Social Media Archives - Page 4 of 4

Does Your Business Need A Social Media Czar?

August 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

I heard the term “Social Media Czar” during a conference call earlier this week, and it’s been rolling around in my head ever since. It sounds like one of those weird goverment jobs where your accountable to no one, and get gigantic powers and an unlimited budget. In the private sector, there’s no such thing as an unlimited budget, and rarely do you have unlimited power, but could there be such a thing as a “Social Media Czar” in a normal everyday corporation, and would it be worthwhile?

In the 21st century, your small business’s Social Media Czar can be the person who can wrangle 4 other people to keep an eye on your company’s online reputation. That way no one gets overwhelmed. If you work at a larger company, it’s probably going to be one person from the marketing department who will try not to be overwhelmed trying to watch the social media space as well as do their “real” job.

I saw a great tweet from Pistachio where she noticed that most of what you hear about Twitter is the same thing you heard at the beginning of popular adoption of the world wide web. Although she was only talking about Twitter, it really applies to almost everything in social media. How often do you hear someone say something along the lines of, “I’m not interested in what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch”. Well, here’s an idea, don’t follow Ashton Kutcher. The Facebook excuse is usually very similar.

The problem with that kind of think is that if you’re not in the space, you have no control over your brand. If I go eat at Quizno’s in Cary and ask for a lid for the cup for my 2 year old so he won’t spill his water, and they refuse because only cups that are paid for get lids, I’m going to take a photo and post that to my Twitter stream and Facebook page with my smart ass remark about how silly it is. I heard back from lots of other people who also shared their bad experiences at Quiznos. Lots and lots of people saw all the negative chatter about Quiznos, but there was no one from Quiznos there to step in and try to mitigate the damage.

The much repeated social media catch phrase is, “the conversation about you is going on in the social media space whether you’re participating or not”. If you were at a cocktail party and heard someone bad mouthing your company, would you just walk away or would you go over and try to explain your side?

If you’re a sole-proprietorship, you are your own Social Media Czar. If you run a small business, you may still be the SMC. If your business operates with more than about 20 employees, you’re crazy if you’re not actively monitoring you reputation online. If that’s all I could convince you to do, I’d be happy. In reality, you should be taking the next step, listening to your marketplace. If you want to surge ahead of your competitors, you could go all the way – appoint a Social Media Czar who can ignite your fans and grow your brand’s base.

Can You Build A Community Website Without Involving The Community?

August 20, 2009 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

I saw an interesting blog post in the NY Times today about how the Washington Post is planning on giving up on their attempt to cover Northern Virginia. The WaPo had spent too much time and money covering Loudoun County, Virginia:

We found that our experiment with LoudounExtra.com as a separate site was not a sustainable model

said Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for the Washington Post Company.

The Times article goes on to say, “Updating the large amount of special features and technologies” on the site, which was run by Post staff members, proved unsustainable, Ms. Coratti said.

Really Ms. Coratti, you can’t run a full-scale news operation like the WaPo at only Northern Virginia and pay everyone, shocking!

The Washington Post isn’t the only newspaper out there who is stuck in this mindset. I would even say that most old-line newspaper companies think the same way the WaPo does. It just isn’t in the DNA of a newspaper to trust the people they cover to add anything of value.

That’s not to say they don’t trust the wisdom of the crowds. Writers will often check stuff against Wikipedia, at least as a sanity check, sometimes as their only check. They trust the Wikipedia crowd, but not Loudoun County crowd.

Why didn’t the Post reach out to the Loudoun County community to help update the large amount of special features? Why not let the community decide what features get included by voting stuff on or off the front page in Digg style?

As far as the technologies involved, what special technologies did the LoudounExtra.com have that their main site didn’t? Were they not updating all of the company’s core technologies in one swoop?

The Times article has a very newpaperish paragraph about halfway down:

The challenge, though, is that hiring reporters to cover car thefts, school board meetings and new store openings is expensive. So is hiring salespeople to visit local businesses and sell ad space.

There’s that mindset again. Do you really have to hire a reporter to cover car thefts? Is there really nobody in the gigantic community of Loudon County who might be willing to do a bit of leg work every couple days to get some experience, or get their name in a byline, or maybe it was their car that was stolen.

The same with the school board meetings. I would bet that there are people who live in the district who are more informed and passionate about what’s happening at that school board meeting than some reporter who lives 45 minutes away. Why not let them cover it?

As far as ad space goes, why not open it up using something like Project Wonderful?

I think the final paragraph in the Times story almost nails it:

Making hyperlocal sites work will continue to be a challenge, Mr. Sterling said. “It may be the case that you need to do some mix of community-based citizen journalism or blogging and maybe have a couple dedicated folks in the market,” he said. With LoudounExtra.com, “it was probably the case that they were just really top-heavy and couldn’t get the ad support.”

