure certainly diminishes its overall impact.

The good news is that some of the models currently being considered include free access for users who come in from links in blogs and social media, so at least in some cases exposure will not be limited solely to paid subscribers. But it is too early to know how well these hybrid models will work so we may see publishers move to less porous paywalls over time. And some sites are already choosing to show only short excerpts of articles for free.

So if not many users are reading the coverage, just how valuable is it?

The rise of social media has already resulted in PR professionals relying less on the major media middle man and directly engaging their target audiences. So maybe it won’t really matter in the long run.

But companies like to frame newspaper articles and glossy magazine covers on their walls and PR professionals still need to deliver big wins. Has anyone ever framed a good comment thread from a company blog, or a collection of “likes” on a Facebook Page? So it’s hard to imagine mainstream media relations falling too far out of the PR toolkit.

Here’s another question:

Would you foot the bill to give users free access to coverage of your company or clients?

Imagine reaching out to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and offering to pay the bill for unlimited user access to content about your company. That would certainly be one way to try to maximize exposure.

But that would cause all kinds of problems, not the least of which the publications’ editorial integrity being called into question. Do sponsoring companies start getting more coverage? Does coverage tend to be more favorable because the content is essentially subsidized? It just wouldn’t work.

So as more major publishers move to subscription models, it will be interesting to see what impact this has on mainstream media relations.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
3. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?

Unique, one-of-a-kind, best-of-breed…blah, blah, blah. We see this type of marketing speak over and over in press releases and promotional materials. And let’s be honest, we’ve all used it at one time or another — shame on us. But which buzzwords are the most overused?

I saw an item in PR Daily recently using the MoMA press release archive to demonstrate how press releases were much better years ago. That got me curious about which terms are currently being most abused. I hadn’t come across any anti-buzzword content lately so I thought I’d do my own research.

So I searched PRWeb’s press release archive for a selection of overused terms, buzzwords and marketing speak using a “site:prweb.com” search on Google, for example:

I opted for Google over PRWeb’s internal search because internal search results are not typically very good. I chose PRWeb over PR Newswire, Business Wire, etc. because it was among the first search-friendly services so I figure its content is fairly well indexed. And from what I can tell the PRWeb archive dates from 2006 so that is a good way to check press releases from just the last four years.

To come up with the list of buzzwords I started with the usual suspects then got some more ideas from Wikipedia and TechCrunch. This led me to David Meerman Scott, who I realized did something similar back in 2007 and then again in 2009 using a different set of terms and a larger range of press release services.

My list of terms could have gone on endlessly but I decided to cap it at 75 98 (the list is growing based on suggestions in the comments). A lot of what I have included is more marketing speak than technology or industry buzzwords, since I wanted to look at overused words across all industries. If there are any glaring omissions please let me know and I’ll add them in.

So here are the most overused buzzwords and marketing speak in press releases, based on the number of times they appear in releases currently archived on PRWeb. Any phrases that are sometimes hyphenated are grouped together with the non-hyphenated version (e.g. award-winning and award winning).

“Leader” was the most used term by far — funny how many companies, products and services anoint themselves as “the leader” or “a leader”. And it is not surprising to see “unique” in the top five since we all think we’re special, now don’t we.

I was glad to see “revolutionary” with less than 5,000 mentions. That one was overused like crazy in the 1990’s.

Which terms do you think are the biggest offenders? What would you love to see stricken from marketing speak forever?

Related posts:

1. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
2. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

I have done several posts on news organizations and Facebook recently so I thought it was time to switch things up and look at Twitter again. There is of course much more to the social media universe than just The Bobbsey Twins. But Twitter, Facebook in some cases Digg still represent the majority of social media referrals to many news sites, so they continue to be a priority.

Since I have ranked news sites in various areas in the past (Facebook Pages, page speed and domain authority) I thought I’d do something similar for their Twitter profiles. The easiest thing to compare is reach based on Twitter followers and I’ve included that data below. But which news sites are making the most of their Twitter presence?

To help answer that question I used Twitalyzer to evaluate the main Twitter profile of 30+ major news organizations including a mix of newspapers, magazines, TV and online-only outlets. There are many different Twitter analysis tools out there but I’ve seen Twitalyzer mentioned several times recently so I decided to try it out.

The data point they make available without a subscription is called “Impact.” Impact is calculated by combining the following factors:

• The number of followers a user has
• The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted
• The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people
• The relative frequency at which the user posts updates

A paid Twitalyzer account also provides Influence and Engagement scores which would be interesting to look at another time.

Please accept the usual caveats about the accuracy of the data, methodology of the tool, etc. What I am most interested in is making a relative comparison between the various news sites. With that in mind, here are the main Twitter profiles for 30+ news organizations ranked by Impact score:

@nytimes takes #1 by a small margin, but the top nine Twitter profiles are all closely bunched together with Impact scores between 75.8% and 78.5%. Starting with #10 things begin to drop off. At the bottom of the table poor @BW, @csmonitoronline and @aolnews each got scores below 10%.

I thought @ColonelTribune would have scored much higher than 23% since they have a decent number of followers and it is a dynamic, popular Twitter profile. It is also interesting that despite that low score the profile is still in the 99.4th percentile:

Perhaps @ColonelTribune is more popular among industry professionals (as an example of a great Twitter persona) than typical users and news consumers. Or maybe Twitalyzer missed the boat on that one. What do you think?

UPDATE:
Jeff Katz, Twitalyzer’s Product Lead, gave me some more information on how Impact scores are calculated and how this would factor into @ColonelTribune’s 23%:

“As you pointed in your post, the Impact score is calculated (and weighted) based on a few variables. While I would have to dig in a bit further, I did notice that @ColonelTribune does many things well on Twitter, but he (or she) does not retweet others, which is one of the factors of the Impact score. In fact, @ColonelTribune only RT’d someone else just once in the past 90 days. That said, @ColonelTribune is in the 99.4th % in terms of Impact and given that it is the only regional account (kind of hard to argue that NY Times is not a bigger national and international account) in the top 25 speaks volume.”

So specific to Impact, it is important not only to retweet but to retweet others as well. This also shows that despite its lack of retweeting and the fact that the Chicago Tribune is somewhat regional in nature (they do also compete for national news online) @ColonelTribune has done well to reach the 99.4th percentile.

Jeff also pointed out that because the free version of Twitalyzer is an on-demand service they only processes scores when someone manually requests a particular profile to be updated. This has an impact on the way the various metrics are calculated. The scores are based on 30 day averages, so profiles that are updated more often are working with a larger data set than profiles that may have been updated only once. So the number of times that @ColonelTribune has been updated in the last 30 days will also factor into its Impact score and other metrics.

Related posts:

1. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
2. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope
3. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction

Between privacy issues, a sweaty CEO and technical problems with its “Like” buttons Facebook is having a rough time lately. But Facebook Pages remain a key audience development and content promotion opportunity for publishers so it is important to make the most of them. A good way to enhance Facebook Pages is by using Static FBML to customize tabs for an improved visual experience and greater functionality.

I have seen plenty of blog posts and conference presentations on how to utilize Static FBML but I rarely see news sites highlighted among the examples of good usage. So I thought I’d take a look at a selection of news organizations to see how many are taking advantage of FBML.

The short answer? Not so many. I revisited the 25 pages covered in Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages? and found that the majority are making little or no use of Static FBML. There are a handful of examples however that are worth pointing out.

The Economist

The Economist has multiple customized tabs for subscription, featured articles and a news quiz:

Fox News

Fox News offers a more visual and interactive experience through its “Fun Stuff” tab:

Chicago Tribune

Chicago Tribune uses a welcome tab to highlight sections and features from its main site:

Yahoo! News

Compare the Fox News and Chicago Tribune tabs to Yahoo! News‘ welcome tab, which could certainly use a bit more pizzazz:

To be fair Yahoo! News is just using the welcome tab to establish some rules of conduct. But I think there is a middle ground between the Fox News and Yahoo! News tabs that would work well for most organizations.

The New York Times

I did not see any custom tabs on The New York Times page this week but in the past they have added them for major events such as the Winter Olympics:

Newsweek and Time

In going through the Facebook Pages I also noticed that several organizations are utilizing professional applications from Involver for things like Twitter and news feed integration, as seen in these examples from Newsweek and Time:

I don’t know much about Involver but it looks like they offer some good options for companies that prefer to outsource.

So the bottom line is that news organizations are dabbling with Static FBML on their Facebook Pages but few are doing anything that is noteworthy. Much of what I came across will not be particularly compelling to users or do much to drive repeat visits.

News sites have a big advantage over other companies on Facebook because they regularly produce breaking news and other forms of quality content that can be featured on their pages and placed in user news feeds. So perhaps they have less of a need to add extra bells and whistles. But the average Facebook user is only going to “Like” so many news pages so it is important to offer a strong user experience and stand out from the competition.

For more information on using Static FBML check out:

• How to Customize Your Facebook Page Using Static FBML
• How To Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page
• Facebook Static FBML FAQ / Tutorial

Related posts:

1. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?
2. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
3. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?

Maintaining a Facebook Page is now a fundamental part of most news organizations’ social media presence. News sites utilize Facebook Pages to increase brand visibility, promote content, interact with users and drive traffic back to their main sites. But how much are these pages really worth to them, and which news sites are getting the most value for their efforts?

Only the news organizations themselves can fully answer that question; their own analytics data combined with internal estimates of the value of fans and various actions will paint the clearest picture. But when I came across Vitrue’s new Social Page Evaluator I thought it would be interesting to compare ballpark valuation figures for selection of major news sites.

The Social Page Evaluator (SPE) provides an estimated “Annual Page Value” for any single Facebook Page based on the last 30 days of activity. According to its disclaimer the SPE factors in fan count, user activity, brand activity and “a proprietary engagement multiplier” and then calculates an “Earned Media Value” using a default CPM of $5. The CPM can be adjusted between $1 and $25.

While the methodology and accuracy can be debated the tool does offer way to make a relative comparison of various Facebook Pages, so that is all I am attempting to do.

Here is a ranking of major news organization Facebook Pages based on activity in the last 30 days and using the default $5 CPM:

CNN earns the #1 spot by a considerable margin but The New York Times, Fox News and NPR also have impressive valuations.

In looking at the table, total number of fans certainly plays a large role but posts and interactions matter too. Fox News getting 67,808 interactions from just 41 posts is impressive, although the quality of those interactions is not measured. I had previously pointed out the high level of engagement that Fox News gets on its Facebook page; this data supports that further.

Additional Notes

I also wanted to point out a few things that I noticed while doing the analysis.

CBS News and Reuters are the only two news organizations in the group that have not created a short, customized URL for their page (e.g. www.facebook.com/nytimes):

That is a missed opportunity.

While on Facebook, the page URL shown to users in the browser changes radically depending on how it was navigated to. For example when I went to the CNN page by searching “CNN” while on the Fox News page I ended up on this URL:

There are multiple combinations that can occur. If you paste those funky URLs into a new browser tab they redirect to a better URL (in the CNN example www.facebook.com/cnn?ref=ts). But it is still not the main URL for the page and the redirects themselves do not appear to be permanent.

Also for Facebook Pages that were set with capital letters in the name (e.g. www.facebook.com/TheEconomist) the lower case version has a 302 redirect:

The same is true for capitalized URLs that were set in lower case.

So to minimize user confusion and maximize inbound links to the actual Facebook Page URL it is a good idea to display the main URL in a couple places on the page.

Some organizations do this on their Info tab:

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
3. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page

I was reading Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam’s piece on his time at Newsweek in the 1970s and this passage caught my attention:

For me, Newsweek was like an upside-down journalism school, where I learned an astonishing number of bad habits, e.g., having someone else check your facts. We poached material constantly, from newspapers, from other publications — even from Time. Copying from Time was a fact-checker’s dream, because we knew they took accuracy very seriously over there.

It sounds a lot like the practices of some industry blogs and news aggregators today. So “borrowing” content isn’t a Web-only phenomenon, it’s just a lot easier to spot now.

Shifting from poaching content to paying for it, it really is no wonder that the AP seems so threatened by Google. A wire service’s whole business model is built around selling the same content to as many news outlets as possible. That works great in print and broadcast but not so much online. Actually it would work online, if not for search engines giving users access to everything in one place and filtering out duplicate content to improve their experience. What’s a news agency to do?

Related posts:

1. The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?
2. I Hope News Corp Does Block its Content from Google
3. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much

So Lebron and Kobe may (or may not) be heading towards a much-hyped NBA Finals matchup, but the real question on fans’ minds is: Which NBA playoff teams have the most user engagement on their Facebook Pages?

Ok fans could care less about that, but for myself and some sports and social media marketers out there it’s an interesting question.

In my post on the most popular NBA teams on Twitter and Facebook (and the more recent one on MLB teams) I looked strictly at the following each team has built up. This time I’ll compare user engagement on each team’s Facebook page.

With the second round of the playoffs recently under way I thought now was a good time to pull the numbers since all 16 teams were still recently active. So I checked the number of likes and comments for each team’s last 10 updates. I was going to go back to the first day of the playoffs but that turned out to be quite a few updates, so I’m using 10 as a representative sample.

I realize that counting likes and comments is a very limited measurement of engagement but it offers a simple way to compare user activity on each team’s Facebook Page.

So here are the 16 NBA playoff teams ranked by the average number of likes and comments on their last 10 updates (through Monday night prior to the start of any games):

The Lakers are dominating but more fans mean more opportunities for engagement so they do have an advantage. Denver makes a strong showing at #2 despite having fewer fans than four other teams. Orlando having a long lay-off between the first and second rounds had a negative impact on their numbers. Their most recent 10 updates got limited feedback but the 10 before that fared much better.

Oklahoma City was a surprise at #15; I expected them to do better after their impressive effort in the first round. The Charlotte Bobcats came in last – unless they can get Michael Jordan to start making updates they’ve got their work cut out for them.

So what types of updates drew the most user feedback? Here are the wall posts that received the most likes for each team:

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
3. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page

There has been a lot of news and reaction around Facebook’s new additions to the Facebook Platform: Social Plugins, the Open Graph protocol and the Graph API. News and content sites are a natural fit for participation and Facebook is encouraging news site adoption by showcasing sites that are already experimenting with it. So I thought I’d take a look at some early examples of Facebook Open Graph integration on news sites.

(You can jump to the end for the Takeaways).

The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has added a “Hot on Facebook” module to its home page and in a sidebar on posts:

I like this and think it will do a good job of encouraging user clicks, similar to the Digg widget that has worked well on news sites. Seeing that stories have been liked thousands of times certainly caught my interest.

They have also added the Like button to their post template:

At least to-date a prominent Share button is still present too. Users may be unsure which button to use, and since the like and share numbers are different it creates the impression of things being out of sync (even though they are two different things). Add in the Facebook chiclet below the headline and I’d say they are going a little overboard:

I’m also not sure why the Hot on Facebook module shows 4,241 likes while the post itself shows only 1,363.

Time.com

Time.com is selectively applying the Like button in the “Must Reads” module on its home page:

It is not clear why in this particular case only one of four stories has the button. And interestingly when you click through on that story the Like button does not appear on the page:

Since this is a blog post it is likely that Time just hasn’t rolled out integration across all editorial templates yet.

The Like button does appear on their article template:

But at least on my computer it was a little slow to load, and once loaded it added some extra white space before the start of the editorial text. Like The Huffington Post there are also competing Facebook buttons at work.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is using Facebook to create a branded featured called Network News that takes the form of a small widget on their home page and on editorial templates:

This looks like a nice, simple, useful integration but apparently it has caused user uproar to the point where they had to add an opt-out feature to the widget (the red X):

Over the weekend the situation was serious enough that they felt the need to feature an article explaining the widget and how to opt-out right at the top of their home page:

CNN.com

CNN.com has a “Friends Activity” module on their home page which shows stories that friends liked and those shared in high volume:

Clicking on “View more friends’ activity” brings up a full page version with more links and friend information:

As for button integration on articles, CNN has decided to go with “recommend” instead of “like”:

It would be interesting to learn what impact that difference in language has on usage.

