Results tagged “social networks”

There is not a direct relationship between the national circulation and the number of fans and posts and comments on the Facebook page, according to a study by The Bivings Group.  The company has completed a newspaper online interactivity report looking at Facebook fan engagement amongst the top 100 US newspapers (determined by circulation). 

U.S. blog network Gawker Media was hit by hackers, who gained access to the company's servers over the weekend, hacking into Gawker, as well as its sister sites Deadspin, Fleshbot, Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, Jalopnik, Kotaku and Lifehacker. They gained access to up to 2.5 million usernames and passwords, which could be the "most damaging cyber security breach of a media company to date," the Atlantic Wire reported.

One of the alleged hackers, part of a group identifying themselves as "Gnosis," e-mailed Mediaite, saying Gawker was targeted because of "their outright arrogance. It took us a few hours to find a way to dump all their source code and a bit longer to find a way into their database."

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USA Today has announced the appointment of a social media editor and social media analyst, while the New York Times has just folded the social media editor position into the responsibilities of the interactive news team.

Michelle Kessler, formerly a USA Today tech reporter and editor, is now social media editor for the paper and hence responsible for social media initiatives throughout the newsroom. She will help run social.usatoday.com, which provides updates about the paper's social media activities, and @SocialUSAToday, the paper's rebranded Twitter account. 

Twitter is now allowing users to add embedded versions of images and videos from third party multimedia services including Instagram, blip.tv, SlideShare, Rdio, Dipdive and others, PCWorld reported today.

These embedding features are part of the microblogging site's "#newTwitter" design, which is much like its Twitter for iPad. When users click on the tweet containing a link to the sites, a preview of the photo, video or song pop up on the right side of the screen, called the "details pane."

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The recent Egyptian elections, which saw the ruling National Democratic Party secure victory by arguably questionable means, have prompted increased government restrictions both domestic and foreign media. Writing in the Huffington Post, Magda Abu-Fadil, director of the Journalism Training Program at the American University of Beirut, described the efforts as a "clampdown," but she and others also noted significant efforts to fight back.

The BBC Arabic Service wrote to Egyptian information minister Anas El Fiki to protest the harassment of its local and foreign correspondents assigned to cover the elections after one of its correspondents was put under surveillance by Egyptian security and production companies with whom it worked were threatened by senior officials in the state-run media, Abu-Fadil reported. 

The Kansas City Star teamed up with location-based mobile app Foursquare so readers can "check in" every time they buy a print copy of the newspaper in vending machines and newsstands spread through the city, Editor and Publisher reported yesterday.

User who check in will receive subscription offers, mediabistro.com revealed. Currently, the newspaper is offering  "26 weeks of Friday through Monday home delivery for $1.75 a week, which is more than 50 percent off our normal four-day rate," said the Vice President of Audience Chris Christian.

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Nettby, the social network run by Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, is to close early next year.  Launched in September 2006, it reached its peak in 2008, when it had 400,000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views, reported John Einar Sandvand, a Norwegian editor who blogs at Betatales.com. In a market of 4,5 million people, that is not insignificant. It was valued by its owners, the Schibsted Media Group, at around $31 million.

Originally, while Facebook, which also launched in Norway 2006, attracted many adult users in the country, Nettby was popular among teenagers. And by the end of 2008, said Nettby CEO Rune Røsten, three out of four teenagers had signed up to VG's service.  However, Facebook took off among young people in early 2009 and Nettby has seen a steady decline since February of that year. 

Last week in Paris, Social Media Club France hosted an event titled "Audience Engagement and Monetisation: Social Gaming, a model to follow?" where the crème-de-la-crème of France's fast-emerging social gaming sector partook in a fascinating panel discussion. Presenters included notables such as KRDS, one of only two agencies in France to be included in Facebook's Preferred Developers Consultant Program, and IFeelGoods, which is the first platform that lets retailers provide Facebook Credits as marketing incentives.

Moderated by Benoit Raphael, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Le Post.fr, the discussions covered the elements of success for social games and Facebook apps, as well as the enormous potential for virtual credits to revolutionize the way money is exchanged online. Highlights of the panel discussion can be found here, what this post is about is how this lesson in game dynamics can be applied to news sites.