Trying to build a community site without involving the community is crazy. The people of Loudoun County didn’t need that half-ass site that the Washington Post gave them, but the Post desperately needed the people of Loudoun County. The problem was, the Post didn’t respect them enough to involve them in their plans. Loudon County didn’t feel any type of connection to the site, and that’s where the web is headed. It’s all about connecting now. Newspapers haven’t had to connect to an audience in so long it’s like learning to walk again.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise us when we read that 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation.

Why Chris Brogan Is A Trust Agent

August 17, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I’m not sure when I first ran across Chris Brogan, but I do know that I now interact with him almost every day. Not in person, but that’s okay, because Chris is all about connecting with people from a distance. That’s the beauty of the Internet, you don’t need to be in the cubicle next to me in order to influence me.

Reading his blog and following him on Twitter had a profound impact on the way I view the web and my place within it. There’s not many people you can point at and say that.

There are only a handful of Twitterati in the same league as Chris, but that doesn’t keep him from being super connected to almost everyone when he’s online. Let me give two minor examples. One day when I was checking my twitter feed before heading out to lunch, I saw that he has sent out a message about being on vacation with his family in Maine and going for a dip in the lake. I made a silly tweet about the fact that the water must have been about 34 degrees, but a few minutes later, he responded letting me know it was just barely tolerable. I don’t imagine the same thing would have happened if I had sent something off to Oprah, I’m just saying.

Another nice touch came just a couple weeks ago. I saw someplace that Chris lives up north of Boston. That’s where I lived before moving down to North Carolina about 6 years ago. I was planning a trip to visit my in-laws up there, so I sent off a quick email asking him if he could recommend any good wi-fi coffee shop places around Georgetown. He took the time that night to send me back 4 places he recommended. Awesome.

When I saw that Chris and Julien Smith were writing a book on social media, I knew I’d buy it, because I’m already a fan.

My absolute favorite blog on the entire web is Lisa Barone’s at Outspoken Media, she had an awesome post about Chris and Julien’s presentation at last week’s Affiliate Summit get together which made me even more excited about their upcoming book.

Last night, I could finally order Trust Agents from Amazon.

When I read Chris’s post today asking for a little bit of love in return for all he’s put out, I knew legions would answer his call. When I first ordered the book I didn’t even look at it’s ranking on Amazon’s list. When I read the tipping point tweet from Chris this afternoon, it was already at #45 on the bestsellers list. It’s at #30 at 8pm and rising.

So if you haven’t read his blog, start reading it. If you use Twitter, connect to him on there. If you already do both of those, then do the right thing and open your wallet and help out someone who has helped you in the past, buy his book.

If you honest-to-God can’t afford to buy his book, email me and I’ll try to help you out as best I can.

I Love When Social Media Spills Over

July 26, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

I started attending a local SEO meetup in Raleigh last year. I love the feel of the group. Lots of talking, sharing and war stories mixed in with people who are just starting up their business online. Ashley Berman Hale is the organizer, and the meetup takes it personality from her easy going, “how may I help you” style.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give a talk on the social media space and how you can benefit from it. It was the first time Ashley wouldn’t be leading the meetup, and I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull off the same great feeling that Ashley always left us with. How would our group respond to such a different presenter?

I posted the meetup, and faxed over my request for the Cameron Village library meeting room.

Then, I received a fax back from the library that the meeting rooms were unavailable. Uh-oh. I sent out an email to the group explaining the situation and that I would find someplace else.

Then I received an email from Michael Hubbard at MediaTwo who offered up his conference room. That was great. I love when someone from the meetup community steps up like that.

When I arrived the night of the meetup, it was even better. They have a kick-ass office space right in downtown Raleigh. Cool old renovated building, fancy wired up conference room, gigantic video display and even a small kitchen.

I met Michael when I walked up into the office, he had just finished interviewing Beth Lavin who was attending the meetup that night! (Beth has recently moved back from NYC and is looking to do some interactive planning – if anyone reading this is hiring.)

I wasn’t worried about the actual talk. I am a big believer in social media and all of the good things that it can bring about. I spent a couple days pulling together a bunch of stuff and then throwing most of it away until I just had a small handout. I was surprised to see the number of attendees swell to 47 by 5pm that day since we usually get about 25 or so.

By 6:30 almost everyone had shown up, not 47, but probably 35. A bunch of people had brought food. Some people brought homemade stuff, some brought traditional snack foods. Lots of repeat visitors but also a nice new influx of people who were first timers.

I babble on for an hour or so, with lots of side roads where people throw out questions or their own experiences. That’s the part that I love about the meetup, it never feels like a lecture to me, but more like a group discussion.

We wrap up most of the official talking about 8:30pm.