Takeaways

• At this early stage news sites are still experimenting with various forms of integration, location and functionality. Start simple to see how users respond and measure the impact on Facebook referrals.




• Many users are still unfamiliar with the new offerings and concerns about privacy seem to be a common first reaction. So tread carefully and provide clear instructions, settings and (when relevant) opt-out functionality.




• Consider the impact that Facebook Open Graph protocol integration will have on your existing on-site community features and social functionality. This ReadWriteWeb article is a good resource: Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors.




• When adding to editorial templates make sure the new Like button compliments any existing Facebook implementations. Avoid button overkill and the potential user confusion that goes with it.




• It is also important to note that the Like button functions differently than the various Share buttons that many sites are already using, and at least in its basic form creates a less compelling output. (See Facebook Like Button Vs. Facebook Share: Why I’m Keeping Both from Danny Sullivan). Using the XFBML version instead of an iFrame allows for more customization.




• Carefully monitor the effect of any integration on page load time. Site speed is now a ranking factor so this impacts SEO as well as usability.




• Not covered in my examples above is the fact that Open Graph protocol can also provide sites with additional reporting data. This Inside Facebook post has the details: With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page

Related posts:

1. News Sites Not Making Much Use of Static FBML on Facebook Pages
2. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
3. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction

Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So how well do major news sites perform in these areas?

To get a basic idea I ran Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google recommends, on the home page of 25 news sites.

The sites include a mix of major newspapers, news magazines and TV news sites. I started with the group I used in my news sites domain authority post and added a few more. It is mostly US-focused but five UK sites have also been included.

Keep in mind that Page Speed analyzes page performance against a series of “rules” that are known to speed up load time. Scores are on a scale of 100 with a high score being good. (This can cause confusion as some users equate a high number with longer load time, but in fact the opposite is true).

So which news sites fared best?

The Wall Street Journal leads the group by a considerable margin and The Los Angeles Times has the unfortunate honor of coming in last (though not by much).

UPDATE: After Mike’s comment below I added Yahoo! News, which scored well and took second place.

One thing to note is that Page Speed scores fluctuate a little each time you run it. I double-checked several pages; some scores remained the same but others changed by 1 or 2 points.

To take the comparison a step further, I also ran Page Speed on the top 10 sites’ lead article. Home pages will rank well for branded searches regardless of site speed, so it is at the content level that the scores matter more.

The Wall Street Journal still had the best score, but the UK’s Mail Online jumped up to tie it. Interestingly three of the five UK sites made the top 10.

UPDATE: Adding Yahoo! News moved it to the top of the group for articles and knocked Guardian.co.uk out of the top 10.

So how important is site speed?

Both the official announcement and Matt Cutts’ follow-up post emphasize the fact that site speed is just one of 200+ ranking factors and signals like relevance and reputation continue to carry much more weight. In addition site speed is impacting only a small number of queries at this time.

So you don’t need to drop everything and make site performance your #1 priority, but it is something to be mindful of. And since it is good for both SEO and usability, why wouldn’t you want to get it dialed in? At a minimum you should monitor the Site Performance data in your Webmaster Tools account and make an effort to minimize your average load times.

How can you improve site speed? Going back to the news site Page Speed scores, here are the highlighted issues for the best and worst performing sites:

As you can see there are plenty of ways to make improvements.

Related posts:

1. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
2. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

The cease and desist letter and the ensuing war of words between The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman and Newser’s Michael Wolff is getting a lot of industry attention this week. To me the real question is: when one site aggregates another’s content, how much attribution is enough?

The value and legitimacy of content aggregation is a topic for another post; I think most would agree that curation serves a more useful purpose than aggregation. But for better or worse content aggregation is a big part of online news dissemination today and I wouldn’t expect it go away any time soon. With that in mind, it is important that aggregators adhere to some basic rules of conduct: a) create their own summary text, don’t just “borrow” from the original and b) properly credit original sources through attribution links.

To see what type of attribution Newser is providing, I picked a random article from the sources grid on their home page today: Oprah Ditches Daytime for New Evening Show.

In this particular case the original article on the Wall Street Journal is linked to both inline and in the “Sources” section of the sidebar:

Two links is good attribution; I think that qualifies as giving proper credit to the original source. But as pointed out by The Wrap, Newser does not always do this. In looking at a selection of other articles in some cases only the “Sources” sidebar link is provided; The Wrap has also claimed that sometimes no attribution link was provided at all.

Personally I think aggregated stories should always include an inline attribution link. A sidebar link may not get proper attention from either users or search engines, so a link should be placed within the actual editorial content.

The Wrap is also looking for attribution on Newser’s source grid. To quote Sharon Waxman:

“All we really want is for Newser to stop pissing on our leg and tell us it’s raining. Very simply: put in credit and links where they are missing. Add a Wrap homepage link to the source grid page. Make it simple and logical to get to actual Wrap content from that page.”

Here is part of The Wall Street Journal source grid linked from that Oprah article:

This is basically a section front on Newser so it is understandable that they are linking to their own articles. But this also shows how Newser is pushing aggregation to the extreme. It is one thing to occasionally aggregate stories from various sources that you think will be of interest to your readers. It is another to mass-aggregate content from a specific publication and then package it on a hub page, even customizing the URL and title tag for SEO:

For what it is worth, Google does not seem to be assigning much value to the page. It has a toolbar PageRank score of 1, and at least in my Google results it is not in the top 50 for “Wall Street Journal.” It is on page one for “Wall Street Journal news summaries” and page two for “Wall Street Journal summaries” but according to the Google Keyword Tool neither of those phrases has any search volume:

UPDATE:
Here’s the video of the “discussion” between Sharon Waxman and Michael Wolff on CNN’s Reliable Sources (April 11, 2010). It’s safe to say they don’t get along:

Related posts:

1. Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly
2. I Hope News Corp Does Block its Content from Google
3. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content

A new baseball season is underway and we are in that wonderfully brief period when fans all over the country still believe this could actually be the year for their team. Enjoy it while you can.

But while major market teams have a big advantage in the real game, social media is the great equalizer online, so I thought I’d see which teams have attracted the largest following on Twitter and Facebook. After getting good response to the posts I did on NFL and NBA teams I wanted to add MLB to the mix.

So without further ado here are the 30 Major League Baseball teams, ranked by total number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans:

I’ll add the usual caveats: these numbers change very quickly but I find taking a snapshot at various points useful for comparison (perhaps I’ll update this at the All Star break and the end of the season). And of course social media is not a popularity contest; it’s how you engage your followers/fans that really matters. But reach has value too and I like to see which teams are faring best in that area.

Baseball is a game of statistics after all, so looking at numbers seems fitting. I could take it further and come up with analogies for batting average and on-base percentage like average tweets per day or retweet percentages, but maybe another time.

Not surprisingly the Yankees and Red Sox are at the top of the standings, although Boston is far behind the Yankees and Phillies in Twitter followers. I believe that playing in the World Series got the Yankees and Phillies added to the previous version of Twitter’s Suggested Users list, which is likely why their numbers are so much higher.

In looking at the figures above, it is clear that teams are attracting much larger audiences through Facebook than Twitter at this point.

On a different note, if I was the Detroit Tigers I’d get in touch with Facebook. While the Tigers fan page has 248k+ fans, as of today the only page Facebook search shows for “Detroit Tigers” is an unofficial, outdated page with 841 fans:

Even clicking “See More Results” doesn’t surface the real page – I had to use Google to find it.

As Markus points out in the comments below, the problem with Facebook search and the Detroit Tigers page was actually that I used the misspelling “Detriot” in my search query. Pretty embarrassing. I guess I can salvage things by using this to point out that Facebook search needs to do a better job of understanding the user intent behind common misspellings!

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

It has been a couple months since Google Social Search was made available in beta to all users on Google.com, so I thought I would revisit it from a marketing perspective.

As I covered when Social Search initially launched in Google Labs, for companies the main objective in social search optimization is to get included in their target audiences’ social circles. That’s great for marketers, but is it what Google wants?

On The Current State of Social Search panel at SMX West a few weeks ago, I asked Johanna Wright, Google’s Director of Product Management, Web Search, about this. Johanna said she could understand why brands would want to connect with users through Social Search, but that Google had developed it with individuals in mind, not companies.

Thus there isn’t any type of official Google profile for companies as there is with Facebook Pages or branded YouTube channels. It is still possible for a company to set up a Google profile; Tad Miller offered tips on this last year. But the lack of an official corporate option complicates the process for businesses, particularly if someone else has already created a Gmail account with their brand. Danny Sullivan wrote about this in connection with Google Buzz last month.

Despite these challenges companies are experimenting with Social Search and the launch of Google Buzz has increased the number of brands setting up Google profiles, particularly news and content sites. But ultimately what companies need is for users to connect with them through various social media outlets and then link to those accounts from their own Google profiles.

So how well does this translate into brand visibility in Google Social Search?

To get a sense of how it’s working, I took a look at my own social circle and Social Search results. I follow a number of different news sites (and other companies) on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and each of those accounts is linked on my Google Profile. I’m also subscribed to 368 feeds in Google Reader including a wide range of blogs and news sites. So in theory I should have as good a chance as anyone of having brands and especially news sites in my social circle.

In the current “snapshot” of my social circle there are 432 direct connections and 28 secondary connections. Of those 460 connections, 67 are companies, news sites or blogs, roughly 15%. (This information is available by clicking the “My social circle” link above your social results or going directly to this page while signed into your Google account).

So while Google created Social Search with individuals in mind, at least in my own experience brands are not specifically being excluded although they are certainly a minority.

I was also curious how Google Social Search was connecting me to the 67 non-individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

• Twitter 42
• FriendFeed 19
• Digg 4
• Flickr 2

At least in my case, following a brand on Twitter offers the best chance of having them added to my social circle. Content included in my social results through Google Reader subscriptions is not covered in Google’s social circle snapshot so I can’t tie any numbers to that.

Of the 67 brands in my social circle, only five are major news sites or magazines: The Huffington Post, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Business Insider and Hürriyet (a national newspaper in Turkey). I’m not sure why these five made the cut. At least to-date the only one that frequently pops up in my social results is Sports Illustrated, but it is nearly always just a link to their SI_24Seven Twitter profile, or one of its Twitter Lists, as seen in these results for “nba”:

(By the way…go Bulls!)

In a couple months of checking I’ve never had a SI.com article appear in my social results. I can get the other four news sites to surface for branded searches, but I’ve yet to see them come up for any non-branded queries. That seems odd since all five produce content every single day and I’m often shown outdated or not fully relevant listings from other members of my social circle. But I think this is more related to Social Search still being an early beta product than content from brands being intentionally de-emphasized.

The bottom line: Google Social Search does offer opportunities for brands, but it is still early days and the results are mixed at best. In addition, having a news site in your social circle via Twitter does not necessarily mean that actual editorial content from the site will be included in your social results. But as the overall quality of Social Search improves I expect this to get better. And hopefully Google will decide to offer Google profiles for companies in the future.

How often are you seeing content from brands in your Social Search results?

Related posts:

1. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
2. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all experimenting with various forms of real-time results now and making deals with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. So how can news sites maximize their real-time search visibility?

It should be noted that there many forms of real-time search, including Twitter Search itself and sites like OneRiot, Collecta and Topsy, among others. But in this post I am focusing on real-time results in the major search engines.

First, a quick look at how news content is currently being included in real-time search results.

In its “Latest results” Google blends results from Google News and Google Blog Search with updates from Twitter and Facebook Pages, offering multiple paths in for news and content sites.

For example as news was breaking on the Chile earthquake a couple weeks ago, The New York Times created a Twitter List to pull together the latest information from a variety of sources. The Chile Earthquake list was shared quite a bit on Twitter, causing it to appear frequently in real-time search results.

As this was happening, the real-time results for “earthquake in Chile” (at the time of this screen grab) included both the actual breaking news article and a retweet of @nytimes announcing the List, creating a double impression:

Editorial content is even more prominent on Bing Twitter, where the “Top links shared in Tweets” get a dedicated place on the page and remain there for longer periods of time. To-date the top links for many queries tend to be news sites as seen in this example for “NCAA tournament”:

In this particular case The New York Times was not included in the top links section but it did appear in the regular tweet stream. The fact that Bing identifies the source of any shortened URL helps credible news sources to stand out, particularly in the top links section where the domain for each link is referenced four times.

The opportunity is more limited on Yahoo, with real-time results limited to two tweets featured in the Twitter tab of the “Latest News” box:

However links to news content are often included in the highlighted tweets and Yahoo plans to incorporate more real-time content soon.

Real-time Search Optimization

As can be seen, news sites have some real advantages in competing for real-time search visibility particularly in Google and Bing. News organizations can quickly gain multiple listings and sustain them for a period of time through user retweets. This combined with the fact that well-known, trusted sources stand out from the clutter increases the likelihood of getting clicks.

So what can news sites do to maximize their visibility in real-time search?

• Monitor hot topics and trends to understand what users are searching for and talking about




• Add keyword support to tweets and updates and utilize hashtags




• Coordinate content promotion activities, timing tweets and Facebook Page updates for shortly after articles and blog posts are indexed in Google News or Google Blog Search




• Mobilize fans and followers through active engagement to foster an influx of tweets, shares and links to content, particularly from authoritative users. This helps to keep the content in the real-time stream and to establish it as a top shared link




• Act quickly – real-time search opportunities don’t stick around for long

These steps are pretty straightforward but the nature of real-time search also creates challenges. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:

• True real-time results happen in the moment and are fleeting, so it is difficult to sustain visibility. I had difficulty keeping up just to grab screenshots for this post (fortunately both Google and Bing have a “pause” button)




• The engines are still in a testing and experimentation phase, so real-time is not being strongly promoted yet and many users are not even aware it exists




• A recent eye tracking study from Oneupweb showed that user engagement with real-time search results is still limited, although it fared better with users looking for news content




• In terms of tracking there is not currently a simple way to separate real-time referrals from other Google, Bing or Yahoo search referrals. Tom Critchlow of Distilled offered some potential workarounds in a recent SEOMoz post, but it’s not an easy process right now. Tracking data from URL shorteners like Bit.ly can help to paint a clearer picture

If you have any additional tips or observations, I’d love to learn them. What are you doing to increase the real-time search visibility of your content?

UPDATE:
Some new developments: Google is now including “Top Links” with its real-time results and is allowing users to zoom in and “replay” tweets from specific dates and times. And Bing is experimenting with blending Twitter results into its main Web results.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch was on Fox Business yesterday talking about the business model for media content on the Internet.

Here’s what he said he had to say about search engines:

“Search on the Internet, whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, is free. And they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content, such as Wall Street Journal or whatever, and what they call their scraper, and they use it for search. It gives them their raw material for nothing. And then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it. We don’t get any of that. They are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead, but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.

“They say, ah yes but because when somebody searches for something and a page comes up for a newspaper it’s registered as a unique visitor and you sell your own advertising along side that. But that is nothing like a, that’s peanuts, compared to the cost of producing a real quality newspaper. And we just need to…it’s not a question of old media vs. new media or anything like that. We’re a new media company in many many ways, look at Avatar, that’s new media.”

So Avatar good, Google bad.

It might not hurt to remember though that search engines send news sites A LOT of quality, monetizable traffic every single day, for free. Natural search can account for 10-20% of a news site’s total traffic, sometimes even 30-40%, so maybe it’s not such a bad relationship after all.

Related posts:

1. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards
2. Borrowing Content Was Happening Long Before Blogging
3. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining

For my presentation on Twitter Marketing Tactics at SMX West this week I wanted to get a sense of just how much traffic Twitter is driving to major news sites. So I conducted an informal poll of 10 US newspaper and magazine sites that Define works with or I am friendly with.

