New Media Bytes | Online journalism, web production and promotion

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Web producers spend kabillions of hours optimizing and honing content for presentation on their news websites. But what about all those stories and photos that get sent directly to users via RSS?

What happens to your content once it gets sent out through your feeds? What does the content in your feeds look like?

Do you know how many people are subscribing to your RSS feeds and possibly circumventing visiting your news site altogether?

All that control and information is just a free sign up away! What’s the magic web service? FeedBurner !

If you’ve heard of the tool and haven’t investigated it yet, I encourage you to explore the benefits of using this feed re-syndication service. To help you, check out some of my favorite aspects of FeedBurner .

1. Know Your Subscribers

The most immediate and obvious benefit of syndicating your feeds through FeedBurner is that you’ll finally be able to track just how many subscribers you have to every burned feed. Your daily subscriber reporters will also tell you from which countries your subscribers hail, what feedreaders and web browsers they use and your stats over time.

2. Geotag your feed

Geotagging is essentially slapping a long-lat designation on your stories. Geotagging your blog posts can help geographic news indexers such as Google News local , Outside.In and EveryBlock find your content and round it up for people searching for news in a specific location. You could insert the longitude/latitude measurements into each post or you could use FeedBurner to do this automatically. See my post on Geotagging your feed using FeedBurner .

3. Encourage Subscribers to Share and Interact with Your Content

FeedFlare, a simple add-on to your feed content, enables users to social bookmark, email, share and save your posts in a number of ways. Add Digg and StumbleUpon buttons to your content. Allow users to see how many comments a specific post has. Why not create your own FeedFlare ? You can see an example of FeedFlare by viewing the end of a post in the RSS feed for NewMediaBytes .

4. Get More Subscribers Through Feed-by-Email

Although RSS is incredibly incredible, many people still haven’t quite got the hang of it. The majority of web users don’t use iGoogle or Google Reader or some other feed reader. It’s true. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find a savvy web user who doesn’t have an email account. FeedBurner provides conversion of your blog posts to email and delivers them once per day to recipients. Even better, FeedBurner doesn’t put their branding in the email, which makes it appear that the email is coming directly from your blog!

5. Keep Blog Indexing Services Alert to Your Newest Content

FeedBurner’s pingshot option will ping blog indexing services such as My Yahoo, Bloglines, NewsGator and others every time you post new content. If your feed is podcast-ready, you can ping up to 12 services, which increases your potential traffic.

6. Ensure Your Feed is Compatible with Readers’ Software

If your site is running an older version of Atom or RSS, you may want to consider FeedBurner’s SmartFeed option, which “Translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.”

7. Optimize Your Podcasts for iTunes Visbility

Do you publish podcasts through your RSS feeds? If yes, then start salivating. If no, start! FeedBurner’s SmartCast automatically adds enclosures for any digital media in your posts. That means you don’t have to do anything special when publishing a podcast. Just put the audio or video or whatever in your posts and you instantly have a podcastable feed.

What’s more is you can add meta data to your feed to increase your visibility in iTunes. Add an author image, podcast subtitle, description and keywords and FeedBurner will transmit those details to iTunes every time you publish a new podcast. All of these things can help your content become more findable to podcast software.

8. Monetize Your Feeds!

Music to your ears, right? If not, it should be. By re-syndicating your feeds through FeedBurner, you can tap the ad resources of the FeedBurner Ad Network and/or Google AdSense for Content. This doesn’t mean you’re news site will get rich instantly. But hey, was your news website making any money from your RSS feeds before using FeedBurner?

Parting Words

One last note, if you’re concerned about using FeedBurner’s resyndicated feed URLs, you can maintain your own feed identity by using FeedBurner’s MyBrand .

Do you use FeedBurner? Another service? What are your thoughts on controlling your news websites’ RSS feeds?

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Want to get some traffic out of Facebook but don’t want to spend moolah on developing an application?

You’re in luck. Facebook provides a number of tools that can help you promote your content and cash in on social network referrals. And the best thing is - Anyone Can Do It!

So what’s the secret tactic? - SHARING!

In this post, you’ll learn about how creating a newsroom network and sharing your content with an easy-to-use tool can get you more visits from Facebook visitors.

THE BASIC GOALS OF YOUR FACEBOOK PRESENCE

Building a Facebook presence for your news organization helps your paper, TV station or website connect with your audience on a site they naturally use and potentially exposes your content to new users. The main goal should be to engage your readers on a more intimate level and find new users. To do this, you should:

• Participate - Comment, Send messages, Share content
• Make Friends! - Isn’t that what social networking is all about?
• Promote - Use Facebook to promote your stories and drive traffic to your stories. You should also tell your readers you’re using Facebook, where they can get more content and interact more with your news org.

HOW TO GET STARTED USING FACEBOOK

If you don’t already have a Facebook account, take the plunge and sign up! Start exploring. Make friends. Be social! The easiest way to start “getting it” is to use the site.

Designate one or a couple people to be the main Facebook aficionados and then encourage everyone in the newsroom to create a personal account. You will quickly build a strong network just inside your news org.

From there, people will make more friends, expanding the newsroom network into spouses, friends and readers!

Are you already thinking about creating a profile page for your news org? That’s a great idea, but you’ll likely be better served by a Fan page, which I discuss in a follow up to this post.

MAKING FRIENDS MATTERS

Awesome image by Gwennypic

Adding friends on Facebook is important for growing your presence on the network. The more friends you have and the more you participate with raise your visibility. Raising your visibility will lead to more friends.