Then the spill over starts, and it was even more awesome than usual. I had a chance to talk with Morgan Siem, who is head tweeter for Raleigh’s Metro Mag, and is newly addicted to Twitter, Richard Horvath from Thee Design, one of Raleigh’s best web design firms, Audra and Matt Murray of AAYP (which I didn’t even know existed, but love the idea of) and the most awesome teriyaki chicken and beef I’ve ever eaten, brought in by Truly Hawaiian.

There was a ton of other people there who I haven’t mentioned, and they we just as varied as ones above. The best part of being part of your local online social media scene is the real life society it introduces you to.

Douglas Bailey Can’t Hear You

July 15, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

Don’t bother talking to Douglas Bailey. First of all, he’s smarter than you, so he doesn’t care what you say. Second, because you’re not working for a dying industry that can’t figure out how to save itself, you are not worthy to share your opinion. Third, since he has no control over his own actions, you need to change how you want to use the web.

Douglas Bailey took the time to write an editorial at the Boston Globe’s website called, Got a comment? Keep it to yourself. It is the heart of everything that is currently wrong with the online newspaper business.

He goes about reminding us of how hard the reporters work to get the story, the long hours of digging, triple checking the facts, editorial reviews, fights with their editors over a paragraph or two that might cause a problem. Now on top of that, says Bailey, the reporter has to put up with the indignity of actually having to see the unwashed masses comment on his pristine work.

This is insane. We know that newspapers made a mistake and devalued their product by giving it away for free on the Internet. Some rebuilding could begin by removing these reader forums and restoring journalism’s dignity.

Newspapers didn’t make a mistake by putting their product online and not charging for it, newspapers are making a mistake by believing that nothing has changed in the last 20 years and they should still be able to do whatever they want and get paid top-dollar for it. I have some hard news for Douglas and his friends still holding on by their fingertips at The Boston Globe – you’re not as important as you think, in fact, everyday you are becoming less important because you continue to look down your nose at the very people you want to influence.

He reminds me of Spaulding in Caddyshack who upon seeing Danny Noonan all dressed up at Judge Smails club greets him with, “Ahoy Paloy”.

People like Douglas Bailey remind me of Clay Shirky’s chapter in Here Comes Everybody where he talks about the Abbott of Sponheim coming to the defense of the pre-printing press scribes. In 1492, the Abbot of Sponheim wrote a tract called In Defence of Scribes urging that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. One problem: the abbot had his book set in movable type so his argument could be spread quickly and cheaply.

Bailey finishes off his argument by sticking his fingers in his ears, closing his eyes and singing loudly while walking back to his house:

By the way, don’t bother posting any comments directed to me when this article appears on the Web. I won’t see them. Instead, go start your own website or blog or buy a legitimate newspaper, or write a letter to the editor, or an op-ed (and sign your own name to it). If you really have something interesting to say, I’ll find you.

Well, I for one, don’t believe him. I think Douglas Bailey is a coward. I think he’s afraid of the future and is unable to keep up with the changes that are re-shaping the once insulated world he was once involved with.

Can Online Newspaper Sites Survive?

June 18, 2009 by Phil Buckley 5 Comments

50 years ago, Joe Morello wanted to play a kick ass drum solo. He pestered his band leader who was also in the mood to do something different from Stardust and Body & Soul.

In the end, The Dave Brubeck Quartet did something that changed Jazz forever. Jazz hits had never been written in 5/4 time, because nobody can dance to it. The Columbia Records’ sales force were scared to sell it because it sounded… well, it just sounded so different.

But when DJ’s started playing it, and the switchboards would light up.

Take Five became the first million-selling modern jazz hit, a landmark at the intersection between jazz and pop culture.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet had already cut a bunch of recordings and had a pretty good following by 1959. But they decided to take a risk. The risk lost them some of their existing fans. They lost the ones that wanted traditional, “common time” 4/4 beats. But what they built instead was a community of true fans. Not just people who listened to their songs on the radio, but people who would say to their friends, “Dave Brubeck is coming to play next month, come see it with me, you’ll love it.”

That is what I think will save newspaper websites. Love. The same kind of love that has built up a community force-field around Wikipedia, 37 Signals, Apple, and Barack Obama. People become invested. When you try bad-mouth the iPhone, an Apple fanboy will jump to it’s defense. Point out Ruby-on-Rails shortcomings, supporters point to the success of 37 Signals. Point out how cluttered and user-unfriendly the News & Observer’s website is, and we all nod in agreement. No community. No passion. No fanboys. Why is that? Where is our community?

Look at the News & Observer’s website. What is the most important story? Where does the editor want you to focus?

What is the purpose of this website?

