blogging, Joel Kramer, MinnPost, Real-Time Ads, RSS, social media marketing, Twitter

Podcast: Real-Time Ads seek to harness immediacy of social media

MinnPost publisher Joel Kramer is aiming to bring the same immediacy and frequency of social media to advertising with a new ad format, dubbed Real-Time Ads.

Kramer noticed that local businesses in Minnesota were using Twitter, blogs and other social networks to get their messages out to people, and Kramer wanted to tap into this market. Real-Time Ads don’t even require additional effort on the part of advertisers either. All an advertisers has to do is submit an RSS feed of content that they are already creating (like a Twitter feed or feed from a blog), and MinnPost will display headlines or brief summaries of these existing messages that link back to the full message on an advertiser’s Web site.

Real-Time Ads look like a cross between traditional classified ads and Twitter updates. And like a Twitter stream, Real Time Ads are listed in chronological order. Advertisers are required to update their messages frequently, and if an advertiser doesn’t update for awhile, their message will be at the bottom.

MinnPost is currently vetting advertisers for this program in order to ensure a high quality experience. A lot of advertisers are interested in Real-Time Ads, but many don’t have an RSS feed of a frequently updated message. If an advertiser isn’t already harnessing the immediacy and frequency of social media and blogs, they probably aren’t a good fit for Real-Time Ads.

“If you’re only creating a message once a week, then this thing is not for you,” Kramer said. “Beyond that, we do want the space to be a value to our readers. So, we might say only certain kinds of products and services could be in there.”

Kramer strives to keep MinnPost’s ads high quality because high quality ads provide a better user experience and bring in more money. MinnPost only displays banner ads to Minnesota residents, guaranteeing advertisers that their ads are reaching the people they want to reach. This targeting of ads is why MinnPost enjoys a robust $15 CPM.

Real-Time Ads enjoy one significant benefit over other, more traditional ads like banner ads: they’re self serve. MinnPost is not involved in the ad creation process, and advertisers sign themselves up and provide their own RSS feeds. All MinnPost does is vet potential advertisers.

This new ad format is meant to be another piece of the puzzle for MinnPost, not a panacea. The site has banner ads, large sponsorships, small sponsorships, a jobs board and now, frequently updated, small ads. Banner ads are designed weeks or months in advance and are for longer-term campaigns.

A Real-Time Ad could be advertising a lunch special for two hours. A restaurant, for example, might notice that business is slow and then update their status with a new special to try to entice dinners to come in. Real-Time Ads are designed for the now.

“For readers, it’s a kind of marketplace of the latest marketing messages,” Kramer said.

The service is currently in beta and free to advertisers testing it out. A final price for the ads hasn’t been settled on, but Kramer said the ads will be less than $100 a week. Kramer said MinnPost is considering charging different rates for different placement. A Real-Time Ad that is placed on all pages would cost more than one that just showed up an ad-only page.

MinnPost is also considering charging different rates based on how often ads are rotated into a particular spot. Kramer also said it’s possible that Real-Time Ads will be targeted. For instance, a local sports store would be able to choose to have their Real-Time Ads only show up on sports content.

“There could be many, many combinations, with different prices on them,” Kramer said about Real-Time Ads.

Kramer views Real-Time Ads as a form of content that enhance a user’s experience, and ideally, MinnPost users would find Real-Time Ads valuable, instead of distracting like most online ads. Kramer is considering having a dedicated page of just Real-Time Ads. A business directory could logically follow as well.

The format is about a week old, and Kramer said more time is needed to gather feedback before making any major judgements. Advertisers seem intrigued by the idea. Only time will tell, however, if users find the new ads valuable.

Click here to stream the interview. Or download the MP3.

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facebook, ReportingOn, Ryan Sholin, Twitter, Twitter API

Thursday Dose of social media: How to get retweeted

HOW TO: Get retweeted on Twitter – Getting retweeted on Twitter is a great way to gain more followers. It turns out there is a science behind getting retweeted. Here are a couple of take home points from this excellent post:

• People like links — Tweets with links in them are much more likely to be retweeted.
• Complex tweets get retweeted — This may seem counter-intuitive, but tweets that require a higher reading level are more likely to get retweeted. Don’t try to make your tweets more complex to get them retweeted, but rather, don’t dumb down your tweets either.

This post over at Mashable also has a bunch of sexy charts and graphs.

ReportingOn 2.0 is live — Creator Ryan Sholin dubs it as “the backchannel for your beat.” Here are some excerpts from Sholin’s post announcing the new version:

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

We’ll have in-depth coverage of ReportingOn 2.0 soon. But I strongly encourage journalists to check it out ASAP.