The surveyed group included a mix of sites covering general and breaking news as well as specific topics such as lifestyle, sports or entertainment. Most organizations prefer to keep their figures private so I’m not able to share the actual sites but they are all well-known brands. I looked at referral data for 2008, 2009 and 2010 to-date and for comparison also included Facebook and Digg.

So what percentage of total site traffic came from Twitter and the other social sites? Here are the group averages:

To-date in 2010 Twitter represents an average of 0.7% of total site traffic.

10 newspaper and magazines sites is not a sufficient sample so take this survey for what it is, but the data does provide a rough idea of what major publishers are experiencing. Among the surveyed sites the highest Twitter percentage was 2.9% but the majority fell below 1%. The highs for Facebook and Digg were 2% and 7.2% respectively. The Digg percentages varied the most with straight news sites faring best.

Some notes:

• While all of the surveyed sites have some form of social media strategy none of them are doing as much as they could be. So these figures represent the experiences of typical news sites, not ones that have fully dialed in SMM.




• Despite the low percentages, to-date this year Twitter and Facebook are top 25 referrers for all of the sites and top 10 referrers for most. It is interesting that a top 10 referrer can represent such a small percentage of total site traffic. But since total monthly traffic for most of the group is in the millions, tens of millions or more those small percentages do represent substantial numbers. And if social media is bringing in traffic that the sites might not have otherwise received that’s a nice bump.




• Well-established brands still get a large portion of their traffic via direct navigation. Among the sites surveyed the figures ranged from 30-60%. Partnerships with other large content sites and cross-network promotions were another major driver.




• Natural search engine referrals ranged from about 10% to over 40% and Google.com was the #1 or #2 referring domain for nearly every site. So despite all the attention that social media deservedly gets, search is still its daddy.




• It is interesting that Digg is trending down this year. Not every site in the group was a natural fit for Digg and we are still in Q1 2010 so it is difficult to draw any strong conclusions. But even among the sites that do very well in Digg the numbers have dropped.

REQUEST:

I’d like to expand the size of the survey group, so if any newspaper or magazine professionals out there are willing to share their percentages it will be much appreciated. You can contact me via this form or direct message me on Twitter. Your anonymity will be maintained. Alternatively if anyone is willing to share their figures publicly please leave a comment below. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
2. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
3. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook

In working on my presentation for the Twitter Marketing Tactics session at SMX West next week I’ve been looking at the various types of share and retweet buttons used on news sites.

I’m partial to the Tweetmeme button, although displaying the number of tweets is a double-edged sword. It looks great when there are a lot of retweets; when there aren’t many it can weaken user perceptions of the content.

But regardless of which tool is used, the formatting of the tweet text is something that not every site is making the most of.

When users click a retweet button, they expect to see something along the lines of:

RT @[brand] [headline] [URL]

That exact format does not need to be followed, but you want to minimize the work that users need to do before sending out the tweet. You also want to guide them toward using compelling text that will encourage further retweeting.

Some tools automatically utilize the page’s title tag instead of the headline, which can add unnecessary phrases to the tweet and force users to clean it up before sending.

In other cases no headline or descriptive text is provided, as in this example from Time:

On this Silicon Alley Insider article, clicking the Twitter link in the share toolbar brings up nothing but the full length URL, which is interesting because a shortened bit.ly URL is also displayed in the toolbar:

If users click the “Share” link on that same toolbar they are shown a second Twitter link which produces this tweet:

The problem here is that there is no branding for Silicon Alley Insider and users are less likely to click through when they don’t know the source. Also since SAI opted to use all caps in this particular headline and title tag, the resulting tweet comes off like shouting.

Finally, don’t forget to include the URL, as Newsweek did on this page:

That one is probably a technical glitch, but it’s a big one.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
3. Smart Move from Condé Nast: GQ and DETAILS Should Have Their Own Websites

There is an interesting article in BusinessWeek on how AOL is utilizing software and analytics data in an effort to match content with user interests and monetize it more successfully.

Are you sure you want to write that article, Dave?

Is this a good thing? Done right, I say absolutely. As I’ve covered in past posts on monitoring hot search trends and dealing with seasonal dips in search traffic, news sites can leverage tools and data to gain powerful insights into what’s working and not working on their sites. This information can also be used to find the areas where editorial coverage and user interests most overlap, ultimately resulting in more traffic, pageviews and time on site.

Now that doesn’t mean that the tools should rule the roost, and applying these practices to the extreme of Demand Media or AOL’s SEED is a slippery slope. Standards of quality and editorial voice must be maintained, and news organizations in particular play a more important role in society than simply manufacturing content for the sake of making money from it.

But there is no reason not to use tools and data to help make smart business – and editorial – decisions. If news organizations can’t stay in business, they won’t be playing any role at all.

Related posts:

1. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much
2. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?
3. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining

Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine, but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far.

The Huffington Post is a good high-profile example:

Looking at recent posts they appear to have dialed tagging back a bit, but the average post still gets quite a few tags.

Unfortunately The Huffington Post’s success with search engine visibility has created a “HuffPo effect” in which other news organizations try to copy their blog formula. More than one news site has specifically asked me if adding this block of tag links to the top of posts is good for SEO.

Back in the day making the most of Technorati tags was a blog optimization best practice because it helped to increase visibility on that site. But that’s no longer a significant opportunity, so blog tags are now more about on-site usability; directing users to additional content on a particular topic or allowing them to subscribe to topic-specific RSS feeds.

To be clear, I’m not saying that blog tags have no SEO purpose or value. Tags or categories can be used to help organize content into topical silos and give users and crawlers easy access to posts, and sometimes well-optimized tag pages even rank well. But search engines don’t need 10+ different paths to the same content, and over-linking to a vast number of tag pages makes poor use of a site’s of internal link structure.

Tag pages that include the full text of posts can also create duplicate content issues (including only links and excerpts is the better approach). This is compounded by the fact that most news sites don’t establish tagging rules, so the editorial staff ends up creating lots of tags that are nearly the same and/or a large number of tag pages with hardly any posts on them.

At that point over-tagging harms usability too. Users don’t want to sort through piles of tags to find what they’re looking for, and they don’t want to click through to a tag page to find nothing there but the post they’d just read.

So use tags, but use them wisely.

In a recent Google Webmaster Central video Google’s Matt Cutts talked about blog tags and SEO:

“There are certainly some blogs, including some really popular blogs, who have an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many minutes writing the tags out as they have the actual content to the post. And I always laugh at that because it’s really not that needed.”

Do yourself and your users a favor and tame your blog tags.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
3. Do People Search for “Breaking News”?

Google Buzz has certainly gotten a lot of attention in the past week be it for privacy concerns, suggestions for improvements or its “Code Red” push to get things right. But at this early stage, how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites?

Sharing and discussing content is a key component of Google Buzz, so it’s a natural fit for article promotion and audience development. At a minimum news sites should set up an official profile and experiment with “buzz this” buttons on their templates.

Mashable was one of the first to set up a branded profile and they’ve done well in attracting more than 18K followers to date, although at least for now they are not choosing to follow their audience back:

Despite this their followers are actively engaging with the content; many Mashable submissions are getting a decent number of “likes” and comments:

I wouldn’t expect this to be driving significant traffic yet but as Google Buzz adoption and usage grows the traffic will grow with it.

To what degree that happens depends on how well Google does at improving the interface and functionality. Outside of the privacy issues, most of the current criticism lies with the fact that Buzz is simply too busy and overwhelming. Adding more filtering and organization options will help, and continuing to (safely and appropriately) tie it with Gmail will give Buzz a major leg up on services like Friendfeed that never made it mainstream.

But will it ever catch up with Facebook? That’s a much tougher road, because Facebook has done a great job of gaining adoption across a wide range of demographics. And while there are many improvements that could be made to the interface, Facebook Pages offer a clean, simple way for news sites to promote their content and interact with readers. Facebook itself is making a push to get users to create personalized news channels that benefit both users and news sites.

So at least for now Facebook is the much stronger play.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
2. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
3. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction

Now that Foursquare is all the rage (or the bane of existence if you don’t like all those check-in and badge tweets invading your Twitter stream) news sites are looking at how best to leverage location-based social networks.

The recent partnership between Foursquare and Canada’s Metro is a good early example of the potential that exists. Metro will provide Foursquare with location-specific editorial content such as reviews, tips and articles on points of interest.

While the most natural opportunities for publishers will be tied to current news and information, there are also some compelling things that could be done with historical content.

I’d love to see a partnership between The New York Times and Foursquare. With content in the NYT Article Archive dating back to 1851, there is a world of fascinating stories that could be shared.

Imagine coming across Cooper Union in Manhattan and getting to read an article on Abraham Lincoln’s campaign speech there in 1860. Or walking past a nondescript building and learning that it was once the scene of a notorious crime or a landmark club. Not from a recent Wikipedia entry; from actual news coverage from that time.

I bet that nearly every location in Manhattan has been in the news at some point in the last 159 years. Foursquare and the NYT could bring that history to users in a powerful, personal way.

The NYT could also just build this functionality into their own mobile apps, but partnerships offer greater cross-promotional and audience development opportunities.

That’s just one idea. What else can news sites do with Foursquare and other forms of location-based social media?

UPDATE:
A few days after I posted this The New York Times and Foursquare launched partnership for the Winter Olympics. Foursquare users in Vancouver will have access to reviews, tips and recommendations provided by NYT travel and entertainment writers. While different from my archive idea, this is a great example of location-based opportunities for news sites. Check out The New York Times page on Foursquare to see it in action.

Related posts:

1. New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs
2. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall
3. The Daily Show Visits The New York Times

A major newspaper is about to undergo another dreaded round of layoffs. After the first wave of buyouts, a tough choice has to be made been two journalists of equal talent and seniority. One journalist has a large following and active presence on several social media sites. The other does not. Who offers more value to their organization?

While things are not that simple, the fact is that being social media savvy is becoming an increasingly important part of a reporter’s skill set.

In developing social media strategies for news sites, marketing typically takes the lead on the audience development and content promotion aspects, while the editorial staff focuses more on using social media for sourcing, identifying trends, coming up with story ideas, etc. But there is actually a lot of overlap between the two groups.

Take content promotion. Who would readers rather interact with about a particular story – someone from marketing or the reporter who wrote the article?

A couple weeks ago Tom Foremski and Todd Defren looked at the question of whether or not PR firms could or should use their ability to drive exposure and traffic through social media as a carrot in media pitches. A similar question could be asked of news organizations. Could the strength of journalists’ social media presence impact their ability to get assignments? Will editors favor those who will bring greater exposure to the piece and the organization through their social networks?

That might be taking it too far, but there is no doubt that social media blurs the lines between marketing and editorial and offers a number of new ways to interact with audiences. News organizations that take advantage of these opportunities are putting themselves in a position to succeed.

This blurring benefits the journalists too. In an era where “journalist job security” is becoming an oxymoron, having a strong social media presence makes reporters less expendable and more marketable should they need to find new work.

So what should journalists do? At The Future Journalist session last night in New York, Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik talked about the skills and qualities that media professionals now need to possess. I wasn’t able to attend, but the powerpoint and the syllabus for Professor Sreenivasan’s “Social-media Skills for Journalists” course offer some insights into where they see things heading.

The bottom line: The ways that people consume news and define the “news media” are rapidly changing, and the role of the journalist is evolving with those changes. Journalists who are active in social media bring more value to their news organizations and strengthen their own job security.

Related posts:

1. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
2. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

When it comes to competing for search engine visibility, major news organizations tend to benefit from having strong, trusted domains. But just how strong are those domains?

Using SEOmoz’s new Open Site Explorer I did a head-to-head comparison of 20+ news sites to see which had the most domain authority.

To calculate the scores, SEOmoz uses an amalgamation of link metrics to create a single predictive score for each domain. They refer to domain authority as “our best prediction about how content would perform in search engine rankings on one site vs. another” and claim an accuracy range of about 70%.

So without further ado, here are 20+ major news sites ranked by domain authority and home page authority:

	Domain	Domain authority	Home page authority
1	news.bbc.co.uk	99	92
2	economist.com	99	90
	nytimes.com	99	90
4	msnbc.msn.com	97	89
5	cnn.com	96	92
6	abcnews.go.com	96	90
7	online.wsj.com	95	91
	time.com	95	91
9	usatoday.com	95	91
10	washingtonpost.com	95	90
11	forbes.com	95	89
	guardian.co.uk	95	89
13	latimes.com	94	90
14	timesonline.co.uk	94	90
15	foxnews.com	94	89
	telegraph.co.uk	94	89
17	huffingtonpost.com	94	87
	npr.org	94	87
19	cbsnews.com	93	89
	csmonitor.com	93	89
21	chicagotribune.com	92	89
22	newsweek.com	91	89

In the table home page authority is used to break any ties; if both scores are equal the sites are listed in alphabetical order.

As you can see all of the news sites have domain authority scores of at least 90, and three have scores of 99. Some of these news organizations might like to remember that Google actually holds them in high regard and sends a nice chunk of natural search traffic their way.

I was surprised to see The Economist in the top three because of their subscription wall, but more of their content seems to be accessible to search engines these days.

Related posts:

1. 25 Major News Sites Ranked by Page Speed
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?

Now that the first wave in the Apple iPad crazy-a-thon has past, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of what people are saying about the iPad from the perspective of the news media.

You can view this in the spirit of Robert Scoble’s To create or curate?, or catch on that I’m on a project deadline and don’t have time to contribute my own thoughts.

Either way, here are 10 quotes that caught my attention on how the iPad will impact news organizations from a business or design perspective:

“The business side of the equation will be complicated. Apple has proven over and over that when it comes to media, part of having a simple interface with consumers is having a simple price plan. Publishing companies can’t expect to offer customized pricing on separate devices – one price for Kindle, another for the tablet, and still another for people arriving on computers – and not be buried in a wave of second guessing.”
-David Carr, The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New Front

“Most important for the e-reader debate, total online ad revenues have remained a small part of newspapers’ bottom line — no more than 10% in 2009, an especially discouraging figure considering that newspapers have had a decade to work on boosting online ad revenues. The question, then, is whether newspaper publishers will do any better at monetizing mobile advertising than they have online. Again, some back-of-the-envelope math suggests they won’t.”
-Erik Sass, News Analysis: Even Apple Can’t Save Newspapers

“Editors have been telling us for years that people won’t read long stories online. Yet they will read 1,000-page novels on their Kindles. What will they be willing to read on their iPad? I predict the return of long-form journalism. At the same time, visual storytelling will take deeper, richer forms. Information design will be more important than ever. Something like New York’s Approval Matrix that we designed back in 2005 with Adam Moss is popular in print but will really come to life in this format. Some people might subscribe to it all by itself.”
-Luke Hayman, Five Ways the iPad Will Change Magazine Design

“One sticking point for publishers has been whether they will have direct access to customer data, which they would use to sell renewals or related magazines and to tell their advertisers about their audience. (That is one reason why major publishers joined a consortium, announced in December, that would offer a storefront for digital magazines.)”
-Stephanie Clifford, Condé Nast and Time Inc. Cheer iPad; Others Have Doubts

“Has the iPhone changed the traditional print media business? Not at all — unless you think selling an app for your publication (as Conde Nast has for GQ) is a game-changer. Yes, the New York Times app looks impressive, with video that plays right inside the newspaper display (although you can do that on the NYT web site, too). But will a fancier app change the nature of the newspaper business or the magazine business? No.”
-Mathew Ingrim, Will the iTablet help the media? Possibly. Save the media? No.