If you ask the sales manager, he may say the purpose is to have a platform to deliver advertising. If you ask the online editor, he may say the purpose is to publish news to keep the public informed. Other answers I have heard over time include, “to get back some of the revenue we’re losing on the print side” and “what do you mean?”

What if you asked users? What are they using it for? What if we let them use it for whatever they wanted, what would they choose? Would they want to continue to be only a consumer? Are we helping them? Are we connecting them to others who can help them?

My contention is that our failure has nothing to do with metrics, local visitors or site redesigns. I think it’s because we don’t care about our audience. We don’t know our audience. We make zero effort to connect with them, because newspapers are ingrained with the belief that the very people we write for, offer us nothing in return. We are a 20th century, one-way communication platform. We’re famous, they’re not. We’re important, they’re not. We own the ink, the presses, the paper and the delivery trucks and they don’t. Well, that’s not really the case anymore.

I agree with Clay Shirky, in a world where publishing is now effortless, the decision to publish something isn’t terribly momentous. For a generation growing up without the scarcity that made publishing such a serious-minded pursuit, the written word has no special value in and of itself.

Brian Solis's Social Media Prism — Brian Solis’s Social Media Prism

If you use MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, YouTube or any one of the other social sites, you are more than just a consumer. You are joining the throngs of symmetrical participants who have the ability to receive information, but also the ability to send it. Amateur production means that the category of “consumer” is now a temporary behavior, rather than a permanent identity. The term “journalist” is also rapidly becoming an activity rather than a profession.

It’s okay to admit that you don’t “get it”, you’re not alone. Merlene Davis at the Lexington Herald-Leader obviously doesn’t, and neither does her editor. In a story about her joining twitter there’s no LINK to her twitter page. But, just because you don’t get it, don’t think that “it’s” stupid. Right now there’s a woman trying to finish up her doctoral dissertation, but she’s putting it off by reading status updates from her friends on Facebook, or following links posted in her Twitter stream.

That same woman will follow almost any link her friends post, because she knows she can trust them, they are her friends, even if she’s never met them and they live in Australia. Her friends have permission to send her links, in fact, she likes when they find cool stuff and forward it on, because she’s interested in most of the same things.

When we force our visitors to endure a flash ad that takes over their entire screen, what is that really saying? I can tell you what I think when I see it… We value this advertiser more than you. How long can we continue to behave like this and think it’s the way to grow?

Seth Godin has a post called, The web doesn’t care where he observes:

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn’t please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make the marketer happy.

That’s the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn’t invented by business people, and it doesn’t exist to help your company make money.

It’s entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn’t owe you anything.

Our grandparents had time to read a newspaper everyday. Our parents had time to scan the paper most days. We have have the local tv newscast on in the background as we’re brushing our teeth or getting the kids dressed. What will the next generation have time for?

Think about what you make time for in your own life. Who do you make time for? That’s your community.

Do you have any online-only communities? How about communities that span both, like meetup.com? What communities would or could sprout up around our sites if we encouraged that type of behavior? What if we provided a way for news junkies to gather? What about people that are passionate about state politics in the capital sites like Raleigh and Sacramento? What if the site actively added value to a group? What if the Star-Telegram’s Dallas Cowboys group gained them exclusive access to Cowboys stuff – all based on the S-T’s long association covering the team? What if the Charlotte Observer brought a member of their photography group down on the field at a Panther game with a news photographer? Would that type of behavior create a stronger bond with the community? How many bloggers would start writing about that? How fast would competitors try to catch up?

What about a community built around making the website better? If you created a place for real discussion to flourish, there’s no better place to get ideas and keep your finger on the pulse of the very people who can help your site grow and be accepted by a wider audience.

How about starting today?

Twitter Traffic Multiplier

May 12, 2009 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

Yesterday, at 2 o’clock in the morning, Pete Cashmore at Mashable tweets, Reading: “Why You Should Be Twittering More”. A bit surprising considering that I wrote that post back on February 5th, but not totally weird since he’s referenced in it, and it’s about the effect of a twitter run. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the extra 2,500 visitors and 50 new twitter followers, but there was a more interesting part of the day – the data.

The “Twitter Effect” that hit my post yesterday served to crystallize some ideas I’d had for a while about using visitor data related to twitter traffic.

I use TweetDeck, and I know a ton of people access twitter without going to their twitter.com page. Using an application like TweetDeck means that when I follow a link, I get to that page with a blank referrer field. That makes the job of analyzing twitter generated traffic a little bit harder.

Back to my own data from yesterday. I know that the traffic to the post was as close to 100% twitter driven as is possible.

Knowing that lets me pull out specific data.

The post in question received about 2.725 visits yesterday. Of those 1,074 came from the twitter.com domain. There were also 1,353 that showed up with no referrer (aka direct/bookmarked).

There’s a chance that a handful of people happened by a post that during the previous month attracted a whopping 21 visits, but for this argument, let’s agree to ignore that.