One of the catch phrases heard frequently these days amongst the digerati is "adding a social gaming layer" to, well, everything. For a brilliantly clear explanation of what that means, have a look at this TED talk delivered by Seth Priebatsch. Below we'll delve into what that could mean for news sites.



Social Games: a logical extension of user generated content initiatives

For any community manager, the following statement should make complete sense: positive reinforcement is key to encouraging participation. If step one is allowing your audience to participate more, step two should be rewarding them for doing so (and steps three and four: enticing them to continue the interaction regularly and then share the experience with their friends).

This thinking is nothing revolutionary, in fact it can be traced back to social loyalty schemes that existed far before the internet did (think about your super market club card), and there are a plethora of companies that have already adapted the model to work online (Foursquare, Groupon, and recently Facebook itself just to name a few). It's adding game dynamics to these social loyalty schemes that is innovative, and this is where news publishers could stand to profit immensely.

The question isn't whether or not people are gaming on the web: more than 50% of Facebook users go online to play social games and Zynga has over 200 million individual players each month. For news publishers this poses very exciting possibilities, and the obvious question arises, as Harvard's Nieman Lab put it, "...could adding a little gameplay - and some circular icons - turn casual readers into engaged ones?"

Badges, badges, badges...and MORE badges!

It has already been more than 6 months since the Huffington Post launched its HuffPo Badges initiative, which, as Ariana Huffington explained, focuses on three key member activities, "connecting with others, engaging with our content, and moderating comments." The idea was to take the HuffPo community "to the next level" by offering recognition to top users in these areas, and perhaps even more importantly from a social gaming standard, they had plans to "add more badges and more features that will make being a part of the HuffPost community even more dynamic and rewarding."

As far as we can tell, no new badges have yet been added to the HuffPo experience, which is a big no no according to Thibault Viort of WEKA Entertainment. He explained at the Social Media Club event that at WEKA, the aim is not just to make a social game, but "to make a living game, one that grows and changes everyday". Although the very concept of badges and member ranking involves a dynamic progression, if new objectives aren't regularly introduced, the game play risks becoming stale, and as we know, the novelty factor doesn't last forever.

A new news-related social gaming experiment has just emerged on Philly.com, website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News, which looks to offer a more Farmville-esque experience to users. The company behind the badges system found on Philly.com is called Badgeville, and the name is indeed a play on the stupefyingly popular Zynga game. On Philly.com, users earn points for activities they already do, such as visiting the site, reading articles, sharing content, and leaving comments. 

A visitor gains different sized trophies according to the number of points they've accumulated, and various badges for completing specific tasks, such as the "Wanderer Badge" awarded to members after their 5^th visit to the site. Through the tallying of points and badges, a site's most active users can be identified and a new dimension of analytics is possible.

Engagement Analytics

There is a massive bonus to adding game dynamics to news websites in particular, and that is engagement analytics. By tracking specific actions you want to encourage with a simple point system, you can keep a close eye on the health of your community. Furthermore, with a dynamic system that allows you to introduce new badges at a moment's notice, you can actually target specific activities that you might want to encourage more.

For instance, say you notice there has been a lull in the sharing of articles over the last week, you can take this knowledge and actually act on it by creating a new badge that is unlocked after sharing 5 articles in the next week. What's more, you can link this badge to a real world incentive by allowing sponsors in on the fun. This could be branded, for example, the Pepsi Broadcaster's Badge, and earn users a free six pack of the Pepsi product of their choice.

By coupling game dynamics with an ambitious advertising department, news publishers have a real opportunity to both increase engagement AND boost ad revenue. This can be taken a step further however, by adding a social gaming layer with real incentives to a UGC initiative, such as CNN's iReport or BBC's Have Your Say. In doing so, news outlets can also benefit from richer editorial content, thus addressing virtually every publisher's ultimate goals of providing better content, improving reader engagement and loyalty, and bringing home the bacon.

This is a guest post from Garrett Goodman, a new media consultant currently working with Citizenside, a French start-up that specialises in increasing audience engagement with its UGC hub solution, the Reporter Kit. This solution uses a proprietory system that integrates badges, grades and points to add a social gaming layer to news gathering.

A new browser called RockMelt will offer users a way to stay connected to their friends and indeed, their "world," as they navigate web pages. "Why not build the world right into your browser?" a blog post on RockMelt.com asks.