Google enhances Gmail labeling with drag and drop feature, retires right-side labels — I’m on the record as saying that Gmail is the best e-mail solution around, especially for work. It’s powerful search features alone make it great, but Google keeps improving Gmail, making it even more irresistible for content producers:

Of the more innovative features that has been added is the ability to drag and drop messages into labels, just like you can with folders. You can also drag labels onto messages too. It’s also possible to drag labels into the “more” menu to hide them, making it easier to change labels than going to the Settings function. This feature is huge for those people who complain about Gmail not having some of the drag and drop features of Outlook.

Facebook for iPhone 3.0 Coming Soon – Preview and Details — The biggest take away from this story is that nearly 25 percent of iPhone users us the Facebook app. That’s simply staggering.

The Facebook app is quite good, and it’s probably one reason why the network is growing much faster than the faltering MySpace. In addition, the new Facebook app looks incredibly good. Later this summer, the Facebook app will be getting push notifications.

Facebook started as a Web site, but it has moved into other grounds, like mobile apps. This is a lesson that content producers, journalists, newspapers and others should take to heart. Just because you start doing one thing, doesn’t mean you can’t do something else (especially something that is the logical next step).

Twitter increases API limit to 150 –This is huge news for Twitter users who use Twitter clients. Before, power users would run out of API calls (it was set at 100) and would have to wait for their API limit to reset every hour. This increase certainly makes clients like TweetDeck even more irresistible for work purposes.

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curation, Jebediah Reed, link journalism, Plano Blog, PPS Equity, Steve Rawley, The Infrastructurist

Leaderboard for week of 6-29-2009: Good link journalism edition

This week’s Leaderboard examines what good curation/link journalism is all about.

Link journalism seems so simple. It just some links and a little text. Not hard, right?

Poor link journalism is incredibly easy to produce, but good link journalism is an art and a science. Good link journalism requires a knowledgeable and well-read curator. The value in link journalism is derived from a knowledgeable curator looking at a myriad of sources and information and distilling down the best of it.

Most people don’t have time to do what a good curator does. Many journalists already consume a lot of content on a daily basis on their beats. They have RSS readers stuffed with feeds.

Curation is a skill that more journalists should pick up. Beat reporters are very knowledgeable about a set topic and already process a lot of information. Why not show users what you’re reading, watching and consuming?

We also examine a few other topics in this week’s Leaderboard, including advocacy journalism and hyperlocal journalism.

The Infrastructurist | Jebediah Reed

• The Daily Dig continues to be one of our favorite daily link journalism roundups and not just because everyday has a new “edition” like our Leaderboards.
• What makes good link journalism? It all starts with quality curation. People like Reed monitor a lot of different news sources, agencies, Web sites and saved searches. What makes The Daily Dig good is the fact that Reed links to a variety of different sources and he finds the best infrastructure-related stories. The core value in Reed’s link journalism is derived from him being an expert on the topic, and only someone who spends a lot of time consuming content on a specific topic can be great at link journalism.
• Good link journalism is also about making the links seem interesting. It’s not enough to just grab headlines and link. A good curator sells you on why a story is worth reading. A good curator gives you a true taste of what is to come and highlights the biggest reason why you should read on. Link journalism is in some ways content marketing by offering succinct summaries.
• Good link journalism is also interesting. This goes back to good curation, but it’s not enough to just find news worthy stories or content. Rather, a good curator also finds interesting and unique stories. Some content might be mainstream, while other content off the beaten path.

Steve Rawley | PPS Equity

• PPS Equity offers more than just news about Portland schools; it’s also an advocate for change. And it is starting to seem like good beatbloggers — especially education ones — mix in a bit of advocacy with their journalism. It’s not that they are biased, but rather that they care to see change. For many education reporters, they are covering school districts that are failing. In fact, the American education system isn’t doing so well.
• Advocacy speaks to readers. Rawley is not advocating on behalf of the teacher’s union or some other vested interest but rather advocating for change. That really resonates with readers, especially with beats like education. Most people deeply interested in education are so interested in the topic because they believe the status quo isn’t working.
• Rawley is himself a father of two PPS students. Some may think that’s a conflict of interest, but rather it humanizes Rawley to readers. He, like most people reading his blog, has a vested interest in the district himself. He wants change because he, like his readers, believe the district needs improvement.
• The mission of PPS Equity is to, “inform, advocate and organize, with a goal of equal educational opportunity for all students in Portland Public Schools, regardless of their address, their parent’s wealth, or their race.”
• What ultimately makes this beatblog work is not just the passionate advocacy, but also the content itself. The blog has newsworthy items and features great discussions in the comments after posts. It’s an all-around strong beatblog.