That means that roughly 50% of the twitter traffic yesterday came in naked.

Does that mean we should all be multiplying our Twitter traffic x 2 to get a more realistic idea of it’s true impact?

I would love to hear about any other cases where there’s real data to lean on to make this argument or to refute it.

Even Though We Say Social Media, Mostly We Mean Twitter

March 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I admit, I stole the title of this post from Chris Brogan. He probably won’t mind since he’s spouting smart stuff all the time on Twitter.

The point was driven home by a tweet I saw from Pistachio which talked about the LA Times having 99 Twitter accounts. Since I have been pushing for McClatchy to define a social media strategy for our papers, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My first question was if the accounts were just headline dumps or real people interacting.

Andrew Nystrom was quick to jump to his paper’s defense:

Of 99 http://latimes.com/tweets accounts, ~1/2 are non-RSS. Goal is to get all mostly human-powered asap.

All 99 @latimes accts at http://latimes.com/tweets are ‘official’ per se; some individual streams may mix personal + professional.

I tossed out one more quick question, asking if the accounts were mandated by the management, or if the bubbled up from the hoi polloi?

Bottom-up, based 100% on reader input. See http://tr.im/hly7 interview by @jayrosen_nyu‘s @MsBeat + http://latimes.com/sm for details.

This is the type of thing that gives me hope. Newspapers get it! Not so much mine, but still, the LA Times is indeed a newspaper that seems to understand that they are there for the public, not the other way around.

Twitter is the hottest cog in the social media engine right now. The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month.

The power of Twitter is the way it lets you segment your audience. It’s a combination search engine, blog pulse taker, social media ticker, and instant feedback thermometer.

If your business isn’t leveraging Twitter, you do so at your own risk.

Why You Should Be Twittering More

February 5, 2009 by Phil Buckley 7 Comments

Not everyone in your business gets it. When they walk by your desk and see you looking at Facebook or Twitter they sneer, or even say, “get back to work.”

They don’t “get it”, because you are working!

The social media space is becoming more important everyday. You can tell it’s gaining influence because traditional marketers are now spamming it in hopes of proving some ROI plan they sold to their boss.

Recently, activity on Twitter crashed servers with an overwhelming surge of traffic and has been dubbed The Twitter Effect.

How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

First of all, of course it was a big factor that Pete Cashmore is one of the people on Twitter with the most followers (people who have subscribed to his tweets). According to Twitterholic, he has more than 50,000 followers.

But the key here may not be just the number of followers of the initial tweeter, but the retweets. A retweet is when a Twitter user resends a message so that his/her own followers can share it. Pete Cashmore was the most retweeted Twitter user during the period when the affected blog went down (according to Retweetist).

In that case, the tweet was:

“Reading: “How to use Twitter to find your next job” – http://tinyurl.com/8n8bm8“

Clearly a hot topic put forward by a respected member of the Twitter community. Of course, don’t overlook the good work done by Michael Litman who came up with a powerful title for his post, good social media is usually tightly intertwined with good seo/sem.

So how do you become a bright light within the Twitterati? It takes time and work. One of the best analogies I have come across was by Todd Defren at SHIFT communications. He talks about entering the arena the same way you would enter the neighborhood block party if you had just moved into the neighborhood.

You’d hang back a little, insert yourself mildly into a wedge of conversation, and ingratiate yourself. You’d be a gentleman.

And yet there might still be moments of awkwardness. All the neighbors already know each other. There are cliques. There’s context, politics and in-jokes to figure out. You wouldn’t expect to be the life of the party right away. But, you knew that going in… so, to help grease the skids, you brought some nice bottles of wine and some of your killer BBQ ribs.

Can you dedicate 2 minutes out of each hour to check twitter? That would only be 16 minutes in an average work day, you probably spend more time than that figuring out where to go for lunch.

Start slowly by following people you respect in your area, or your business. For example if you are a newspaper in Raleigh, you might want to check out twitterholic and see who the top tweeters are. You could even use something like TwitterLocal to see who might be worth following that tweets less often, nearby tweets shows you who is tweeting all around you right now.

Once you get an idea of the ebb and flow within Twitter, you can start contributing. Don’t start selling your site, start selling yourself. You are someone who contributes good stuff. You add to the conversation. When you respond to others, help them, they will allow you in. They will “follow” you. Once real people start to follow you because they think you add something valuable, you have made progress.

Maybe you were following Janis Krums when he was the first person to get a close-up photo of “the Miracle on the Hudson” using his iPhone and Twitter/TwitPic just moments after the crash.

If you were a newsie and could retweet (RT) that you your followers quickly, they would have been impressed. You probably would have picked up a few new followers.