“The future of news is about distributing content as widely as possible and monetising not just content but relationships. Devices will be a big part of that, but they’re not the answer.”
-Patrick Smith, Why the iPad isn’t the saviour of journalism as we know it

“But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.”
-Jason Kincaid, The Tablet Could Spur A Media Revolution, But It Will Be Out Of Apple’s Hands

“But the iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. On the iPhone, you can sell news apps through the App Store; you can upsell specific pieces of content to people within your apps; and you can sell advertising within those applications. (Apple takes chunks of the revenue from those first two options.) On the iPad, you can…do those same three things. The only thing that has changed is the size, and that big beautiful screen. Will people who weren’t willing to buy news on an iPhone be sold on the idea just because the text is bigger and the photos are prettier? I’d be surprised. The commerce proposition hasn’t changed.”
-Joshua Benton, So it’s called the iPad: Five thoughts on how it will (and won’t) change the game for news organizations

“The iPad makes the promise of integrated storytelling possible. (Yeah!) The Web has held that promise, but it is still often clunky. (Boo!) The good news is that the iPad isn’t locked to HTML (Yeah!), but what it will use within the iPhone operating system is unclear. (Hmmm) The New York Times app shown at the release looks great, with embedded video. How it was built is not yet public. The fabulous Sports Illustrated tablet demo was built with Adobe Air and Flex, which don’t play on the iPhone OS. Most online multimedia is built in Flash, which doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. Most audio slides shows are built in Flash. Most online video is encoded as Flash video, which — you guessed it — doesn’t play on the iPhone OS. So while it holds a lot of promise for better user interaction, figuring out a whole new platform, how to design for it and integrate our content management systems with it is going to be a big challenge for news organizations. (Sigh.)”
-Regina McCombs, What Apple’s iPad Means for Journalism Design, Multimedia & Business

“My guess is that the truly revolutionary content is not going to come from the old-guard publishers. It’s going to come from new guys, kids who have grown up digital. This notion of mashing together elements comes naturally to them. And somewhere out there, a genius is waiting to be discovered — the Orson Welles of digital media, someone who will create an entirely new language for storytelling. If you’re reading this, Orson Jr., please get in touch. I’ve got something I want to show you. Okay? Peace.”
-Fake Steve Jobs, Tablet Part Two: The true significance of the Tablet

As additional commentary emerges in the days to come, I’ll update this post with links to more good pieces.

Related posts:

1. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much
2. Newsweek’s Tim Geithner Interview Live on Facebook: Don’t Forget to Link to the Video Afterwards
3. Borrowing Content Was Happening Long Before Blogging

So the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints will meet in Miami for Super Bowl XLIV. NFL analysts and sports writers now have two weeks to dissect the matchup, talk about players and schemes and come up with good storylines. But I’m here to look at what really matters – which team has more reach via social media?

Now we all know that social media isn’t a numbers game – it’s not just about reach, it’s about making the most of your connections. Furthermore it’s not possible to fully quantify reach across all social media, especially since that brings up the discussion of what should or shouldn’t be considered “social media.” So I’m going to gloss over all of that and just look at four things, one for each quarter in the Super Bowl.

1st Quarter: Blog mentions
Two days after the conference championships, which team is being blogged about more?

Google Blog Search has 519,933 total results for “Indianapolis Colts” and 20,776 in the past week. For “New Orleans Saints” it’s 726,855 total and 31,215 in the past week.

On Icerocket the Colts have 24,526 total / 2,466 past week, and the Saints have 29,603 total / 3,666 past week.

And Technorati is showing 4,973 posts related to the Colts and 6,178 for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

_________________

2nd Quarter: Digg
Ok, which team has seen the most activity on Digg? According to Digg’s search tool 1,549 Colts articles have been submitted, with only eight being promoted to the front page and three receiving more than 500 diggs. That compares with 1,645 articles submitted, 11 promoted and two with 500+ diggs for the Saints.

Advantage: SAINTS

…At the half, the Saints head into the locker room ahead. Can Peyton Manning and the Colts pull out another come from behind victory?

_________________

3rd Quarter: Facebook
Facebook offers one of the best ways for teams to engage with their fan base, so which team is making the most of it? As of today the Colts’ official Facebook page has 249,481 fans and their wall posts are getting a good amount of “likes” and comments. But from what I can see, and I searched with both Facebook and Google, the Saints do not have an official page. There are several unofficial pages, the largest one with 368,365 fans, but since the Saints appear to be missing the opportunity to engage Facebook users in an official capacity, this is a major fumble.

Advantage: COLTS

_________________

4th Quarter: Twitter
It gets worse on Twitter – from what I can see neither team has an official profile. So here we’ve got the equivalent of one team throwing an interception and then the other giving it right back.

There are several unofficial Twitter profiles for each team run by fans and media sites, but I could not find any official accounts. @NOScom comes close for the Saints, but this appears to be run by the people managing the team’s website, not the team itself. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).

Too bad the teams aren’t choosing to directly engage their fans via Twitter.

How about the players? Twitter-athletes.com currently lists profiles for six Colts players and 15 Saints players. Plus I suppose the Saints can count Kim Kardashian as a “spokesperson” of sorts.

So the Saints have a small edge here, but without an official presence from either team I’m calling this quarter a tie.

Advantage: NONE

_________________

WINNER:

Despite what looked like a Colts comeback, after a poor 4th quarter by both teams the winner of the Social Media Super Bowl is:

THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS

It’ll be interesting to see how these figures increase as the hype builds over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we’ll see some creative use of social media by both the teams and some of the players. And good luck to both teams in Super Bowl XLIV.

P.S. Vikings fans, I feel your pain. You had it.

Photo credit: Steven Snodgrass (it’s a Creative Commons photo on Flickr, but I couldn’t get WordPress to link to it directly above).

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

Yesterday Cision released the results of their Social Media and Online Usage Study, a survey of social media usage by print and Web journalists. Conducted with Don Bates of George Washington University, the study measures the journalists’ use of and attitudes toward social media for researching and reporting stories.

While it could be argued that some of the findings come down to common sense, there are some interesting statistics in the report.

Here are a few things that I’d like to highlight:

55% of the journalists said that social media was “important” or “somewhat important” for reporting and producing stories:

I tend to focus on how social media helps news sites to engage with audiences and promote their content, but it also offers a great way for journalists to research stories and gain insight into trending topics and public sentiment.

The flip side to that is that not everything gleaned from monitoring social media activity is accurate or reliable. So it’s not surprising that 84% of the journalists indicated that news and information delivered via social media was “slightly less” or “much less” reliable/vetted than news delivered via traditional media. The number one reason for this lack of confidence was a “lack of fact-checking, verification or reporting standards.”

Blogs were by far the most used social media tool (I’ll avoid the discussion on whether a blog is a publishing platform or a social media tool – or both), but microblogging and social networking sites also had significant usage:

Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook were particularly utilized by journalists writing for websites (71%) as opposed to print magazines (61%) or newspapers (49%). A similar difference exists for microblogging sites like Twitter.

Newspaper journalists were the most likely to report using no social media tools (21%).

The section on sources used had an interesting stat that relates to the discussion of press release usage by bloggers and local news sources. According to the survey:

Less experienced journalists use information from press releases and PR professionals more now than five years ago to write their stories – more so than their more experienced counterparts.

So I guess the takeaway there is go after the new folks.

There is a lot more data in the Cision study, so I recommend downloading it to get the whole story.

Related posts:

1. Does Social Media Increase a Journalist’s Value?
2. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets

Today The New York Times made it official that they will be introducing a metered model starting in 2011. There is additional information in the NYTco press release, and Jim Romenesko and others have published the staff memo.

Since the NYT is giving themselves a year to work out the details before implementing the paid model, there will be plenty of time for everyone to speculate on what should and shouldn’t be done, and how spectacularly it will succeed or fail.

But instead of that, I’m going to to give you the (completely fabricated) inside scoop on why The New York Times is really putting up a paywall, in the form of a Top 10 list:

10. Poisoning the cafeteria didn’t scare enough people into taking buyouts
9. The executive bathroom in Rupert Murdoch’s “Evil Publishers” Lounge is pretty sweet
8. They’re planning to launch their own portfolio of blogs that do nothing but aggregate their stories – seems to work for everyone else
7. They’ve spent all their resources trying to brainstorm a witty comeback to that piece The Daily Show did on “aged news” last year
6. Since they made the International Herald Tribune site disappear, why not their own?
5. The metered system will pay for itself by randomly charging one user per day $10,000,000
4. The editorial staff figures since hardly anyone will ever see their work, they can save time by skipping every other word
3. In 10 years Google will control every piece of information on the planet anyway, so why not make a little cash while they can?
2. Clicking their heels three times and saying “there’s no place like home” didn’t bring back the pre-Internet era
1. Waiting a year leaves enough time for the entire industry to collapse, so they won’t have to actually come up a system that works

As Bill Maher would say, “I kid the Times” (and if you can’t joke a little about your own parent company, who can you joke about?). However my comedic talents are limited, so please bail me out by suggesting more reasons in the comments.

On a serious note, only time will tell if a paid model will position the NYT to be successful well into the future or if it will ultimately hurt more than help. Most likely the result will fall somewhere in between. But whether you agree with their approach or not, the point is they are trying to find something that works.

The reality is that the industry is being radically re-invented by new technology, and there are no easy answers out there. Coming up with a viable metered model that still allows a wide audience to discover and interact with the content – in the ways that they prefer – is just one step on a challenging road ahead. I wish them the best of luck, and look forward to seeing how things unfold.

UPDATE:
For those interested in more actual information, NYTco. senior executives have answered a series of reader questions at: Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online

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1. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match
2. New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs
3. The Daily Show Visits The New York Times

Want to use your Facebook Page to build out your mailing list? Alicia Keys knows how to do it.

Users who go to the “Sign Up” tab on her Facebook Page get a personal appeal from Alicia Keys herself, extolling the virtues of her mailing list. Here’s how the video appears on the sign-up form (watch it here):

(click on the image to enlarge)

I have no idea what kind of following she’s built up, but this direct, multimedia approach is certainly increasing the conversion rate on the form. Users who sign up see a second video with a thank you message from Keys.

Now not every business will have as engaging a representative, but that does not mean a personal video appeal isn’t applicable beyond celebrity. The key takeaway: the more ways you can bring your Facebook Pages to life, the better.

I noticed that in addition to the email list users can sign up for text and voice updates via mobile phone. Perhaps for that Alicia Keys should adopt the same style as she did in her Saturday Night Live digital short:

Just saying.

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book

As the devastation and human tragedy caused by the Haiti earthquake grows, people are flocking to the news media for information, and more importantly to learn ways that they can help.

I’ve been impressed by how much attention the media has given to promoting ways that people can make donations. Aid organizations are racing against time to save as many lives as they can, and what they need most right now is money. Unfortunately there are increasing reports of donation fraud online, so major news organizations are playing a vital role in directing people to credible, legitimate groups.

Here are some of the news sites sharing information on how to donate to relief organizations helping the Haiti earthquake victims:

• CNN – Impact Your World
• The New York Times – Haiti Disaster Relief: How to Contribute
• MSNBC – Haiti earthquake: How to help
• Chicago Tribune – How to Help
• BBC News – Haiti: How to help
• NPR – Haiti: Some Ways To Help
• Fox News – Haiti Earthquake Aftermath: How to Help
• Newsweek – The Latest on Haiti and How to Help
• The Huffington Post – Haiti Earthquake Relief: How You Can Help
• The Washington Post – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
• USA Today – How to help victims of the Haiti earthquake
• Telegraph.co.uk – Haiti: how readers of this blog can help
• Guardian – Organizations accepting donations to help Haiti
• LA Times – Haiti: Resources and how to help
• Forbes – How to Make Sure Your Donation Helps Haitian Earthquake Victims
• The Wall Street Journal – Where to Donate — and How

I’m sure there are many more; if you know of any please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Social media users are doing their part too. Word of mouth on Twitter, Facebook and other sites (including The White House blog) has raised over $2 million to-date through mobile phone donations organized by mGive. And “Yele” is being frequently posted throughout the Web as users spread the word about Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation.

UPDATES:
Mobile phone donations have gone very well. As of January 18th mGive has raised $21 million and they are hoping to reach $30 million shortly, crediting repeated media coverage for the success of the effort.

CNN has launched Looking for Loved Ones in Haiti to help people trying to connect with missing family and friends. The Red Cross and Google also have tools for this purpose.

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3. Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.

NBA players, like many professional athletes, have taken social media by storm, but what about their teams? Fans love hearing directly from players, but they also identify strongly with the teams themselves. Twitter and Facebook offer a great opportunity for NBA teams to connect with their fans in a more personal, interactive way. So which NBA teams have the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, who is making the most of their presence?

I got good response when I looked at the most popular NFL teams on Facebook and Twitter back in November, so today I thought I’d do the same for the NBA.

In the table below the 30 NBA teams are ranked by total followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. I realize these figures change quickly, but the snapshot is useful for comparison.

The Lakers and Magic are well ahead in terms of total following, which isn’t surprising considering the popularity of the two teams and their stars, and the fact that both teams were in the Finals last year.

While a number of smaller markets and weaker teams are at the bottom of the list, I didn’t expect to see the Miami Heat down there. They are competitive on Twitter in terms of reach but their lack of a real presence on Facebook sent them down to #28. It doesn’t look like they even have an official page on Facebook; the one with 599 followers was the best that I could find.

But while building up followers is great, it’s what you do with that following that really matters.

So what should NBA teams be doing on Twitter and Facebook? The most important thing is to communicate with the fans, plain and simple. Let them know what’s going on with the team, and more importantly LISTEN to what they have to say.

Beyond that there’s no right or wrong answer, but teams will certainly get a lot more traction by being compelling and interactive. Facebook pages offer a better opportunity for expanded content and extended conversations, but there’s a lot you can do with Twitter too.

A simple thing that many teams do is providing in-game updates via Twitter. As a Bulls fan living outside of Chicago I don’t get to watch many games, but I feel connected to the team when I see a scoring update:

Here are a few other things NBA teams should think about:

• Dish: offer insights and information that fans can’t get anywhere else
• Go behind the scenes: give them sense of what the organization is really like
• Humanize: not just the players, let them get to know the entire organization
• Speaking of players: the more they are involved with the team’s official social media activities, the less likely they’ll be to “go rogue” and say something regrettable on their own profiles
• Multimedia: photos and video bring sports content to life, and social media users love to share them
• Contests and promotions: tickets, gear, autographs, chances to meet players – you can quickly build buzz by giving away the good stuff
• Tie it to the community: let fans see that the team cares about the city and what’s going on there

Now if we could only get the NBA to change the first round playoff series back to five games…

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today of the modern news ecosystem, examining a week of news activity in Baltimore, MD. You can get the details from the study itself but I wanted to point out a couple things that caught my attention.

Of the stories in Baltimore that week that contained new information, 95% came from traditional media and the majority of that from newspapers:

So newspapers can pat themselves on the back for another day. But before we dismiss online and social media sources as nothing more than aggregators and promotion outlets, let’s remember that this study reflects the state of the news ecosystem today. Things are just now beginning to shift as the economic viability of the current model is beginning to fail. New media can and will play an increasing role in original news reporting in the years to come.

Also this statement on the role of new technology in breaking news more quickly was interesting:

As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.

While many people regard press releases as little more than throw-away text, the reality is that smaller news sources in particular do in fact use that content in full or repurposed form. Bill Hunt wrote about this a while back in looking at the use of tech press releases by bloggers. So companies can increase the likelihood of their press releases being used by bloggers and local news sources by giving them a more news-like tone and dialing down the marketing hype.

Related posts:

1. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook

Hearst’s Skiff Reader is being unveiled at CES this week. My professional, analytical opinion is it looks pretty darn good.

I hope the much-discussed digital media consortium with Hearst, Time Inc, Condé Nast, Meredith and News Corp works out. It’s an interesting project and it is good to see publishers trying new things, however slow to move they may have been to-date.

