A social media wish list for news publishers

October 11, 2011 by

You’ve started a Facebook page for your publication. You tweet several times a day. You’re even hawking stories over on Google Plus now.

But that’s not enough for you.

If you’re like me, the tools and metrics you use to connect with your audience through the major social media services aren’t enough. We’re greedy consumers, we news publishers, and we want more.

In that spirit, here is my wish list of tools I’d like to see the major social media services provide to news publishers.

On Facebook

I’d love to be able to see, somewhere, a list of everyone who has liked a URL from my site that has been posted to Facebook. Or even just a reliable number of how many people might be on that list. As it stands now, I see different numbers on the “Like” buttons we post on the articles themselves, and on the links posted to my sites’ Facebook pages. And I have no way to track likes of that URL if it is independently posted to FB by people with which I’m not friends or to whom I don’t subscribe. C’mon, Facebook. Let publishers see exactly how many people like their stuff.

I’d also like to know what people are saying around Facebook about the pieces published to my websites. I’ve started using Facebook’s comments application on one of my websites, and like how it cross-posts comments made on my site to commentors’ Facebook walls (increasing the visibility of the post). But how cool would it be if I had the option to allow that app to also display all comments about that URL posted anywhere on Facebook? Or, if I didn’t want to use Facebook’s comments app, if I had the option on my site’s Facebook page to pull in all FB comments about that piece? For pieces that generate hundreds of comments, give the page administrator the option to select the top comments for display on the page. Either way, this tool would encourage greater interaction between publishers and Facebook, and empower publishers to better connect with the audience that’s talking about their work.

Self-appointed privacy police officers, cover your ears now. As a publisher, I would love for Facebook to give me the ability to target ads to people who have liked an article on my domain, but who are not yet fans of my Facebook page. I don’t need to know their names. Just give me that as an option in Facebook’s ad placement tool. People who already have shown that they like my site’s stuff are my strongest leads as I try to solicit more fans on Facebook. Give me, and other publishers, the ability to reach them specifically, instead of hoping that I catch them in one of the other the targeting criteria that Facebook now supports. (If I had this ability, I would be spending additional promotional money with Facebook today.)

On Google

Obviously, I’m awaiting the introduction of publication accounts on Google Plus, which are said to be in testing now. My site’s brand name is more important to my website marketing effort than my personal name is, and I’d like to have a Google Plus account that speaks as the site, rather than as me. Heaven knows most my readers care more about connecting with the site than with me personally, anyway.

But how will that publication account be managed? This gets me into my fondest wish for Google: That it blow up the Google Accounts system and construct something much more like Facebook’s account architecture. Seriously, data management in Google Accounts is a mess, thanks to Google trying to hack together registration accounts from the umpteen different services it has acquired or created over the years.

I’ve written before of the mess that ensued after Google assigned me a YouTube account from another user who was squatting on my trademark. Instead of allowing the other user to close his YouTube account, then transfer the now-available account name to me, Google kept the old user’s demographic information attached to the YouTube account when transferring it under the control of my Google Account. During the switch, Google allowed my Google Account to inherit the demographic information of the other user’s YouTube account, leaving Google to believe that I am now 16. Whoops.

So now I have two Google Accounts, one for that YouTube account, Gmail and AdSense, and another that I use for Google Plus and my original YouTube account. That’s silly. I’d much rather Google recreate its Account system so individual service accounts never overwrite demographic information on the “parent” Google Account. Then, it should allow one Google Account to administer multiple accounts on the same service. Facebook doesn’t limit my Facebook account to administering a single Facebook page. My Google Account shouldn’t be limited to administering a single YouTube account, either.

Publishers often deal with multiple brands, and assign multiple employees or contractors to manage them. I’d like to assign some freelance video editors to help maintain my YouTube channel. But I don’t want to give them a log-in that also accesses my Gmail and AdSense account. Nor do I want to have to create yet another Google Account that I would have to change the password for every time an editor stopped working with me. On a Facebook page, all I’d have to do is revoke the admin access for that editor. I’d like to see the same functionality on Google.

On Twitter

One of Twitter’s strength is its simplicity. So I’m willing to keep my wish list from that service simple, too.

Fix the search function.

If someone types a brand name in the search box, lead the search results with account names which match that brand, rather than a jumble of individual tweets. It’s frustrating to have to go to Google to find Twitter accounts, but that’s a better alternative now than using Twitter’s own search box. Obviously, that move would make it easier for potential followers to find my publication’s feed within Twitter. (Some apps do this better than the Twitter site itself.)