Another bonus is that you are sometimes privy to information that slips out via Twitter. You might even come across a Tweet from the head of the BBC newsroom, Peter Horrocks, to the director of global news, Richard Sambrook about some new appointments at the BBC that were meant to stay private.

Then comes the next hard question. Michael Gray had a great tweet a while ago:

ok for all those people out there who want more followers on twitter what will you do with them, for them or to them when they follow you

If you had 50,000 tweeple following you, what would you do with them? Whatever you answer is, that’s the reason you should be twittering more.

Do You Need A Site Redesign?

January 29, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I had an interesting talk this afternoon with the Innovation and Product Development guy at one of the McClatchy markets. He wants to do a site redesign. He wanted my input.

A complete redesign is a big project. It means a minimum of 4 months of hard work, and what does it get you? Let’s think about the pros and cons of a complete overhaul.

The current site is not awesome, but it is not terrible. In the galaxy of news sites, it is clearly in the middle. In many ways, that IS the problem. Seth Godin says it best in his book The Big Moo : Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable:

In the old days, showing up was 95 percent of success. If you offered a good product at a good price in a reliable way, you’d do fine. Being local was a good thing. Having a long track record helped. Decent quality and personal service mattered as well.

No longer. Good enough isn’t good enough, because now everything is good enough. Our expectations of quality are unrealistic – and are being met every single day. We don’t just want to be satisfied, we want to be blown away.

Now that brings up another part of that equation. What blows away people when they visit a news site? Is it shiny objects or is it news that is compelling? I think it’s a little bit shiny, but mostly a connection with the readers.

I asked him if he has invited readers to give feedback, maybe ask a dozen or so in, and listen to them about what they want from the site. “Marketing is working on a set of questions”, was the answer.

Marketing really only needs one question, “What can we do to make our site better for you?” After asking that question, you listen and take notes. Since you have no idea what the answers are going to be, just keep an open mind. The only other question I would ask is, “What do you use our site for now?”

The challenge for a web designer at a news site is the fact that a cool widget rarely makes the difference for where someone goes to get their news. But, people generally are drawn to stories where there is compelling photos and/or video, and that is usually lacking in the McClatchy online culture.

Detroit City Council Gone Wild

Because the journalists are still writing for print first, they don’t think to snap a couple of digital pictures, or grab the flip video camera on their way over to the city hall meeting, but you never know what could crop up. Maybe even the wife of a US Congressman will call someone Shrek and keep yelling, “Do it baby!”

There’s a reason that sites like Huffington Post and Human Events have devoted followings. They know what their audience wants, they respond to a constant stream of comments, and they generate more content to satisfy them.

Newspapers have never had to compete like that. Now, on the web, all but the very largest news sites need to find their sweet spot. I can’t imagine that many people in San Luis Obispo California went to sanluisobispo.com on election nights to watch the state by state results come in on November 4th. But when you start planning your trip to California wine country, you won’t start at CNN.

Christopher Penn just wrote a fantastic article about Money as Trust where he ends with:

What should YOU be doing right now, in this economy? Building trust. Building relationships. Strengthening your network. Growing your network. Why? Relationships can exist without money – barter, trade, collaboration. Money can’t exist without relationships, because without trust, money itself fails.

Dedicate yourself to what you do best, local, in fact, hyper-local coverage that gives your readers an angle or insights the can’t get anywhere else. Try to reach out and get you 1,000 true fans. Respond to the community. Use twitter, use Mixx, use Social|Median, use digg, use reddit, use Facebook, use every avenue open to you. But don’t use them like a lazy news organization, use them like you are part of the community. Respect the 80/20 rule.

So I guess in the end, you probably don’t need a site redesign, but you probably need a culture redesign.

Online news is not like the old print newsroom, which is a good thing. Online and print have very little in common. When cars took over from horses, the stable owners didn’t force you to park you car in there, just because that’s the way it had always been done.

The answer is change. Adapt or die. There are plenty of examples of newspapers that are dead or dying. You still have a chance to turn on a dime and adapt – take advantage of it.

Moving Beyond Traditional SEO

January 22, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Last week, Rae Hoffman wrote a fantastic article about the need to think beyond traditional SEO practices. She explains clearly and with a compelling example why you can’t just optimize your site then sit back and wait for the traffic to pour in.

A few weeks back we launched a little site called Tweetwasters. It wasn’t a “serious effort” or anything we planned to monetize. It was a quick dip into the world of Twitter applications. But it also gave me some actual hard data back up what I had known in my gut to be true for a long while… traffic can have a direct impact on your indexing and rankings.

The old adage that “the rich get richer” is full effect on the web. If you have a popular site, you will move up the search engines ranking scheme, even if you do zero on page SEO. Rae offers the ramp up (and eventual ramp down) of Tweetwasters as a perfect example.