While we’re at it, here’s another look at Sports Illustrated’s tablet demo:

Related posts:

1. 10 Quotes on the Apple iPad and the Business of News
2. Smart Move from Condé Nast: GQ and DETAILS Should Have Their Own Websites
3. New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs

Awareness of Newsweek’s Tumblr site has been increasing of late. It’s actually been around for a while but Newsweek seems to have been giving it more attention over the past few months.

I like it. The layout is clean and simple, the content is interesting and Newsweek is mixing in plenty of items from other sources. That’s critical for giving the site stand-alone value as opposed to just being a feeder site to Newsweek.com.

In looking through the site though one thing stands out – nearly every item has no comments or reactions:

That seems odd, but it’s not just a holiday season slowdown. I went back several months and it’s not easy to find items that have gotten comments. I don’t have any data on what kind of traffic the Tumblr site is getting, but either it is fairly low or visitors simply aren’t starting discussions there.

To investigate further I did a quick check for Twitter activity. I didn’t find any shared newsweek.tumblr.com URLs through Bit.ly search, and TweetMeme isn’t registering any recent activity:

A search right from Twitter doesn’t bring up much, but there are some nice comments about the site itself:

So based on just this quick look it doesn’t seem like Newsweek is getting a lot of engagement with its Tumblr site yet. Some visitors are likely clicking through to the full articles on Newsweek.com and then commenting there and/or sharing the newsweek.com URLs, which is also a good thing. But it would be nice to see the Tumblr site have a more interactive feel.

In terms of search engine visibility, as of today the Tumblr site is #9 in my Google results for “Newsweek” so it’s working its way up. Looks like they need to adjust the META description tag on their home page though:

UPDATE:
FishbowlNY did a good interview with Mark Coatney, the editor who is responsible for Newsweek’s Tumblr.

Related posts:

1. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
2. Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.
3. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?

I was going to post this last week but then opted wisely for letting myself enjoy a holiday break. Also I’ve only been blogging here for about six months, so I’m still building up momentum. But since all the cool kids have been sharing their top posts I wanted to join in, plus follow my own advice on identifying your top trends.

Heck, if Brian Solis can put out 10 installments of his greatest hits for the year, I can certainly come up with one.

So belatedly here are my 10 most popular posts of 2009, by pageviews:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
3. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg
4. Google News Optimization Tips
5. The Most Popular NFL Teams on Twitter and Facebook
6. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter
7. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
8. Social Media Dominates 2010 PR Planning, But SEO Increasingly in the Mix
9. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
10. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites

I’m looking forward to making new connections and contributions this year, and helping news and content sites to get the most out of their SEO and audience development efforts. Here’s wishing everyone an interesting and productive 2010.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Dominates 2010 PR Planning, But SEO Increasingly in the Mix
2. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

Yesterday Facebook shared its Top Status Trends of 2009, providing insight into what terms most commonly occurred in users’ status updates. Last week Twitter gave us their Top Twitter Trends of 2009 for categories like news events, people, movies, etc. And throughout December we’ve gotten top 2009 searches lists from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

Data like this is interesting to check out, and it can provide useful insights for marketers and content producers in getting a better understanding of user interest and activities in both search and social media.

But while you’re going through this year’s top trends, don’t forget to apply the same practice to your own sites. Getting a clear understanding of how your target audiences locate and interact with your content and engage with your brand will give you actionable data to use next year and beyond.

Things that news and content sites should look at include:

1. What terms and content types brought in the most search engine referral traffic?
2. What were your top referrers/trends in Web search, news search, image search, blog search and video search?
3. What sections, special features, individual articles, etc. were most (and least) popular?
4. What were your top internal search queries for the year?
5. What types of content generated the most social media sharing and inbound links?
6. Which social media sites brought in the most traffic and links, and how well represented are you in each?
7. Which Twitter profiles built up the most followers and engagement? (main profiles, personas, individual staff members, etc).
8. What types of stories got the most retweets?
9. What generated the most “likes” and comments on your Facebook Page?
10. What types of stories gained traction (or were buried) on social news sites like Digg and Reddit?

There is a lot more that you can look at, but hopefully these 10 will get you pointed in the right direction. And while I focused on editorial sites, the same general approach works for e-commerce, B2B and any other category.

Understanding user behavior in 2009 helps you to grow your audience or customer base and increase engagement in 2010.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
3. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall

This week both Brian Solis and SEOMoz made reference to a recent Forrester report forecasting US interactive marketing budgets for the next five years. You can check out their posts for the aspects of the report they covered. What caught my eye was the chart on budget allocation across various industries in 2009:

As you can see search marketing got a much greater share of interactive marketing budgets than social media. With all the (justifiable) industry focus on social media this year it’s interesting to note that search marketing is still getting the lion’s share of spending. When it comes to interactive media buys it looks like Google and the other search engines still offer marketers the best opportunities online.

According to Forrester that trend will continue:

Related posts:

1. Social Media Dominates 2010 PR Planning, But SEO Increasingly in the Mix
2. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
3. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information

Yesterday Google announced that it is now supporting the rel=”canonical” link element (sometimes referred to as the canonical URL tag) across different domains. This means that in addition to using the tag to help sort of duplicate content issues on a single domain, it can also be used in dealing with duplicate content on more than one domain. (If you’re not familiar with rel=”canonical” see Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag).

In the Q&A in Google’s announcement, one question in particular caught my eye:

Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”?

A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree.

At Define we work with a lot of newspaper and magazine sites, many of which have syndication deals with multiple partners. “How can we prevent our syndication partners from outranking us for our own content?” is one of the most common consulting questions we get.

As I covered in my post on syndication best practices, to some extent publishers have to except that they can’t have their cake and eat it too; if you allow your content to be published on other sites there is always a chance that they will outrank you for that content. Since most syndication partners will not agree to block their duplicate versions from search engines, the current best practices are built around reducing the risk of being outranked as opposed to eliminating it.

Now cross-domain support of rel=”canonical” is the best available option to publishers for dealing with duplicate content caused by syndication and establishing the content on their sites as the original source.

It will be interesting to see if publishers are able to get a rel=”canonical” requirement added to future syndication contracts. Most likely the partners will push back, but if you can get them to agree to it you absolutely should. Though it is important to note that Yahoo and Bing are not yet supporting rel=”canonical” across domains, so this solution only applies to Google.

As you can see from the Q&A above Google is going out of its way to avoid offering a specific recommendation on this matter. I guess in the current climate they want to avoid telling news sites how to run their businesses. But they certainly recognize the tag’s value in helping to sort out duplicate content issues caused by syndication.

UNRELATED SIDE NOTE
Right after I published this post I noticed a mistake with the URL, so I immediately re-published with a different URL. Unfortunately that seems to have interfered with the ability for the TweetMeme button to register retweets of this post. I tried testing and playing around with it but I couldn’t sort it out. Anyone ever have this issue? It’s obviously not that big a deal but that zero doesn’t look so hot.

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
3. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

Today Google unveiled its Living Stories prototype, showcasing its vision of a new format for presenting news stories online. Essentially the idea is that for ongoing stories news organizations would maintain a single, consistent “living” URL that is continually updated with the latest developments.

Google has been collaborating with The New York Times and The Washington Post on the prototype; eight examples have been created to-date, such as this Living Story on health care reform:

(click on the image to see a larger screenshot)

At first pass Living Stories sound a lot like topic pages, which nearly every news site produces in some fashion now. But there is a fundamental difference between the two and Living Stories are ultimately a compliment to topic pages, not a replacement. Topic pages consolidate all of a site’s coverage on general, popular subjects such as specific news figures or companies. A Living Story takes it one level deeper by applying the concept to a specific story about that topic.

Unfortunately for him, Tiger Woods offers a good example of why news sites would want to use both. His current troubles are a perfect case for creating a Living Story since new developments continue to emerge in that story. But as big as the scandal is right now, it certainly does not represent everything there is about Tiger. So sports news sites in particular will also benefit from having a Tiger Woods topic page that encompasses his entire career and provides users easy access to his latest news, stats, biography, etc.

In looking at the current Living Story examples, one thing that struck me is that news sites will need to be careful not to pick subjects that are too broad to be effective. Stories like “The War in Afghanistan” or “The Struggle Over Health Care” do have a specific focus, but it would be easy for those pages to try to cover too much and as a result become overwhelming to users.

So bottom line, are Living Stories a good idea?

Publishers will understandably be concerned about losing page views, but a strong, consistent URL with frequent updates may well get more views (both on-site and via search referrals) than lots of scattered, separate articles would collectively. So I think it is a concept that is worth experimenting with. The main caveat being that Living Stories should ultimately be hosted on the actual news sites, not on Google.

For more information, see Principles of Living Stories and this video from Google:

UPDATE:
February 17, 2010 – Google News announced that the Living Stories code would be made open source to allow for more sites to experiment with the format. With the shift to the public phase of the experiment The New York Times and The Washington Post will no longer be updating their test pages hosted on Google Labs.

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A new whitepaper from Vocus with their 2010 PR Planning Survey results has some encouraging statistics about the increasing role of search engine optimization in the overall PR mix.

Not surprisingly, social media gets the most attention with 80% of respondents indicating they plan to do more with it in 2010. But 57% also indicated that they plan to increase their focus on SEO:

That’s good news, because even just 2-3 years ago many companies’ efforts to integrate SEO and PR activities did not extend much beyond press release optimization. That’s certainly important but it’s just one tactic; there are a lot more opportunities to explore.

Greg Jarboe and Lee Odden are at the forefront of evangelizing the importance of SEO in public relations and in teaching how to actually implement integrated efforts. Both rightly deserve credit for increasing awareness industry-wide.

Another chart of interest in the Vocus whitepaper demonstrates how social media monitoring has become an essential part of the PR practioner’s toolkit:

News monitoring and online media databases have traditionally received the lion’s share of PR tool spending. Over time I’d expect to see social media monitoring tools grab more budget at the expense of both, as more and more focus is placed on direct communication with target audiences.

I was surprised to see only 36% of respondents are using online press rooms, since that should be a fundamental part of any corporate website. Perhaps some of the respondents took the question to mean third-party online press room services.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Journalist Social Media Usage Increases, Concerns About Reliability of Information
3. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?

In November Google announced a new format for Google News Sitemaps with several changes including new tags that provide additional detail on each submitted article.

Google is using words like “more flexible,” “easier to submit,” “more control” and even “exciting” to describe the new format and transition period. That may be getting carried away but the new format does have some advantages for publishers, although they are not being fully utilized by Google News yet.

The main opportunity comes from the new tags. While designed to help Google News better interpret and categorize the content in the sitemaps, the tags also provide publishers with additional chances for exposure.

The <genre> tag has the potential to be the most helpful. Content that is not a straightforward news article is now labeled with one of these six values (when applicable):

• PressRelease: an official press release
• Satire: an article which ridicules its subject for didactic purposes
• Blog: any article published on a blog, or in a blog format
• OpEd: an opinion-based article which comes specifically from the Op-Ed section of your site
• Opinion: any other opinion-based article not appearing on an Op-Ed page, i.e., reviews, interviews, etc
• UserGenerated: newsworthy user-generated content which has already gone through a formal editorial review process on your site

The first three (PressRelease, Satire, Blog) are visibly shown on Google News results pages, as in this example for a search on “IBM”:

This will help users seeking specific content types find what they are looking for, potentially resulting in more traffic to that content. It also has the potential to do the opposite; users may disregard non-editorial content such as press releases in greater volume now that it is easier to identify.

Google News does not currently offer the ability to sort by genre in either the left sidebar or the Advanced Search page. Doing so would bring a lot more user functionality to the genre designations, so hopefully it will be added at some point.

Blog content does get some extra exposure however. When a user clicks on the “all X news articles” link at the bottom of a story cluster, Blogs is the second section on the full coverage page:

Two other new tags in Google News Sitemaps are <publication> and <access>. <publication> identifies the name of the news outlet and the language it is published in. While not a big plus for publishers, this can help in properly identifying the source of an article and in matching content in other languages to the appropriate version of Google News.

The <access> tag is used to identify sites that require a subscription or registration. This could be a negative for publishers that fall into those categories as it might result in users favoring other sources. However publishers can avoid having to use this tag by participating in First Click Free. Although in today’s climate such news outlets may instead prefer to just block their content from Google News altogether.

The fourth new tag is the <title> tag, which allows publishers to specify the title of each article. This is a good thing for publishers because it’s not uncommon for Google News to do some strange things in determining article titles itself.

For more information on the new format for Google News Sitemaps, see:

• A new face to Google News Sitemaps
• News Sitemaps format transition FAQ
• News Sitemaps: Creating a News Sitemap
• News Sitemaps: Content types

Publishers should note that there is a six-month grandfather period during which Google News Sitemaps that had been previously submitted in the old format will still be accepted, so there is plenty of time to convert existing sitemaps. However all newly submitted Google News Sitemaps must be in the new format.

Related posts:

1. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag

More developments in the Rupert Murdoch vs. Google saga today, as the Financial Times reports that discussions have taken place between News Corp and Microsoft on an exclusive deal with Bing that would lead to News Corp blocking its news sites (such as The Wall Street Journal) from Google.

I’d actually like to see this happen…it would make for an interesting case study demonstrating that the only one hurt by such a deal is News Corp itself. It would also be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the financial realities of trying to extend such an arrangement to a larger group of publishers.

Believe it or not, being indexed in Google and Google News is actually good for news sites.

Danny Sullivan has been covering the SEO aspects of this story in depth – these posts provide an overview of the key points better than I could summarize here:

• Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News”
• If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?
• Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal (or News Corp) Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing

Jeff Jarvis also has some good thoughts on the topic:

• Murdoch madness
• Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google

And Bill Tancer from Hitwise has pulled data showing just how important search engine referral traffic is to The Wall Street Journal and newspapers in general:

• News Corp. – If You de-Index Will They Still Come?
• News Corp. Google-less?

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much
3. The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

The role of social media in professional sports is getting a lot of attention these days, unfortunately mostly in the form of teams and leagues trying to clamp down on it or players making mistakes with it.

Despite this, fans are passionately supporting and discussing their teams through a range of social media outlets, in particular Twitter and Facebook. Since we’re in the heart of football season, I thought I’d take a look at which NFL teams have the largest following on both sites.

In the table below the 32 NFL teams are ranked by the total number of followers/fans on their official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. These figures obviously change quickly but this current snapshot is useful for comparison.

Interestingly, despite no official presence on Twitter the Pittsburgh Steelers have the largest reach thanks to their large number of Facebook fans. I was also surprised that the Dallas Cowboys do not have an official Facebook page as they would certainly attract a significant number of fans.

I had expected all the teams to have more followers on Twitter. The San Diego Chargers lead the league with only 28K followers. (UPDATE: Thanks to Mike Blewitt for noticing that it is actually the New England Patriots that have the most Twitter followers at 30K+).

The New Orleans Saints and New York Giants are currently at the bottom of the social media heap with no official presence on either Twitter or Facebook. However an unofficial Saints page is very popular on Facebook with 163,760 fans.

Capturing data on only “official” accounts and pages was actually somewhat difficult (I welcome corrections if I’ve missed any). Twitter is a wild west for NFL teams right now – there are far more unofficial accounts, and even those that that claim to be official aren’t always actually so. Twitter should consider extending its “verified accounts” to team sites as well. On Facebook the official team pages are easier to identify, but they often face competition from other pages created by fans or local media. For several teams the unofficial pages have significantly more fans.

So the main takeaway is that NFL teams need to take better control of their social media presence and come up with more a cohesive engagement strategy. NFL fans are among the most passionate, so there is a great opportunity to leverage their loyalty and enthusiasm and further extend the relationships.

Related posts:

1. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?

While many companies now have some form of presence on Twitter, how well are they utilizing it? According to a new study by Weber Shandwick, when it comes to the Fortune 100 the answer is not so well.