Beyond that, I’d like to see a few changes that would help improve Twitter as a reporting resource. Give me the ability to restrict my searches to my own timeline, my own tweets or the tweets of another individual Twitter user. (Again, without having to turn to third-party tools.) Finally, I’d love a private bookmark feature, so I wouldn’t have to “favorite” a post to retain it for future reference. Many reporters I know use the favorite for this purpose, but making a post as a “favorite” ought to mean just that. And I particularly like the idea of my bookmarks being public, either, as favorites are.

That’s my list. What’s yours?

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Two new features from Google, neither of which are named 'Plus'

July 6, 2011 by

The big news from Google over the past week or so has been the launch of Google Plus… which I won’t be writing about today, for reasons I’ll mention at the end of this post. But I wanted to bring your attention to two other Google initiatives of interest to news publishers, which deserve not to be lost in the hype over Google Plus.

First, Google’s launched a new program to identify authors and attribute their webpages to them. The program uses authors’ personal Google Profile pages as the focal point for listing and linking all their current work around the Web.

The program provides some additional visibility to participating authors’ work in exchange for their linking more visibly to their Google Profile pages. (Here’s mine, so you can see how this works from that end.)

It’s a relatively easy four-step process to participate. But you’ll need access to the content management system your publication runs.

First, you’ll need to add a rel=”author” attribute to the anchor tags around the bylines of your articles. That anchor tag should hyperlink your author profile page on the same Web domain.

Second, that author profile page will need to include a link back to your Google Profile. And the anchor tag linking the Google Profile should include a rel=”me” attribute.

Third, in the links section of your Google Profile, you should include a link back to the author profile page on your website, checking the box that “this page is specifically about me.”

Fourth, make sure that the “+1” tab on your Google Profile is set to public. If you want to make sure you did everything correctly, you can ask for Google to review your work by filling out this form.

What happens then?

Google will begin adding all of your bylined articles to the +1 tab of your Google Profile. It will also automatically assign a “+1” from you to those articles, so you don’t have to manually hype your own stuff to the search engine anymore. Google also will add a thumbnail of your profile photo next to the links to each of your articles in its search engine results pages [SERPs].

What’s the value of those steps? I don’t know yet. It’s too early for me to tell if those steps are driving more traffic from Google to the articles that I write. Or if the additional +1s are moving my articles up in the SERPs, relative to where they would have been without them.

But, having been in situations where people have tried to copy my work online and pass it off as their own, I’m encouraged that this system exists by which Google is associating my work with my profile as soon as it’s published. It’s also just fun me to make code change on my website and see an immediate change in the Google SERPs. I don’t know if I’m moving up any spots, but I think having my picture there next to my work is kinda neat.

Google’s second initiative is over on YouTube.

For videos that appear on a website with an RSS feed, an “As seen on (Website name)” link now appears just below those videos on YouTube. That link sends readers to a new YouTube page for your website (not your website’s YouTube channel) that lists the most-recently linked YouTube videos on your site, and links back to the articles that embedded or referenced them. (Here’s an example from one of my websites.)

YouTube is building these pages from RSS feeds, looking for YouTube links and embed codes. Do note that YouTube appears to be referencing only the first link or embed code it finds in a post, ignoring additional videos in that post. And it ignores entirely posts without video links or embeds.

Again, I haven’t yet seen any increase in site or video traffic from this new feature. But I’m intrigued by the “Play All” option that appears on the top of YouTube’s generated pages for the videos on my sites.

The “Play All” option effectively creates a playlist of all those referenced videos, on the fly. With one click, I can watch videos from all of my recent blog posts, back to back, in a single stream.

That’s bringing us one step closer to the day when video-using websites adopt the functionality of a traditional television channel. While I enjoy the interactivity of online media, we won’t reach our largest possible audience until we offer an alternative for more passive consumers. We need to get to the moment when someone can switch on the television, click to an online channel, then watch video after video from that channel without having to navigate, much like I can sit in front of my TV and watch a traditional channel such as ABC or Comedy Central for as long as I want. When that happens, that’s the day that online blows up the television industry the way that it’s already blown up print media.

Finally, I wanted to mention why I’m not writing about Google Plus. It’s not that I haven’t gotten an invitation (and thank you to all who sent one). It’s that Google won’t let me use it. Whenever I go to plus.google.com, I get this message:

“This feature is not available for your account
You must be over a certain age to use this feature.”

Seeing as I’m 43, and that I find it hard to believe that Google developed a feature that’s only for use by Baby Boomers and older, I looked on my Google Dashboard to see just how old Google thinks I am.