Good core marketing and the occasional yet regular viral success (it doesn’t need to be large scale, especially if your industry isn’t) – both of which amount to driving traffic at the end of the day – can get you good rankings with or without SEO.

Rae hits the nail on the head when reminds us that SEO is but one component to marketing your site. You need to build your user base. You need to cultivate your 1000 true fans, and that doesn’t happen by focusing solely on your on page optimization.

2009 is already seeing the impact of search engine algorithm tweaks, not to mention wholesale changes like search wiki at Google. How are you marketing your site? Are you in a sector that could benefit from you spending some time and energy on Twitter or one of the other social platform? Are you using press releases?

Working with some of the best newspapers in the country is usually great, but some are slow to grasp the change in the way their product is being consumed. Google or Yahoo, more often than not, now decide what newspaper/news-site has the story I search for. The carefully laid out path of homepage->sports section->high school sports->story is rarely followed, because I am taken directly to the story. So while the editor wants to focus all of the resources and cool stuff onto the homepage and section fronts, many visitors never see it. The lowly story page is left as an after thought.

There’s a reason that CNN had some phenominal traffic numbers on Inauguration day, they have a following that thinks of them as “the” place to go get their breaking news. What are you”the” place for?

Top 5 Things For A New Website Owner To Do

January 20, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Everyone needs to be on the web. Even if it’s a one page site that just lists the address and phone number of your brick and mortar store. Hopefully, you want to do a bit more that just a page with your address and phone number on it.

Small business owners need a checklist they can look at and check off, that’s what this post hopes to accomplish.

1. Put analytics on your site. If you want something free and easy, I would suggest Google Analytics. Once that is installed you can start to see who is coming, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, and where they jump ship. You can do lots of more complicated and customized stuff using the advanced features available from Google Analytics, but that is for another post.

2. Understand the difference between “hits”, “page views”, “visitors”, “unique visitors” and “time on site”. Back in the stone age, people talked about “hits”, but what they really meant was the number of pages viewed per day(or week, month, year). “Page Views” is still something some sites care about, usually if they sell advertising that is priced by page impressions. A site like the Drudge Report can report “visits” as an accurate metric, because he has a one page site.

Unique visitors is an interesting metric, and is a much better count of visitors. On the flip side is “Return Visitors”, which also can give you certain insights. A commonly overlooked metric is how much time visitors are spending on your site, aka “stickiness”. Obviously more is better, unless they don’t end up buying.

3. The number one metric you should be tracking is CONVERSIONS! If your site makes money by selling something, you need to track the funnel. You can see where people leave the path you so carefully planned for them. You should be constantly tweaking and A/B testing until nobody can escape.

4. Put your address, email and phone number on your site. Even better, put it in the footer of every page. If someone wants to find you or call you, don’t make it hard. This also allows Google and Yahoo to add you to their local business directories, but you shouldn’t wait for them to find you, you should add yourself.

5. Sign up for Google’s Webmaster Tools. This tool is invaluable for finding problems with your site.

None of these cost anything, and probably would take a novice a couple of hours.

Once these items are knocked out, it’s time to start phase 2, which will be my next post.

Redesign Do’s and Don’ts

January 6, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

My friends down in Fort Worth, Texas are planning a major redesign of the Star-Telegram.com website.

A couple years ago, I helped them move from their old Knight-Ridder platform, to their new McClatchy CMS. The move was major, but the design was kept the same. Then about a year ago, they gave their site a face lift and that’s where they’re at now.

I was talking with Cody at the Star-Telegram this afternoon about some of the design, SEO and core functionality they should consider for their next redesign. When I started thinking about it, it became a pretty long list. Then it dawned on me that many of the suggestions are not limited to Star-Telegram.

So my #1 piece of advice is… Take 1/2 the stuff you currently have on your section fronts OFF, maybe even 2/3 of it. For some reason, there is a perception that visitors will not look any deeper than the homepage. Let me be clear about this one… on a normal site, that may be true, but when someone goes to a newspaper site, they don’t expect everything to be on the front page. The people laying out the print paper certainly understand this, they don’t feel the need to have 300 stories highlighted on the front page.

Today there was 353 links on their homepage, 205 of them internal. That seems like a lot to me. It’s not that far out of the “norm” for a news site, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. The homepage highlights over 20 other sections. That must be reduced. It’s overwhelming, and keeps the visitor from being able to focus on any one thing.

#2. Stop publishing stories to multiple sections. The McClatchy CMs allows you to publish stories to multiple sections, which makes sense in some sense, but it’s actual application makes it a problem. One of the main problems is from the SEO perspective of duplicate content. Having exactly the same article repeated 3 or 4 times is not optimal. Until the CMS can give that story a single url, that is used in multiple sections, it should be avoided.