RockMelt's fundamental goal seems to be making browsing the Web a personal experience. Users will have to log in to use RockMelt, and as all the information entered is stored in the cloud, a user's account can be accessed from anywhere with all its settings. 

According to the head of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, online media need to become more like television, states an article on paidcontent.org.  "It means a screen which is less constrained by the need to have three or four ads and every single bit of content on one screen," Denton was quoted as saying in the article.  PaidContent speculated whether Denton was making reference to a future Gawker redesign.

There will always be space for writers, however, even if just to put text around a video. He expressed frustration with blogs, noting that for the Gizmodo iPhone 4 story, "we had to cease publishing for six hours to keep this story at the top of the page." 

In an effort to find out how social media and multitasking are affecting students, Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania has blocked social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter on its central wireless system for the past week, MediaGuardian reported today.

Eric Darr, provost at the U.S. university, came up with the idea after watching his teenage daughter multitask with social networking, text messaging, music and more. "It struck me how overpowering all this was, not in a negative way, and it made me wonder what would happen if all that wasn't there," he told MediaGuardian.

A new, redesigned, re-engineered Twitter site has been launched, aiming to provide an "easier, faster and richer experience," according to the site's blog. The company has realized that although the 140-character constraint means that information is shared quickly and concisely, but that "life doesn't always fit into 140 characters or less."

The new design includes a cleaner timeline and offers more detail when you click on an individual Tweet, related to the author or subject: maybe other Tweets from them, or a map showing where it was sent from if geotagged. If you click on a username you can see a mini profile within the page, offering a bio and recent Tweets. There is also "infinite scroll," meaning that there is no more need to click "more" to view older Tweets.

With all the talk about the 'massive' potential of Facebook Places to marketing and advertising, what is the significance of this new tool to the newspaper industry?

After some independent analyses of 100 media sites, Justin Osofsky of Facebook Developers has shared tips on how news organizations can get the best out of Facebook. "We recently set forth to learn how news organizations can best use Facebook to (1) drive growth in audience and traffic, (2) increase engagement, and (3) gain valuable customer insights," he said in a blog post on the site.
 
Under the first category, that of driving growth in audience and traffic, the 'Like' button plays an important role. Already noted by editorsweblog as a useful tool for news publishers, websites have increased chances of click-through rates when thumbnails of friends are present, and when comments are allowed. Click-through chances are also increased when the 'like button' is situated in very visible areas like top or bottom of page, or close to visually exciting content, Osofsky said.

Based on research carried out by Gartner, it has been determined that a whopping 20% of social media users are 'influencers.' Considering the increasing importance of such media in news dissemination and increasing website traffic, how can this information be exploited?

Grouped into 'Salesmen,' 'Connectors' and 'Mavens,' this 20% is able to influence over 70% of other users' activity. According to Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner, "Salesmen and Connectors are the most effective social network influencers and the most important groups."

Dubbed the world's first social magazine, the new Flipboard app for iPad combines the two things we are all addicted to: Facebook and Twitter; and in a way that is "a whole lot prettier," according to Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times.

By signing up to the magazine users can 'unclutter' both Facebook and Twitter accounts, and have 'clearer vision' of their updates and tweets through the use of tiles (see video here)

Facebook seems to have fallen a bit out of favor according to recent statistics, so Flipboard could be the perfect touch at the right time in terms of maintaining popularity. Facebook and Twitter are undeniable centers of communication and are the modern day word-of-mouth agents, central to driving traffic to news websites, especially through the exchanging of links between friends.

American consumers are more satisfied with the The New York Times and USA Today websites than with Facebook, according to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), released today, The Washington Post reported.

In the ACSI, which is conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and is based on interviews with 70,000 customers, Facebook scored a 64 out of 100 while The New York Times received a 76 and USA Today a 77, PC Magazine revealed.

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Spanish media are aware of the impact of social media and the importance of getting their content where conversations are taking place. According to a study published by Vector Software Factory, 75 percent of Spain's online media sites have an official account on Facebook while 76 percent also use Twitter to share content, prnoticias.com reported.

"The reading habits of users, who are not faithful to only one source of news because of the easiness to access information online and the multiple choices they have, are pushing media to go out and meet their users," Javier Mazo, spokesperson of Vector Software Factory told Puromarketing.com.

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