Evan Milberg: Comm 361

This chapter covers the fundamentals of building an online audience, specifically tracking content, web analytics, search enginge optimization, writing good headlines, and distribution through social media.

Track Everything

It’s important to track everything that you publish, inclduing daily statistics that covers how many posts you get per week, the type of things that are being written about, social networking feedback, and other user-generated content.

It’s important to track your audience as well by using Web analytics software. Services like Omniture, Hitbox, and Google Analytics are great ways to track how your Web site is doing and how it performs daily.

The things to be looking for are pageviews, unique visitors, and the amount of time each user spends on your Web site.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The way marketing has been traditionally done in the past is currently being supplemented by viral marketing. Everything is found through a search engine nowadays, so in order to garner attention to your Web site, you have to know how search engines work.

Search engines do three things:

1. Spiders and robots are programmed to scavenger the Internet for new pages or new information on existing pages for search engine indexing.
2. The indexing itself takes all of the information gather from the spiders and robots and compiles them into a database.
3. Queries take keywords entered into search engines and look into the index for the most relevant results and then presents those results to the media consumer.

Journalists use SEO to grow their audiences. The fastest way the online robots can pick up your material and index it is by assisting them by creating links that link directly to your published content. Tags are another catalyst. The same methods can be applied to video content.

Headlines

The best way to attract hits is by writing effective headlines. To attract readers, your headlines must stand out, but be simple at the same time. For the robots indexing information, it is important that you select the right text, preferably  text that is repeated in the story. These keywords need to include who, what, and where.

It’s also important that while you are trying to attract robots to not SOUND like a robot. Use conversational language that occasionally has a bit of attitude. An article can be well-written, but no one will read it if the headline is boring.

Social Distribution

As noted earlier, the way to go now is through viral marketing. The way to achieve viral success is by targeting specifics outlets on the Web so your content is featured on every type of channel possible to maximize your audience. Make sure your content links to social networks, blogs, video and photo sites like YouTube and Flickr, and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.

This chapter focuses on the interactivity of news that has been touched upon in previous chapters. The challenge in making journalism interactive is balancing objectivity and journalistic credibility with informality of conversation. There are also legal and ethical issues that come with people publishing anything they want and ignoring copyright laws. Finally, how do you attract an audience that is too apathetic to participate?

News as a Conversation

Most journalists would rather speak AT their audience as opposed to WITH their audience. However, due to the growth of journalism in accordance with Web 2.0 technology, stories must come in the form of conversations so the audience feels actively involved. It is no longer enough to simply make comments on blog postings anymore. Journalist must also communicate through social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogs like Twitter. The benefits of news as a conversation are:

• The stories become transparent
• You can manage feedback and communicate in real time
• You can spread awareness through word-of-mouth advertising

As mentioned in a previous chapter, beatblogging sites like NowPublic are already doing this.

Building an Online Community

In order to get an audience involved, journalists themselves must be committed to interactive media. Among things journalists can do to maximize the effects of their interactive web sites are:

• Asking for content from the audience, allowing them to become a part of the journalistic process
• Moderating feedback on stories and other types of user submissions
• Assisting your audience with the Web 2.0 technology
• Create contests which give the audience an incentive to participate
• ADVERSTISE!!

Some of your audience members can also prove to be valueable sources when creating content for the Web. Many of these sources can come through social networks like MySpace or LinkedIn. Journalists can also create their own niche social network and use pro-am journalism to collaborate with their community.

Maintain Accuracy and Ethics within the Web

There are some potential risks to collaborative journalism. The Web is anonymous, and anyone can post an offensive post that could do more harm than benefit. The journalist is responsible for monitoring all content that is published and making sure it isn’t offensive. The journalist also has legal responsibilities to make sure he or she is not breaking any copyright laws.

It is also important to note when errors have been made and to correct them as soon as you can. Journalism, regardless of its medium, is obligated to be accurate.