#3 Cull down you sections. You don’t need 350 different sections. If I were the CMS Czar, all the sites would be limited to 40 sections.

#4 Stop publishing stories that are only 2 paragraphs. This one is certainly not specific to Star-Telegram. There are lots of stories that are “updates” or “breaking” that are just too short. I understand if the story is something important, but that is rarely the case.

#5 Start linking. Another one that plagues all the McClatchy property. Did I miss the memo that said, “don’t ever put a link in a story”? Understand that no one thinks you are the ultimate source on every subject. The heart of the web is that articles are hyperlinked.

#6 Add assets to every story you can. I want to see a picture of the kid that won the contest, or the teacher that was arrested or even the house that was raided. In fact, I also want you to embed a Google map of the crack house that was raided so I know where it is.

#7 Work with bloggers. Bloggers are not the enemy. They want exposure, you could use their content/photos/podcasts or whatever your people are failing to get you.

A couple weeks ago, I was adding some assets to a high school football story for The Fresno Bee, and ran across a fantatsic collection high school football photos by John Canton who had a couple of kids playing for the team. He had hundreds thousands of fantastic photos available, and he made them available to anyone. I added one of his photos (with attribution) and a link back to his site. I’m sure he liked the exposure, and The Bee got to use a great picture.

#8 Leverage social media, without being boring. We have tried to use Facebook and Twitter for a couple of sites, but just dumping headlines into the social media stream is not only useless, but seen as rather offensive to the majority of users who make an actual effort to be part of the community.

What I’ve talked to DC about is actually using an app like Twitter to engage the community. The political news junkies are very plugged in, and want to know everything. Why not pull them into the conversation earlier. How about a tweet like, “Harry Reid’s office refuses to say if Roland Burris will be seated today”… and actually put that out in the wild BEFORE you have the story written.

#9 Stop accepting takeover ads, flyover ads and autoplay talking ads. You do not make your users love you when you force things on them.

#10. Strip your main navigation down to bare minimum. This one is like the homepage argument, you don’t need to show everything you have every time someone mouses over a link. Most people are smart enough to find what they are looking for. For example, if I want the score of last nights game, I already figure I’m gonna need to go through “Sports” to get it, and I won’t complain if I actually have to click on Sports. Oh, and don’t stick flash ads in your drop down navigation, it makes you seem a bit desperate.

#11 Can you explain, in one sentencee, what the object of the site is? If you can’t, you need to figure it out. Once you do, tape it to the monitor and make sure everything you do is leading to that goal.

If the goal is to keep the locals of Fort Worth, Texas informed about the Cowboys, why are you spending money on covering the City Hall meetings? If your goal is to cover all the news in Ft. Worth better than anyone else… you need to define what that means.

Really think hard about your goal. Can you reach your goal with your current team? If not, why not? What if you asked for help from a community that would probably love to help?

Avatars Can Solve Some Problems

January 4, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

A few days ago I was looking for a good picture to use for my twitter account. Trying to pick out a picture you think doesn’t look terrible is always hard, so then I turned to the Internet to solve this problem. I had seen a member of the SEO meetup I belong to that had a great avatar and thought that might be a smart solution.

I did a quick Google search for “create avatar”, and found a wealth of free/do-it-yourself sites that take the pain out of creating an avatar.

The first one I tried was DoppelMe. It was really easy, although they don’t actually give you the image, they allow you to link back to it. Having non-black/brown hair puts me at a disadvantage since the colors are limited, and as I would find out, apparently not a lot of old guys are making cool avatars.

The next one I found was Simpsonize Me, which was fun. Aside from the creepy Burger King dude that sponsors the site, it was easy to use and created a very high quality Simpson-like character. This was the only one I ran across that tried to age into account. Simpsonize Me also allows you to create a full body character, and select only the part you want.

Face Your Manga was my third stop. It offers a lot of options and is super easy. The site is hosted under an Italian domain, but is perfectly translated for us English speaking types. This was not my favorite avatar, it seemed more aimed at younger kids.

I also stumbled across BeFunky’s UVATAR. This site has you upload a photo and then uses that as a base. My final product was a bit sketchy, but I really liked the way they let you customize almost everything. I worked with other photos of my wife and kids, and it really depends on the quality of the picture you start with. So don’t take too much from my attempt here. Keep in mind, that this was my first attempt, and as I did more, my results became better and better.

Far and away the funniest site to build an avatar at is the South Park site. This site lets you choose from kids, boys, girls, adults, almost everything. Lots of fun stuff. If you’re a South Park fan, it’s worth the time just to see how you would look if you ever do anything dumb enough that you would get written into a script.

The entire process was fun and lets me have an identity that is me, without really being me. The other interesting part is to do this with a friend who can help guide you. We all see ourselves one way, and that’s not always the way the rest of the world will recognize us.