Turns out, Google thinks I’m 16. The only place on the Google Dashboard that mentions age is under the YouTube settings, which lists my age as 16. Why? I don’t know, but I’m going to take a guess. I acquired a YouTube account name from another user, who was 16, so it appears that when Google transferred that account to my profile, it didn’t reassign my age to the YouTube account, but assigned the old YouTube account owner’s age to my profile. That’s the only explanation I can devise.

That seems like a pretty questionable data-management practice to me. (What happens if a 25-year-old transfers a YouTube account to a 16-year-old? Will that minor now get access to age-restricted videos on YouTube, as well as to Google Plus?) And why would Google launch a social media effort that excludes teenagers anyway?

Rather than create another Google Account just to get access to Plus, I’ve asked Google’s engineers to take a look at my case and to see if Google can list my age correctly. I suppose I could just create another Google account, but I’m hoping Google can correct its error with my current account. (I don’t want to have to put my friends and colleagues on Google Plus through the hassle of including me in their circles via one account now if I’m going to change back to my correct account at some point in the future.)

So I hope all you old folks are enjoying your time with Google Plus before we “teen-agers” crash your party. ;^)

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The lessons of the past are the lessons for the future in search engine optimization for news websites

March 11, 2011 by

Now and then, I like to take a trip into the memory hole and remind folks what online publishing was like back in “ye olde times”… of the 1990s.

Since I’ve been writing in recent weeks about search engines and how the affect news websites, I thought it worthwhile to remind folks (or tell our younger readers) what life was like in the era B.G. (Before Google). Because where we’ve been often provides some pretty good clues about where we’ll be heading in the future.

Before Google, search engines determined which sites appeared at the top of their search results pages almost exclusively based on what appeared on those webpages themselves. This led to webmasters (a term that I just discovered my autocorrect no longer recognizes – sigh) to pack their HTML code with what they thought were the most popular keywords and phrases that would bring people to that page.

So readers would be scrolling along such pages, then come to a long blank section of whitespace, where the page’s author had typed those keywords, over and over again, but set them in the same font color as the page background so that they would be invisible to a human reader. The words, though, would trigger a favorable placement for those keywords from the search engines.

Google came to dominate the search engine business because it found a way to work around this garbage, and to reward Web pages that actual human beings endorsed, rather than ones whose publishers best played the SEO games of the day.

In the early iteration of Google’s algorithm, a Web page was assigned a score, called “PageRank,” in large part based upon the total number of links pointing to that particular page. The more that other webmasters had chosen to link to a particular page, the higher it placed in Google’s results pages.

You didn’t even need to use a keyword on the page itself. So long as enough other people were using that word in their link to the your page, your page would rank highly in the Google results pages for that term (a phenomenon that came to be known as “Google Bombing”).

To use a phrase from today’s publishing era, Google was using social media to determine the value of a page online.

You don’t need a computer algorithms to parse worthy on-page content from the worthless when millions of Internet readers around the world are doing that with their links, likes, tweets and bookmarks. Just as Google won the 2000s by quantifying the social value of that decade’s most popular way of sharing information – the hyperlink – the search engine that wins the 2010s will be the one that most effectively indexes the social value of all the ways people share webpages today, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter and beyond.

I’m already seeing publishers react to Google’s crackdown on content farms, as my wife and I have been inundated with e-mails from content farmers (heh) who are now begging for in-bound links in an attempt to salvage some Google value for their websites.

My advice to news publishers? As always, think about your community. As I wrote last month, communities drive traffic. As Google and search entrepreneurs look for better ways to index social media, keep your focus on providing news and information that appeals to your community. Then, keep looking for ways to inspire and enable your community to share links to your work with others.

Yes, that means pasting “Like” and “Tweet” buttons on your pages. (See, the bottom of this article for examples.) But you won’t fully engage your community if that’s all you do. Start there, then monitor how people are using those tools. Listen to comments and engage your community in conversation across whatever platforms they use, while repeating links to your site wherever relevant. Remember, the person you’re conversing with knows about the original piece, but the hundreds of other lurkers dropping into the conversation might not. Keep giving out those links.

Unless you’re starting your own search engine, who wins or fails in the search engine business shouldn’t matter to you. You can’t control their algorithms. So don’t waste your time and sanity trying. Stick to two basic techniques: plain English optimization and engaging your community. Do these well, and the search engine referrals will take care of themselves over the long run.

That was true in the 1990s, and the 2000s, and remains true today.

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