Among the Fortune 100 Twitter accounts analyzed by Weber Shandwick, 53% did not convey any personality, tone or voice and 15% were either inactive or placeholders:

Additionally, 26% of the accounts were primarily used for a one-way flow of information that offered no engagement with followers, and only 9% of the accounts focused on customer service:

The end result for the Fortune 100? No so many tweets, and understandably not so many followers:

As I covered in my Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites post, there’s no “right” way to utilize Twitter. Every company needs to come up with its own customized strategy that fits its corporate culture while meeting the needs of its customer base. But since a single Twitter account cannot be all things to all people, it is important for companies to experiment with a diversified approach.

Corporations also need to make sure that the desire to play it safe does not rob their Twitter efforts of creativity. If you are not providing value to your followers (by being some combination of informative, interesting, engaging, insightful, valueable, etc.), you are going to lose your audience and the resulting opportunities from having that relationship.

Related posts:

1. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
2. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book
3. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope

With all the buzz about Twitter Lists I thought I’d take a look at how some major news sites are doing so far with their own Lists.

Looking at selection of Twitter accounts from 30 31 news sites, I checked the number of Lists that have been created and how many followers each has attracted to-date. These figures will change quite a bit in the weeks and months to come, but I wanted to capture an initial snapshot. (Note: currently Twitter allows users to create a maximum of 20 Lists.)

As can be seen it is still early days for both Twitter List creation and user adoption.

As of today half of the news sites have not created any Lists, and only four sites have more than 10. The average number of followers is still very low, and all of the Lists have less than 1,000 followers (many of them significantly less). The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Huffington Post have done the most so far with List development.

It will be interesting to see how things evolve over time.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Social Media Super Bowl: Which Team Has More Reach?

This week Google unveiled Google Social Search, an opt-in feature that provides additional search results with content from a user’s “social circle” of friends and trusted sources. A limited number of listings will appear at the bottom of the main search result pages, or users can drill down to see more extensive listings:

Currently a social circle is determined by the social media accounts linked from a user’s Google Profile, the feeds they subscribe to in Google Reader and their Google chat and Gmail contacts. So if you link to your Twitter account on your Google profile the people you’re following on Twitter become part of your social circle. The same goes for the sites and blogs you follow via Google Reader.

It’s still an experimental feature in Google Labs and users have to be signed into their Google account to use it, so it’s safe to say that adoption of Social Search will be slow. But in case in takes off, the questions businesses should be asking themselves now are: Are we in our target audiences’ social circles? If not how do we get there?

For news and content sites the task is fairly straightforward as lots of users are already subscribed to their RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, etc. Such sites also produce new content every day, so there are plenty of things that Google can pull from in creating social results. Other types of businesses will have to be more creative, which is where smart content marketing and social media strategies come into play.

I don’t believe it is currently possible for businesses to create Google Profiles in the same way that they can create Facebook Pages, but the individual(s) responsible for their social media outreach can build up social circles through their own Profiles, just like they do in a variety of social media outlets.

There have been many Google features over the years that never gained traction – a few years ago Subscribed Links offered a similar opportunity for content sites but never found mainstream adoption. But Social Search has a better chance of making it, so it’s a good idea to start developing a strategy for it now.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
2. Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets
3. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play

One of the more promising features in this week’s relaunch of CNN.com is NewsPulse, which surfaces popular content in a simple, user-friendly interface:

(Click on the screenshot above to see a larger image)

NewsPulse makes it easy for users filter popular news by time period (from 15 minutes to 30 days), section and content type (articles vs. video). How “popularity” is determined is not specifically defined, but it is likely a simple metric like page views.

One aspect that CNN might want to rethink is the inclusion of “Total Comments” for each news item. Since many stories do not appear to allow comments this results in quite a few “popular” stories with zero comments, which sends a mixed message to users:

NewsPulse is still in beta so there’s likely to be some changes based on user activity and input. CNN.com is soliciting user feedback by including a prominent survey link at the top of the page:

It will be interesting to see how NewsPulse changes user behavior on the site over time. It has the potential to increase the number of stories read per visit, resulting in more page views and time on site. Part of it will depend on how deeply users are willing to drill down with the interface. Personally I think the potential upside makes it well worth experimenting with. And CNN.com has wisely maintained the typical section front structure for users that prefer to interact with the site in that way.

Related posts:

1. The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?
2. The Most Popular MLB Teams on Twitter and Facebook
3. The Most Popular NBA Teams on Twitter and Facebook

Yesterday posts from eMarketer and Marketing Pilgrim called my attention to some interesting social media statistics put out by advertising network Chitika.

First, a study of 33 million unique users from Chitika’s network in September showed that visitors coming from Facebook and Digg were more loyal than those coming from the three major search engines and Twitter. Chitika defined “loyal” visitors as those who came to a site four or more times in the same week:

Facebook leading the pack isn’t much of a surprise since a high percentage of search engine referral traffic is “one and done” – searchers find what they were looking for and then move on. But I wouldn’t have expected Digg to be a strong second, since the social news site is known for sending large spikes of visitors that quickly scan the page and then move on.

It’s also important to note that while search engine visitors may be less loyal their volume is much greater, especially visitors from Google. Another Chitika study showed that social media represented only 0.55% of total referrals across their network, compared to nearly 98% for search engines:

This highlights the fact that there is more to SEO than just increasing search engine referral traffic – it is essential to convert those visitors once they arrive. In publishing that typically means additional page views and time on site, RSS and e-mail newsletter subscriptions, user account and on-site community sign-ups, etc.

I’d also like to point out that for major media sites, search engine referral traffic is typically a much smaller percentage than Chitika’s network is receiving. According to a Hitwise US News & Media Report back in 2007, on average search engine referrals represent about 23% of traffic to print media sites. (Side note: Hitwise, you’re overdue for an updated version of that report!). That’s a pretty good figure considering that direct navigation still represents the lion’s share of traffic to newspaper and magazine sites. For many news sites (especially poorly optimized ones) search engine referrals are still considerably below 20% of total traffic.

As for social media traffic, while still quite small those figures are definitely trending up strongly for news and content sites, especially when looked at year-over-year. Even just a year ago the majority of news sites were barely dabbling with things like Twitter – now most have Twitter mania.

For a social media presentation at the Publishing Business Conference earlier this year I surveyed 12 major magazine sites that Define works with, and found that in 2008 social media referrals ranged anywhere from 0.6% to 18% of total site traffic, the average being between 1-3%. This is more in line with the figures for Chitika’s network:

(Click on the image above to see the full size slide).

And while the figures for specific social media sites vary from site to site, total social media referral traffic is up considerably in 2009 to-date.

Related posts:

1. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%
2. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

I’m definitely a fan of Muck Rack – it offers an easy way to track major media journalists on Twitter and pick up on trending topics. So I’ve been curious to see how their Twitter press release service would do.

Muck Rack charges $1 per character to send out a 140 character press release, with a minimum fee of $50. Releases are posted on their press release page (and in its RSS feed) and tweeted via @muckrack, which currently has 5k+ followers.

Based on their press release page and RSS feed, since the service launched in late July they’ve distributed 51 press releases, a small number being their own. That’s an average of about 4 press releases per week, so there’s not a lot of volume yet.

Of those 51 releases, 28 included a bit.ly URL, so I tried using bit.ly search to get click data on each of those shortened URLs. My intent was to show the average number of clicks for bit.ly URLs in Muck Rack releases. Unfortunately I discovered that the “total clicks” figures bit.ly reports from its search page are not very complete or accurate (you get better data on URLs you’ve personally shortened in your history when signed into bit.ly). So I wasn’t able to learn anything meaningful there.

bit.ly search did have data on the URL in the most recent Muck Rack press release, reporting 65 clicks:

That doesn’t measure up to the hundreds or thousands of clicks that popular content often gets via Twitter, but press releases are in a different category. It’s less important how many people click and much more important who is clicking and what they are doing with the information. If you look at @muckrack’s followers there’s a mix of media and non-media professionals, so there’s certainly an opportunity for the press releases to get some exposure.

To see how Muck Rack stacks up against the competition I checked the volume of activity on some other Twitter press release services, but there aren’t a lot of apples-to-apples comparisons to be made. Much of what’s out there is established press release services that now send out releases via Twitter in addition to their main distribution methods, or services like Brian Solis’ microPR that connect PR and media professionals without the use of press releases.

Probably the closest competitor is Journalism.co.uk in the UK, which charges £30 to distribute a release through Twitter and RSS. As of today their @pressreleases Twitter account has 6,600 followers, a bit more than Muck Rack’s 5,050. Their Latest Press Releases page shows their most recent 50 releases, the oldest being from October 7th. So in less than a month they’ve distributed as many releases as Muck Rack has done in its first three months.

Of course the larger question is whether or not companies will use third-party services to distribute press releases via Twitter when they can do so for free on their own. The answer lies in how much additional value the services can provide in terms of exposure and activity.

UPDATE:
In addition to hearing from Chris Evans-Roberts of Journalism.co.uk in the comments below, today I corresponded with Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media, the company behind Muck Rack. Greg noted that they encourage users to use bit.ly so that the metrics will be open and verified by a third party. He also agreed with the notion that it’s important who sees a press release, not how many people, and that they are focused on making the service more useful for journalists to increase its value.

Related posts:

1. Where Do You Want Your Social Media Press Releases to Live?
2. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

Although search engines keep improving on their ability to deal with duplicate content, this continues to be one of the main SEO issues facing news and content sites. Even when the engines do a reasonable job of filtering out duplicates in their results, sites are essentially shooting themselves in the foot by splitting internal and inbound links to a particular piece of content across multiple URLs. Therefore it is critical for publishers to diagnose and eliminate (or at least mitigate) the duplicate content issues on their sites.

Here are the most common causes of duplicate content on news media sites:

1. Tracking codes. Appending tracking codes to URLs (e.g. ?xid=rss or ?cid=top-stories) results in the same piece of content existing on multiple URLs – in some cases quite a large number of URLs. The canonical URL tag is a good way to mitigate this issue.




2. Publishing the same content in multiple sections. An article can be linked from as many sections and locations on the site as desired, but it should only exist on one unique, permanent URL.




3. Repurposing content in new packages. Media sites often pull existing content into new features/packages, typically to create attractive options for advertisers. For example a selection of movie reviews (that also exist in the film section) will be duplicated on a different template in a “What’s Hot This Summer” feature. Since the pages are not exactly the same the canonical URL tag is not the ideal solution, and publishers typically resist consolidating through permanent 301 redirects because they want the content to also exist in its original location. From a SEO perspective, the best approach is to avoid this practice altogether.




4. Syndication. Syndicating content is a common practice and an important revenue stream for publishers. But when the search engines encounter the same article on multiple sites it is likely that one version will be given prominence, and it may not always be the original. My post on syndication best practices covers ways to reduce the risk of being outranked for your own content.




5. CMS issues. Although content management systems have become more SEO friendly over the years most still cause a number of SEO problems, including duplicate content issues. The most common is printer-friendly pages. Or for example in photo galleries the first slide may appear on a different URL when you go back to it via the “previous” button. Conduct a comprehensive SEO site audit to identify CMS and site architecture issues (as well as editorial and marketing issues).

A few other notes on dealing with duplicate content:

• This week Google specifically recommended against using robots.txt to block duplicates, which is a change from previous recommendations.




• In the duplicate content session at SMX East, Google also announced that the canonical URL tag will work across domains by the end of the year (currently it only works with URLs on the same domain). As interesting, Yahoo and Bing admitted that they are still not supporting the current version of the tag but are hoping to by the end of year.




• In September Google added a function to Webmaster Tools called Parameter Handling that allows sites to specify certain URL parameters that can be ignored during crawling. There is a good writeup on the duplicate content implications of this on Search Engine Land: Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content

This week Google started embedding a Hot Trends graph at the bottom of search results pages for queries that fall within their top 100 fastest-rising search terms, as seen in this example screenshot:

While checking out search trends is interesting for users, it can also be valuable to publishers. A tactic that some news and content sites employ is monitoring Google’s Hot Trends list in an effort to identify hot topics and then quickly produce matching content around them.

Does this work? Sometimes. Many search trends come and go quickly, so sites that cover a topic after its peak will likely miss out on the larger search engine visibility opportunity. As I covered in my post on dealing with seasonal search declines, it’s not easy to chase search trends because there is a danger of always ending up one step behind.

But occasionally a search trend has greater sustainability or fits well into a particular site’s area of coverage, in which case jumping in and producing related content can really pay off.

So how do you monitor these trends? The major engines all produce some form of hot topic/trend list, and several third-party and social media sites do as well. You can also use keyword and reputation monitoring tools, real-time search tools and popular/meme lists for articles, tweets, social media submissions, etc.

Here are some free resources for identifying hot topics and search trends. I’ve primarily stuck to aggregated trend/topic lists to keep the list manageable.

Search Engines

• Google Trends: Hot Trends
• Google Insights for Search: “Rising searches” for last 7 days
• Yahoo Buzz Index
• Bing xRank
• Ask.com IQ

Blog Search

• Google Blog Search: Hot Queries (right sidebar)
• Technorati Popular
• MyBlogLog Hot Topics
• IceRocket: Popular (left sidebar)
• BlogPulse Featured Trends

Twitter

• Twitter Search: Trending Topics
• TweetMixx: Trending
• Trendistic (right sidebar)
• Twitscoop: Hot Trends (click on link in top nav)
• TweetMeme
• Retweet
• #hashtags: Newest hashtags
• Twemes

Other Social Media

• Social Mention: Trends
• Addict-o-matic: Hot Topics
• Sency
• Digg: Popular Last 24 hours (other time intervals possible)
• SocialBlade
• Reddit: Top Scoring Links Today (other time intervals possible)
• Delicious Hotlist and Popular
• POPURLs

Related posts:

1. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends
2. 5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic
3. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media

My post on Facebook Page engagement for news sites has drawn some interest in the fact that Fox News averages many more “likes” and comments per update than any other news site, despite having significantly fewer fans than CNN, NPR or The New York Times. So I thought I’d take a closer look at what Fox News is doing on its Facebook Page, as well as some engagement examples.

After reviewing several days’ worth of activity, I have to say that nearly anything Fox News posts to its page ends up getting a decent amount of likes and comments from fans. Even more mundane news items still manage to spark a round of commenting. So it seems to me that it is the strong, passionate opinions of the fans themselves more than anything specific that Fox News is doing.

That said Fox News does attempt to solicit fan opinions, particularly on more controversial topics, which certainly helps to encourage participation:

Referencing political figures that are known to generate strong reactions from their user base is also working for them:

As for the type and quality of comments being posted, I’ll share this sampling of today’s comments on Barak Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly and let you make your own assessment:

Related posts:

1. Facebook Pages: Which News Sites Get the Most Engagement?
2. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement
3. Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.

Now that the improved Facebook Pages have been around for a while I wanted to check the level of engagement that major news sites are achieving with them.

Most news sites have an official Facebook Page now, with the typical approach being to add a daily stream of links to new content while promoting site features, apps, feeds, etc. in the sidebars and subpages. Some news sites are supplementing content links with direct questions and comments to users, but this does not appear to be happening in any significant volume.

Using a sampling of 15 16 news sites, I captured the total number of fans on their Facebook Pages as of today. To judge user engagement and activity, I also calculated the average number of “likes” and comments that the last 10 updates/links to each page received.

CNN currently has the most fans, with The New York Times not too far beyond. Fox News and The Economist have crossed six figures, after which the figures start dropping quickly.

Fox News is strongly ahead in terms of fan engagement and activity – their like and comment numbers are significantly greater than any of the other sites. This is not surprising based on the reactions that Fox News reporting tends to generate from both sides of the political fence.

A couple of notes: The Guardian’s page has only 4 updates total, so their averages are based on a smaller selection. The Daily Telegraph has N/A for likes and comments because they do not appear to posting any updates or links at this time.