More friends and heightened visibility will lead to more people paying attention to how you interact on the network, which is the first step to getting people to get interested in your content.

And one of the best ways to meet and make more Facebook friends is by participating through sharing content!

WHY SHARING IS IMPORTANT ON FACEBOOK

Sharing is essentially posting to your profile a link to and description of an item you find interesting.

When you share content on your Facebook profile, a note is posted to your newsfeed that says you shared something. A similar item will pop up in your friends’ newsfeeds, noting that you shared some content.

By sharing content, you are making your link available to a potentially huge audience depending on how big your network is.

***Remember the suggestion of getting everyone in your newsroom to create an account? What if everyone had a profile and shared on Facebook the big breaking story of the day?

The exposure to your content shared by multiple people on Facebook could be huge, and the more people that see the shared item increases your chances of a higher click-through percentage to your posted link.

In short, more networked sharing leads to more Facebook referral traffic.

EASY TOOLS FOR PARTICIPATING

One of the great things about Facebook is the number of ways you can interact on the site. You can add an application, play games, share content, comment on your friends’ pages and more.

But Facebook presents problems because you have to be signed in to the site to use it’s features.

Here’s a tool to make your Facebook life a whole lot easier - the Facebook Toolbar. This toolbar works only on the Firefox web browser. If you’re stuck using Internet Explorer, try using My FB Toolbar, which isn’t quite as nice as the Firefox version and it isn’t supported by Facebook (although it does the trick).

What the toolbar looks like (Facebook Image):

The toolbar keeps you alert of the pokes you’ve received, new friend requests and messages and allows you to easily share whatever page your surfing using the “share” button - also the biggest benefit to using this toolbar.

Other tools for easy sharing are:

• Mahalo Share - See my screencast on how to use Mahalo Share to bookmark and share stories across a number of social networks.
• Twittersync Facebook application - Using this application will update your Facebook status any time you update your Twitter. If you share links through your Twitter account, your links will also show up on your Facebook status and your friends will be alerted and see the links on FB too! You can also sync your news orgs Facebook Fan or profile page with your auto-updating twitter feed to keep your news org’s Facebook status updated with the latest news.

Have You had Success Sharing Content?

What has been your Facebook sharing experience? Seen any huge traffic spikes with traffic from the site?

Image by Payton Chung

While newspapers are working on getting their staff members interested in online, the fact remains that many print writers and photographers aren’t all that interested in paying attention to the ups and downs of their newspapers’ websites.

From the online perspective, here’s a few strategies I’ve seen work in getting newspaper people thinking about success they can have online.

1. Pick one person to start with and cultivate

This tip comes from Ryan Sholin, who brilliantly says in these transitional times “you can’t mandate mindset. But you can grow culture.” How very true.

By focusing your efforts on one person or a very limited number of people, you up your chances of building online evangelists who can help you achieve your goals. Get one person excited who can influence his or her desk, and build from there. This is a whole lot easier than trying to convince an entire newsroom that your latest web idea will matter.

2. Start small to get more buy-in

Going for the whole shibang on an online initiative is great if you can pull it off. Those of us on the web side know it’s not quite that easy.

For example, instead of launching a huge staff-wide video initiative, pick a couple of people who would be interested in creating their own online show and stick with it. By starting small with new projects, you may be able to inspire other staffers that they can do it too. If you can lower the barriers so technology or web stuff is not so overbearing and scary, your staffers might be more interested in trying out your project

3. Share the stats

Reporters want to know how many people read their story - and if they don’t, it’s likely because they’ve never thought about actual readership statistics. Informing your newsroom on online stats can even spur some competition among staffers, with some desks wanting to make an extra effort to beat out another section on page views. Why not?

This tip could be discouraging for some sections too. Help put stats in perspective for reporters of sections with disappointing numbers to keep them interested in the success of your online sections. You can also find motivation here as sections with low numbers offer staffers the opportunity to take ownership and grow a section. Seeing those numbers climb can be a very gratifying experiment.

4. Congratulate staffers on online successes

If someone nails a great story online and pulls in a high unique visitors count, make a note of it in your newsroom meetings. Send emails to reporters and copy section editors when an online effort meets and especially when it exceeds its goal. Everyone wants a pat on the back, and giving one might just help get your newspaper staff pay more attention to how their works play out online.

5. Encourage creative outlet and expression

Do you have a business writer who loves to talk fashion and American Idol? What about any writers with a personal blog or Facebook addiction? While your paper might not be the place for personal commentary, your online site could thrive as users latch on to the personalities of your writers. Ask those with an interest to participate online for your news org. Success may influence other writers and photographers to share their hobbies on the website.

6. Give your reporters a voice

And by voice, I mean a blog. Yes, some reporters will react that writing a blog on top of their beat duties is more of a pain than a reward. But the right coaching and encouragement can help you turn that view around! Discuss the interests of your reporters with them and pick a blog topic that gets them hungry for writing. Next, explain how blog writing can heighten their personal brand and name recognition. After a few comments on their posts, it’s likely your reporters will see a spark.

What are your tips?

I’ve written a few tactics that I’ve seen work. What are some of the strategies you’ve used to get your newspaper staff more interested in online success?

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A shortfall of some web analytics programs at news sites is they don’t always report the metrics producers need - a key measure being referrers […] Continue Reading…