Tagged: smo

Choosing a strategy for content: 4 Ws and a H

Choosing a strategy for content: Format, Medium, Platform, Scheduling - and objectives
For this content I chose to write text accompanied by some images and video, published on a blog at a particular moment, for the objective of saving time and gaining feedback.

Something interesting happened to journalism when it moved from print and broadcast to the web. Aspects of the process that we barely thought about started to be questioned: the ‘story’ itself seemed less than fundamental. Decisions that you didn’t need to make as a journalist – such as what medium you would use – were becoming part of the job.

In fact, a whole raft of new decisions now needed to be made.

For those launching a new online journalism project, these questions are now increasingly tackled with a content strategy, a phrase and approach which, it seems to me, began outside of the news industry (where the content strategy had been settled on so long ago that it became largely implicit) and has steadily been rediscovered by journalists and publishers.

‘Web first’, for example, is a content strategy; the Seattle Times’s decision to focus on creation, curation and community is a content strategy. Reed Business Information’s reshaping of its editorial structures is, in part, a content strategy:

Why does a journalist need a content strategy?

I’ve written previously about the style challenge facing journalists in a multi platform environment: where before a journalist had few decisions to make about how to treat a story (the medium was given, the formats limited, the story supreme), now it can be easy to let old habits restrict the power, quality and impact of reporting.

Below, I’ve tried to boil down these new decisions into 4 different types – and one overarching factor influencing them all. These are decisions that often have to be made quickly in the face of changing circumstances – I hope that fleshing them out in this way will help in making those decisions quicker and more effectively. Continue reading →

Is community moderation etc. journalism? Another ice cream question

Photo by Photoctor
Looking down? Photo by Bhaskar Pyakurel/Photoctor http://www.flickr.com/people/dev07/

Here we go again. Fleet Street Blues reports on a user comment which “seems to makes quite a lot of sense”. It reads as follows:

“Five years or so ago, there was a certain kind of old-school journalist who, converted to the cause, as it were, banged on at length about the importance of hacks having a web presence of the highest order to demonstrate the new skills. It turns out, however, that the new skills are a piece of piss (particularly with current web technology), and promoting a yarn via Google, Facebook, Twitter etc is, in reality, an administrative task rather than a journalistic one. If you want to employ a proper journalist rather than a cheap web monkey, the SEO stuff really is secondary. (Of course, there is the fact that many employers actively want web monkeys rather journalists because they are so much cheaper, but that’s a whole other debate.)”

What is wrong with this picture?

Well even before we get to the conclusion, the premise is flawed.

The headline is indicative: “The difference between promoting a yarn… and writing it”

This is the usual ‘drawing a line’ waste of time (“Is ice cream strawberry?”) that seeks to establish some kind of higher ground that journalists can occupy, rather than actually asking what we want to do in our journalism.

If you want to have a web presence to demonstrate new skills for your career, fine. If you want to use those skills to produce good journalism while you’re at it, however, then you’ll probably do a great deal better.

The point of community management/SEO/social media optimisation etc. from a journalist’s point of view is that it should seek to involve readers as early as possible, and so improve the editorial product while it is produced. Not only that but also so that, once published, any errors/additions etc. are likely to be added by users.

It’s the difference between seeing users as passive audiences, or as active collaborators.

If you see them as audiences then, yes: SEO/SMO/community management is an administrative job akin to being a papergirl or delivery man. Let’s all look down on those poor web monkeys who fail to live up to our own high standards.

If you see them as collaborators and users, however, then no: SEO/SMO/community management is not something you can comfortably leave entirely to someone else.

via Mary Hamilton.

Does Twitter improve your site’s search engine results?

A Tweet's Effect On Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study

Yes. Or at least according to a couple of blog posts in the SEO blogosphere.

Back in December Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan asked what “social signals” Google and Bing count in their algorithms. Previously, the answer would have been none, as far as Twitter is concerned, because like most social media (including blog comments, forum posts and social networks) any links posted on Twitter carry a ‘nofollow’ tag, instructing search engines to ignore it.

But now that Twitter has signed deals with the big search engines, they now get the “firehose” of data from Twitter direct – without nofollow attributes. Bing tell Sullivan:

“We take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that shared the link.

Google tells him:

“We use the data only in limited situations, not for all of general websearch.”

The post contains more information about how both search engines use the “social authority” of a user (followers, followed, etc.) to further rank links.

A case study

Yesterday, the issue gained a fascinating case study from SEOmoz (image at top), when one of their articles suddenly appeared on the first page of Google search engine results for the term “Beginner’s Guide” following a tweet from Smashing Magazine and hundreds of retweets. Continue reading →