UPDATE:
After seeing Matt Gallivan’s comment I added NPR to the table today. They are indeed #2 in terms of total fans (among the group of news sites that I looked at). Their fan engagement figures also rank high.

Related posts:

1. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
2. Which News Sites Have the Most Valuable Facebook Pages?
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

This week Google put out a video to give publishers more information on how Google News works and how best to optimize for it. I pulled out some of the more useful tips, combining information from some of the slides with additional details provided by Google’s Maile Ohye.

Article Ranking Factors within a Story Cluster

While there are a wide range of ranking factors these four were highlighted:

• Fresh and New – Priority is given to articles that are recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. Articles need to be “objective news” to lead a story cluster (op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription content are not eligible to lead clusters).




• Duplication and Novelty Detection – More credit is given to original sources of content. Google News uses “Citation Rank” to try to determine the original source (i.e. a lot of subsequent articles linking to a particular source or referencing it within editorial text).




• Local / Personal Relevancy – Weighted by section and story; more credit given to local sources. For example the Charlotte Observer is likely to be given more weight on stories about North Carolina.




• Trusted Sources – Trusted sources are given a boost in each edition and section via various signals. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.” For instance Google News factors in how often articles from particular sources are clicked on in determining user trust.

Image Optimization for News Search

• Use large image sizes with good aspect ratios
• Include descriptive captions and ALT text
• Place image near article title (helps Google News to associate the image with the subject matter)
• Use inline, non-clickable images (as opposed to linking them to something else)
• JPG images are preferred (PNG was specifically cited as not being as good)

Google News Optimization Best Practices

• Articles must be on unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google News to differentiate articles from static Web pages. Three digit URLs are not required if you submit an XML news sitemap.




• Don’t break up the article body – Articles should have sequential paragraphs; don’t break them up with user comments or links to related posts.




• Put dates between the title and body – Helps the date extractor to establish the correct publication date.




• Titles matter – Create good HTML title tags and on-page article headlines. The title should be “extremely indicative of the story at hand.”




• Separate original content from press releases (and other forms of non-news content) – separating articles in the directory structure helps Google News identify what is specifically news content.




• Publish informative, unique content – Sites are encouraged to produce strong original content as opposed to repurposing or duplicating stories

Some other information:

• Story clusters (i.e. a group of articles on a particular topic) are ranked according to “aggregate editorial interest.” So news that generates a lot of coverage will be given priority on the home page and category pages.




• Using XML news sitemaps is encouraged.




• Articles are now re-crawled to look for updates, typically within the first 12 hours. This confirms a recent discussion in a Google help thread (See Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles for more information).




• To get your videos into Google News you need to create a YouTube channel. Other video hosters may be included in the future, but for now YouTube is the only way in. Creating textual descriptions and transcripts is helpful.




• PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News, used “delicately” since the linking structure of a brand new article is going to be different from an article published years or months ago.

Here’s the complete Google News video:

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

On Friday Yahoo announced new additions to its SearchMonkey enhanced results, including options for news content.

SearchMonkey allows sites to use structured data to include additional information in their Yahoo search results such as addresses and phone numbers, review scores, pricing, etc.

For news sites, the publication date and a photo can be added to Yahoo search results for articles and opinion pieces, as shown in this example:

To take advantage of the enhanced news results, publishers can either use RDFa markup to embed the news data in their content, or use a NewsML feed to send the data privately to Yahoo. For technical details and instructions see the SearchMonkey News help page.

Once the markup is added the enhanced results should appear in Yahoo after the content has been crawled again. Embedding photos will be a good way for publishers to draw attention on the SERPs and increase clickthrough rates.

Not sure what SearchMonkey is? There’s some background information on the Yahoo Developer Network: SearchMonkey.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly
2. Rich Snippets: Increase Google Visibility for Reviews through Microformats
3. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines

July and August are a time when many content sites see a seasonal dip in all forms of traffic, including search engine referrals. Major stories that emerge (such as Michael Jackson or the health care debate) can bring large spikes in search traffic, but it’s common to see the numbers drop after May and not pick up again until September.

This is to be expected, and it’s one reason why year-over-year metrics have more value than month-to-month. The best measuring stick for August 2009 is August 2008, not the months that preceded it.

That said, there are plenty of things that news and content sites can do to improve their search engine referral (and overall) traffic during slow periods.

Here are five ways to mitigate seasonal search traffic declines:

1. Go after hot topics – Regularly monitor the top searches, topics and trend data published by search engines and social media sites for content ideas and opportunities. It’s not easy to chase search trends as there is a danger of always ending up one step behind. But if a particular topic seems sustainable you can gain a share of searches by creating strong, relevant content around it.




2. Bolster your best stuff – Dig into your analytics data and determine which sections and content types tend to perform best in summer. Then make sure you’re doing everything you can to support them on-site, in particular leveraging your internal link structure.




3. Get creative – Develop special features and packages that are likely to garner attention and links. There are lots of good approaches to “link bait” – find the topics and hooks that work for you. Special promotions like contests and giveaways can also be effective.




4. Reach out – You’ve been meaning to get more involved in brand and content awareness building activities such as social media marketing; now’s the time. Research the opportunities and come up with an effective social media strategy. By engaging (appropriately) with your target audiences you’ll indirectly facilitate an increase in traffic and links.




5. Build for the future – Slow seasons are a good time to make improvements to site architecture, update page templates and engage in various forms of testing on the site. Improve the site as a whole so when things pick up again you’ll be stronger than ever.

Related posts:

1. Hitwise Reports News and Media’s Share of Search-Referred Traffic Declining
2. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%
3. Help Haiti: News Sites Promote Ways to Donate

This week Search Engine Roundtable highlighted a Google News Help thread in which Google confirmed that it is now able to recrawl articles that have been updated within a “short period of time” of the original publishing.

Google employee “Inbal” later provided a more specific time window, indicating “the rate at which we recrawl may vary, but we try to go back and check for changes in article content within the first 12 hours after we first find it.”

This is encouraging news for publishers as previously once an article was indexed in Google News no changes or updates to it would be registered. So if an article was accidently published with a typo in the headline and then corrected, Google News would still display the erroneous headline.

More importantly, in breaking news situations articles are often initially published with limited information and then later updated with further details. Previously the only way to get the more comprehensive version into Google News was to republish the article on a new URL, which was not the best experience for either on-site or search engine users.

I went looking for an updated story in Google News today and was able to find an example. When I first checked this updated CNN.com article on the Lockerbie bomber:

Google News was still displaying the original first sentence (which had been changed in the update):

However within a short period of time the Google News snippet had been updated to include the new first sentence:

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
3. Google News Optimization Tips

Recently I wrote about the importance of including meaningful content in videos embedded in press releases. Today I came across a great example of how to incorporate video and other multimedia content into a news article.

This ESPN.com article on Michael Vick signing with the Philadelphia Eagles features a video player right below the headline with links to four different videos, each of which adds more substance to the article:

Later in the article there’s also a link to an ESPN Radio podcast featuring an interview with one of Vick’s former teammates:

And ESPN supplements the article with a special “Vick Signs With Eagles” sidebar that includes links to more news, blog and video coverage:

The end result is an informative, engaging user experience on a page with strong topical relevancy. That relevancy combined with the fact that the article is likely to be shared and linked to frequently strengthens its ability to compete for search engine visibility.

So far Google seems to agree. As of today the article is #1 (after some embedded news results) for the query “michael vick eagles”:

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
3. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match

Yesterday I received a copy of Rafe Needleman’s Pro PR Tips in the mail from ITDatabase. I’d seen some of the tips previously via Twitter and on the Pro PR Tips blog, but the book presents them in a nice, clean format that makes for a good read. I ended up going through all 100 tips in one sitting.

In the book the PR tips are broken down into various categories like PR basics, pitch tips, demo tips, etc. Some are practical and useful, others are pretty entertaining.

Among the ones I liked, here are a dozen that stood out:

Tip #7: Don’t thank me
When you thank me for a good review, I get suspicious. I think I must have missed something and let you off too easy.

Tip #14: Dirty Secret
Every now and then, press releases work. (Yes, writers hate blind press releases. Except when they are good).

Tip #16: Not BFFs
Dear PR Person,
We didn’t “work together” back in 1999. You pitched me. It was beautiful, but don’t make it more than it is.

Tip #21: Guest List
People I want to hear a pitch from, in descending order: CEO, CTO, VP Product Development, Janitor, Brand Marketing Manager.

Tip #25: Black list
Yes, I really do have a list of PR people I won’t talk to. It’s shorter than you probably think, though. Everyone deserves a second chance.

Tip #27: You do your job, I’ll do mine
Will we take a submitted article? I just threw up a bit in my mouth.

Tip #37 Uh-huh
If we’re doing a demo via phone and WebEx, at least 25% of the time that you’re talking, I’m reading my email.

Tip #42: Flair
A sure way to get your email noticed: Use colored backgrounds, fancy fonts, and complex templates. Journalists love that.

Tip #44: How not to pitch
“As seen on TechCrunch” is a bad way to start a pitch to me.

Tip #49: Where’s the fire?
The flag on your email says, “Urgent.” My brain says, “Meh.”

Tip #73: Decoder ring
You say: “Google’s entry into this space validates our market.” You mean: “We’re screwed.”

Tip #74: Restroom pitch
Yes, I would like to hear your pitch, but not until you zip up, wash your hands, and we leave the bathroom.

What are some of your favorites? By the way, ITDatabase is giving away free copies of the book to tech PR professionals; you can fill out a form on their blog.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter
3. Paywalls, Media Coverage and User Access: What’s a PR Pro to Do?

This week’s Sysomos study of the 5% most active users on Twitter includes a list of the top 25 users (with more than 50,000 followers) ranked by average tweets per day.

@foxnews tops the list averaging 135.85 tweets per day. @nytimes and @time also made the top 25, averaging 39.25 and 29.22 tweets respectively.

Is 135.85 tweets a day too much? It certainly seems excessive, but the 99,703 followers of @foxnews don’t seem to think so.

While I wouldn’t go to that extreme, it does emphasize the point that just like everyone else, news organizations can use Twitter however they see fit, and Twitter users can choose to follow or not follow them accordingly.

With this in mind, it is beneficial for news and content sites to take a diversified approach to Twitter, offering a range options for users to subscribe to. While the variations are limitless, the main opportunities include:

• Content Broadcasting – this is essentially RSS feeds on Twitter, used for simply pushing out links to new content. A main profile can be set up as well as separate profiles for site sections or specific topics. While the opportunity for engagement is limited, these types of accounts do tend to attract large numbers of followers and the links do get retweeted. So there’s no reason not to set up them up as a foundation building step.
• Brand Ambassador / Personality – a person or persona that officially represents the company on Twitter. It’s a more humanized approach that offers much greater opportunity for direct engagement with users. Some sites give this responsibility to a specific individual, others create a persona – @ColonelTribune is good example of this approach. The advantage of using a persona is that multiple people can share the work, and it’s easier to make a transition when the people behind it move on.
• Individual Journalists and Bloggers – participation by the editorial staff offers a great way to engage users on a more specific, personal level. Letting readers “behind the curtain” by sharing insights into the story development process, soliciting input and providing previews or exclusive tidbits (such as additional information that didn’t make it into a particular article) is a great way to build relationships and gain a loyal following. There should certainly be policies in place to prevent missteps in this area, but there is a big upside to encouraging editorial participation.

Of course the PR and marketing staff should also play an active role in your Twitter strategy, and company employees of all kinds should be considered in the overall social media plan. But for the purposes of sharing news content and interacting with users, these three approaches offer a great start for news organizations looking to get more traction from Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter
2. News Sites on Twitter: Who is Making the Most Impact?
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

Executive quotes in press releases are notorious for lacking any kind of substantial information. It’s the most common place to find fluff in a release, and they tend to be largely ignored.

Yesterday’s Microsoft – Yahoo press release featured video quotes from both Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, partially shown in this screenshot:

On the surface this seems pretty cool, and the press release even includes links to additional video clips for broadcast media:

But unfortunately these videos offer little more than a multimedia version of the typical executive fluff.

I commend Microsoft’s PR firm Waggener Edstrom for incorporating video content into the release, but it would have been great if the videos had been more substantial.

They can probably counter that both videos have had a significant number of views. But that’s all the more reason to make the most of the opportunity.

Do the videos add value or are they more executive fluff? Watch and judge for yourself.

Related posts:

1. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
2. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
3. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases

Yesterday Steve Rubel pointed out how the article highlights on sites like CNN.com and iMedia Connection are a good time saver for him.

CNN.com places a “Story Highlights” section with bullet points to the right of the headline, for example:

While a great feature for users, article highlights are also an effective SEO technique. The placement of keyword-focused, descriptive bullet points near the top of the page gives the engines useful information for determining the topical relevancy of the page.

A similar method is the more traditional “dek” below the headline, as seen in this example from BusinessWeek.com:

The use of article highlights or summaries is particularly helpful in instances where the on-page headline does not provide a clear, literal description of the content. While editors and producers should always be encouraged to incorporate literal text in their headlines, in reality this won’t always happen. So the highlights help to offset pages with more witty, print-style headlines.

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Great Example of a Multimedia News Article from ESPN.com
3. Twitter Suggested Users – Today’s Studio 54 Velvet Rope

It’s no secret that mainstream news sites are experiencing increased exposure on social news sites like Digg. Back in March Soshable noted that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.

Major news sites have seen strong increases in social media referral traffic over the past couple years, and Digg continues to be among the top referrers. But I was curious what kind of push back some of these sites might be experiencing from Digg users.

Using di66.net’s list of the top sources in Digg in the past 30 days, I pulled out 22 general news sites from the top 100 or so sources. Then using Digg’s advanced search I checked how many submissions from each domain had been buried.

CNN wins the prize for the most buried news site, with Yahoo News not too far behind:

Of course some news sites have a lot more content submitted to Digg than others, so it stands to reason that sites with more submissions will have more buries. So I also looked up the total submissions for each, and ranked the news sites by percentage of submissions that were buried.

CNN and Yahoo News are still the most buried news sites by percentage of content, but ABC News and MSNBC are pretty close:

Going back to the di66.net list of top Digg sources, out of the 22 news sites I pulled out, CNN was the 10th most popular source and Yahoo News was 9th. So their bury rankings are probably higher than they should be. By contrast Telegraph.co.uk was the 2nd most popular source but it ranks 19th in bury percentage in this group. BBC News was the most popular source out of the 22; its bury percentage is right in the middle at #11.

It should also be noted that what’s most important is social news success is quality of content and user appeal, not to mention who the submitter is. But it does appear that some major news sites are more likely to be buried than others.

Related posts:

1. My Top 10 Posts of 2009 on News Media, SEO and Social Media
2. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends
3. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends

There’s been a lot of coverage this week of Condé Nast bringing in McKinsey & Company to help them restructure the business, which hopefully will work out for them. Props to Silicon Alley Insider for including a photo of the consultants from Office Space in their write-up.

Tuesday’s announcement that GQ and DETAILS will get their own sites in October is definitely encouraging, and is a big improvement over hosting both on men.style.com. It’s not just that users expect a branded experience on a dedicated domain. It’s that there are so many SEO and audience development initiatives, including social media marketing, that simply work better when a site exists on its own unique, branded domain.

Best of luck to both GQ.com and DETAILS.com.

A side note to Condé Nast Digital’s PR team: I’d put your online press releases on regular Web pages. People will be less likely to link to the .pdf versions in your online press room. I did it above but I didn’t really want to.

Related posts:

1. So Far so Good for Seattlepi.com
2. 10 Quotes on the Apple iPad and the Business of News
3. Hearst Skiff Reader Looks Cool

One of the ways that higher profile Twitter accounts have built up large numbers of followers is by being included among the “suggested users” shown to users signing up for a new account:

Each new user has a group of 20 Twitter profiles suggested to them; one click of a button and they’re automatically following each one. It’s not the same 20 every time – Twitter randomly shuffles in 20 profiles from the group it has deemed worthy of recommendation.

Since new users aren’t always sure exactly how to use Twitter, this starter group can be quite helpful, so the profiles that are featured do end up getting a steady stream of new followers.

So the question is, how do you get on the list? I hear this question asked a lot now, with the most common answer being you have to know someone at Twitter. I also hear that Twitter is bombarded with requests to get on the list, so they don’t like people asking anymore.

All of this conjures up images of the infamous velvet rope at Studio 54. How cool do you have to be to get recommended by Twitter?

Photograph by Peter L. Gould, nymag.com

It’s also important to emphasize that number of followers is a very weak metric for measuring success on Twitter. It’s understandable that companies focus on this, since it’s an easy figure to monitor. However things like level of engagement, referral traffic and links to content are much more worthwhile barometers of success.

UPDATE:
After posting this today I came across a post from Twitter explaining their selection criteria: Suggested Users

I also noticed that just last night on Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan published an extensive look at who’s on the list: Who Does Twitter Love? Breaking Down The Twitter Suggested Users List

Related posts:

1. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
2. Diversified Twitter Strategies for News Sites
3. Fortune 100 Need to Get More Creative with Twitter

In my post on syndication best practices I noted that one way to reduce the likelihood that partners will outrank you for own content is to require a link back to your original on every syndicated article, for example:

This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link to original article, ideally with the headline as the link text]

The use of attribution links is recommended by the engines themselves, although they caution publishers that the links are used as a signal but do not guarantee that the original versions will be given prominence for related search queries.

In looking at syndicated content on Yahoo News, most of the syndicated articles do not include attribution links (each news source likely has to request or provide them), but among those that do exist there is a problem. The Yahoo attribution links do not point directly to the original article URLs. Instead they point to an internal Yahoo News URL which then has a temporary 302 redirect to the original article.

For example at the bottom of this syndicated LiveScience.com article you’ll see the attribution link:

However the link points to:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/livescience/sc_livescience/storytext/amazonriverdatedto11millionyearsold/32639997/SIG=121l8b9em/*http://www.livescience.com/environment/090708-amazon-river.html

That URL then has a 302 redirect to the original LiveScience.com URL. Yahoo is probably using the temporary redirects for tracking, but this practice is interfering with the SEO value of the links. So if you are negotiating a syndication agreement with Yahoo News, be sure to request attribution links directly to your original URLs, or at least require Yahoo to use permanent 301 redirects.

Going back to the LiveScience.com example, a search today in Google using the exact headline “Amazon River Dated to 11 Million Years Old” brings up these top results:

Another site becomes the de facto #1 through an embedded Google News result, followed by the Yahoo News syndicated article and then the LiveScience.com original.

The good news for LiveScience.com is that Google is showing both results instead of filtering out their page in favor of the Yahoo version on a stronger domain. However the split result is certainly costing them clicks.

Related posts:

1. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?

Syndicating content is an important business development initiative for publishers; it generates revenue, increases exposure, drives traffic and helps facilitate inbound links. However from an SEO perspective there is a downside, as syndication creates duplicate content issues. Search engines don’t want to show users multiple versions of the same content, so when an article has been syndicated it’s likely that one version will be given prominence – and that may or may not be the original.

One of the most common concerns I hear from publishers is the fact that syndication partners are outranking them for their own content. This is a fairly common occurrence, especially when the partners are strong, authoritative domains and their syndicated versions attract a lot of links. To some extent publishers have to accept that they can’t have their cake and eat it too – if you’re going to license your content to other sites, there is always a chance that those sites might outrank you for that content.

The only way to completely eliminate the issue is to require syndication partners to block their versions from the engines. Partners typically refuse such an arrangement, but it’s becoming a more common request in contract negotiations.

Beyond that, there are steps that publishers can take to help reduce the risk of being outranked for their own content:

1. Require partners to link back to the original on every syndicated article, for example: This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link, ideally with the headline as the link text]. It is important for the link to point directly to the original URL
2. Publish the content on your site and allow it to be indexed prior to releasing it to partners
3. Limit the amount of the text that is syndicated – instead of giving partners the full content, allow them to publish a reduced snippet of the article
4. Require partners to use generic title tags (e.g. their site name) on their versions

In its tips for dealing with duplicate content, Google specifically refers to the attribution link but with a caveat:

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

You can see that the attribution link is recommended, but it is not guaranteed to resolve the issue. So it is important to build in as many protective steps as possible into any syndication contract.

UPDATE:
In December 2009 Google began supporting the rel=”canonical” tag across different domains, giving publishers another tool to use in mitigating duplicate content issues caused by syndication. Check out Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals? for more information.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

I couldn’t resist sharing this great video from The Daily Show of Jason Jones visiting The New York Times. The back-and-forth with Assistant Managing Editor Rick Burke about “aged news” is my favorite part.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall
2. New York Times Plans to Implement Permanent Redirects on IHT.com URLs
3. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match

Among news sites “breaking news” is a sought-after keyword phrase; I see it prominently placed in home page title tags all the time:

And it’s not just general news sites. “Breaking news” is featured in the title tags of sites covering sports, entertainment and a wide range of topics.

Seeing this term targeted so often got me wondering, does anyone actually search for “breaking news”?

If I’m looking for breaking news on a particular topic I’ll search with queries using that topic, for example “Air France crash” or “Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court.”

And if I want to get an overview of the current news of the day I’ll go to Google News or Yahoo! News, or direct navigate to a major news site. But I don’t think I’d ever simply type “breaking news” into a search engine.

However, according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, some people do:

Currently CNN.com and MSNBC.com are the top two listings in Google for “breaking news.” It would be interesting to learn how much search engine traffic they are getting from that specific term.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags
3. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites

Last week at the Google I/O developer conference it was announced that Google is now able to execute JavaScript onClick events, which basically means that links in JavaScript that were previously inaccessible can now be read and pass PageRank. Vanessa Fox did an extensive write-up for Search Engine Land which covers the changes in detail.

While it’s good news that Google is continuing to improve its ability to deal with JavaScript, this change also impacts the way that many publishers display sponsored links on their sites. In addition to the nofollow attribute, using JavaScript has long been a popular way to ensure that sponsored links adhere to Google’s guidelines by making them inaccessible to crawlers, as seen in this example:

To be clear, selling sponsored links is a perfectly legitimate business practice and an important part of most publishers’ advertising sales strategy. What Google doesn’t want is for those links to have SEO value, which is why their guidelines dictate that paid links are coded in a way that they will not pass PageRank.

Previously, sponsored links in JavaScript such as those in the example above could not be read by crawlers and thus were in compliance with Google’s guidelines. Now those same links can potentially be read and pass PageRank, which means they are technically violating the rules.

Is Google going to run out and start penalizing sites with sponsored links in JavaScript? I can’t imagine they would, especially when virtually no one outside of the developer and SEO communities is even aware that this change has taken place.

That said, there are some simple ways to ensure that JavaScript links do adhere to Google’s guidelines, so it’s best to address this now and ensure that your site is in compliance. It can be done by redirecting the sponsored links to an intermediate page that is blocked via robots.txt, or by applying the nofollow attribute to the JavaScript links (see the Vanessa Fox writeup as well as the second half of this article in SEL for more detail).

Related posts:

1. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

Inside Facebook published some new statistics this week on Facebook’s US audience growth over the last 60 days. Interestingly, users over 55 decreased by 650,000 during this period:

This is a big change from the previous 60 days which had shown considerable growth in that demographic.

I can share anecdotally that my own mother, who is in her early sixties, joined Facebook a few months ago along with a number of her peers. From what I’ve observed she doesn’t necessarily know she’s doing half the time (sorry Mom!), but her and her friends seem to be sticking with it. Email is by far still the preferred tool for online communication and content sharing in her age group, but social media is beginning to make inroads.

Let’s see what they make of Google Wave.

Related posts:

1. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction
2. Alicia Keys Facebook Page: I’d Sign Up if She Asked Me All Cool
3. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book

The discussion about HubSpot’s post on the syndication of social media press releases vs. traditional press releases called my attention again to PitchEngine, a platform for creating and sharing social media releases (SMRs).

PitchEngine is a good tool that provides a useful service, and it’s reasonably priced (in fact it’s free if you only keep your SMRs on their site for 30 days). But what caught my eye were the options for archiving releases and creating a custom newsroom.

With archiving you can use RSS to feed links to your PitchEngine SMRs into your own newsroom, as GerberGear does:

Or you can host a custom newsroom entirely on PitchEngine.com, as Brunton does:

Both options create opportunities for additional exposure on PitchEngine, and they are useful for sites that lack the resources to maintain their own pressrooms. However there is also a downside. Whether it is individual releases or your entire newsroom, hosting on PitchEngine means that the content is not on your site, so your domain loses the SEO benefit of the links pointing to that content. Essentially you are helping to build up PitchEngine.com’s link equity as opposed to your own.

Some may consider this issue a worthwhile trade-off, if they feel they will gain greater overall exposure through a third-party site than they would by hosting their releases on their own site. However long-term it is much better to strengthen your own domain as opposed to someone else’s.

I want to stress that this issue is not unique to PitchEngine, it applies to many third-party release hosting services. For example on The New York Times Company’s corporate site, press releases are hosted by Thomson Reuters on http://phx.corporate-ir.net URLs:

Last year Todd Defren wrote that social media releases are best kept in your company newsroom for a variety of reasons. Specific to the SEO implications, I believe that is still the best approach. Keeping the content on your own domain allows you to benefit from internal and inbound links to both the newsroom itself and individual releases.

Related posts:

1. A Look at Muck Rack’s Twitter Press Release Service, 51 Releases Later
2. The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases
3. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content

In looking over a post on the Google News blog from a few months ago on ways to help Google News better crawl your site, this tip in particular caught my eye:

* Article Titles in Google News

In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don’t hyperlink the headline on the article page – after all, your reader is already there! And it’s always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

(The headline/title tag tip is also included in their Help for Publishers guidelines on article titles).

That’s interesting because a basic best practice in editorial SEO is to customize on-page headlines in the title tag (when necessary) to make them more literal and keyword focused. Of course headlines should be keyword focused as well, but for a variety of reasons that doesn’t always happen, so customizing the title tag is a good way to offset the issue when needed.

I scanned through some of the Top Stories on Google News today – the majority of articles I checked did have the exact headline in the title tag, but in some cases it had been customized, as in this NYTimes.com example:

In cases where the headline and title tag didn’t match it was the headline that was used by Google News. So it appears this tip is intended to make it easier for Google News to understand the correct title for articles, as opposed to being a “must do” to prevent an issue.

Using the exact article title in the anchor text of links doesn’t always happen either. Due to space limitations and to try to grab on-site users’ attention, news sites sometimes use shorter and/or wittier “tout links” on home pages, section fronts and in popular content modules. But linking with the article headline is something that publishers should do when possible.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
3. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags

Hearst released some numbers this week on how things are going with seattlepi.com two months after moving to an online-only model.

From their statement:

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Keeping pace after an 80% reduction in staff is a good sign, although we don’t how well they monetized the April 2009 traffic compared to April 2008. And considering the print Post-Intelligencer no longer exists you would think the increase in unique visitors might have been higher, since the website is now the only way to get their content.

On All Things Digital, Peter Kafka is still skeptical about the viability of their model and whether they can make the numbers work in a local market. But you’d think these figures mean they’ve at least got a chance. So for now we can say so far, so good. Let’s hope things work out for them.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
2. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall
3. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much

According to data released by Hitwise a few days ago, News & Media is one of the few categories showing a YoY decline in share of search-referred traffic:

Fortunately the majority of sites we work with in this category are bucking the trend, as most are seeing strong improvements in YoY search engine referral traffic thus far this year.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of major publishers still get a huge portion of their traffic from direct navigation. So total natural search engine referral traffic is a more important measuring stick than what percentage of site traffic comes from natural search.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Visitors More Loyal But Still a Very Small Percentage of Site Traffic
2. 5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic
3. Survey: Twitter Less than 1% of Traffic to Newspapers and Magazines; Facebook 1%

Today Newsweek offered live streaming of Jon Meacham’s interview with Treasury Security Tim Geithner on its Facebook page. This is a good example of how publishers are attempting to add more value to their official pages on social media sites, which is certainly needed as many of the pages are still fairly one-dimensional.

However in going to the interview page on Facebook after the fact I didn’t see any links to the recorded video of the interview that has been published on Newsweek.com. (The video is not currently available on Facebook). The large graphic links to the home page, and the “More from Newsweek” links point to other content:

Hosting the video on Newsweek.com is a good idea because long-term that’s where you want users and search engines to access it. But it’s also really important to direct Facebook users who may come looking for it to the right place. I’d imagine the “Geithner Interview” tab won’t stay on their Facebook page for too long, so it’ll be important to include a link on the main tab for a while as well.

UPDATE:
Last night Newsweek added a wrap-up article to the page where the video was posted on their site, and linked to it in a wall post on their Facebook page:

The wall post will quickly move down the list, but in the short-term it will help people who come looking for the video.

2ND UPDATE:
Some time later on the Facebook interview page, the “Thanks for Watching the Live Q&A!” graphic (shown above) was changed to “Miss the Live Interview? Watch the Video on the New Newsweek.com”, which links to the video on the Newsweek site. Glad to see this was addressed, and hopefully they didn’t lose too many visitors during the critical early period when people were actively seeking out the interview.

Related posts:

1. Newsweek on Tumblr: Good Effort, Needs More Engagement
2. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much
3. Newsweek Cares about (some of) your Tweets. Fox News Not so Much.

For anyone who’s been following the story of the shutting down of IHT.com and the migration of International Herald Tribune content to the New York Times Global Edition, there has certainly been criticism over the lack of permanent redirects from the old IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com.

It’s understandable that people were puzzled by this move, and when a major site makes a critical mistake it doesn’t take long for it to be put in the spotlight. But there is usually more to the story, and for a number of reasons companies aren’t always at liberty to share all the information.

Fortunately this week The New York Times Chief Search Strategist Marshall Simmonds (disclosure: I work for Marshall) was able to make a statement to Search Engine Land to shed some light on the matter.

Here’s the text of his statement:

I wanted to bring you up to speed on the developments around the shuttering of the International Herald Tribune site, IHT.com, and archive transfer to the New York Times, nytimes.com.

The SEO team has been involved in the project since the beginning and recommended the implementation of one-to-one 301 redirects of all IHT content to its new location at the NYT.com. This, of course, conforms to best SEO practices when moving any content and was accepted and built into the timeline. We’ve moved plenty of content at the NYTimes before without incident.

As the project progressed, and we turned our focus to other matters, the move ran into several complications and a fast approaching deadline. Rather than consult with us, the IHT project team made a last minute decision and used an interim 302 solution without understanding the SEO implications.

After launch the impact was obvious, and we moved in to correct and educate. The NYT development team’s top priority right now is one-to-one 301 mapping of all IHT content to its new location. This, unfortunately, was a perfect storm of quick fixes and lack of attention to protocol and will be fully corrected in the coming weeks.

So the bottom line is, the NYT SEO team strongly advocated the use of permanent 301 redirects from all IHT.com URLs to the corresponding new URLs on NYTimes.com, and they are continuing to do what they can internally to get this implemented as soon as possible.

This situation also illustrates a key component of managing enterprise SEO initiatives. In large organizations with multiple properties spread out in various locations, there are a lot of stakeholders involved in every project, and a lot of factors involved in each decision. What’s best for SEO isn’t always what gets done, despite your best efforts and the good intentions of all the parties involved. Thus the process of making the case for SEO internally and educating on SEO best practices and the SEO implications of all site projects and processes never ends.

Related posts:

1. Foursquare and The New York Times Archive Would Be a Great Match
2. Top 10 Reasons The New York Times is Really Putting up a Paywall
3. The Daily Show Visits The New York Times