Plano Blog | The Dallas Morning News

• This is yet another strong beatblog from The Dallas Morning News. This one is run by Theodore Kim and Matthew Haag. This beatblog is focused on providing local coverage of the city of Plano, Texas.
• Again this beatblog is patterned after the pioneering work that Kent Fischer did with the DISD Blog. Many of the new beatblogs at the Morning News are trying to capture that same magic that Fischer had. Fischer and the DISD Blog are an excellent blueprint for how to do beatblogging well.
• Kim said, “By using the blog, we’ve been able to cover much more ground. The small stuff and the big stuff, the chicken dinners and the larger trend stories: We’re finding a place for all of it through regular features such as our daily Morning Jog and Bulletin Board. And people are responding.”
• The blog is allowing reporters to cover smaller topics. In the era of shrinking newspapers, beatblogs offer an opportunity for increased coverage, instead of diminished coverage due to a lack of space. Also, the Plano Blog is spurring conversations about the area and attracting residents to the Morning News brand.
• This is a hyperlocal effort of sorts, but instead of developing an entirely separate site ala Loundoun Extra, the Morning News has decided to hand two reporters a blog and tell them to provide in-depth coverage of a single geographic area. This is a less sexy option than other hyperlocal efforts, but early returns suggest it is working. And it’s the kind of effort that can be started in a matter of minutes, rather than months like big projects like Loundoun Extra require. A beatblog like this is a down and dirty way to provide innovative and new journalism to a community.

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BeatBlogging.Org’s funding runs out Sept. 1

Friends,

I regret to inform you that BeatBlogging.Org’s funding will be running out in about two months.

It has been a great ride. We’ve chronicled a lot innovative beat reporters and news organizations and have helped highlight best practices. I hope through the work that we have done that we have helped journalists learn how harness the power of social media, blogging and other Web tools to help improve beat reporting.

BeatBlogging.Org will not, however, be disappearing. There is still work to be done and innovation to be chronicled. BeatBlogging.Org is too strong of a brand to let die.

Unless a journalism non-profit or university steps up to bring BeatBlogging.Org in house, this project will most likely be going volunteer only. If it is the latter, I’ll obviously have a new day job, and if that is the case, I’ll need assistance in carrying out BeatBlogging.Org’s mission.

I’m asking for all of you to help me brainstorm what to do next with BeatBlogging.Org and the best way to move forward. Collectively we can figure out how to not only have BeatBlogging.Org survive but also thrive.

NYU’s Jay Rosen especially deserves a big thank you for coming up with the idea of BeatBlogging.Org and for also securing funding for the project. Rosen is one of the most innovative and forward thinking journalism professors around, and I’m eager to see what comes out of his new Studio 20 program.

As for me, I don’t know what I’ll be doing once BeatBlogging.Org’s funding runs out. Obviously, this a tough job market, but I hope to remain in journalism. Ideally, I’d love to remain focused on journalism next and helping to push journalism forward.

Even if that is not possible, rest assured that I will still be active within the journalism community through posts on BeatBlogging.Org, at Wired Journalists, my personal site and within the larger journalism community on the Web.

Thank you for all your help and support with this project. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to working on the Leaderboard.

Sincerely,

Patrick Thornton
Editor of BeatBlogging.Org

1 Comment

facebook, New York Times, Twitter, Yahoo

Tuesday Dose of social media: Even 100-year-olds are on Twitter & social media

Centenarians show it’s never too late to tweet — If someone 100 years old can use Twitter and social media, so can anyone. Hear that journalists:

Three percent of U.S. centenarians questioned in a new survey said they use the service that allows users to send short text messages, or tweets, of up to 140 characters at least once a week to keep in touch with their friends and family.

Another 10 percent sent emails to stay connected, 12 percent shared photos on the Internet and 4 percent downloaded music from the web.

Link from Yahoo breaks traffic records at New York Times — How does a Home & Garden story about bargain homes in undesirable locations set traffic records for a news organization? When that link comes from Yahoo!

Links are valuable. This story proves it:

Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper.

Now, the Times and other papers still haven’t figured out how to monetize these traffic spikes. That’s the next frontier.

Facebook to emulate Twitter’s follower model with profile fans — It appears that Facebook will be trying to emulate Twitter even more with followers, in addition to friends:

Could it be that you will soon be able to have followers, not just friends, on Facebook too? That definitely appears to be the case. Just take a look at your email notification settings for a little proof.

Notice something different? Look closely and you’ll see the new option to receive an email notification whenever another Facebook user “Connects to me as a fan.” In other words, Facebook followers, here we come.

WARNING: New Facebook scams today, junfunrun and bulitre — Here are the latest Facebook scams to be aware of. Be careful on Facebook when it comes to clicking on links! I received one of these scam links in a private message from someone I haven’t talked to in years. That was a pretty big tip off that it was in fact a scam (plus the message made no sense).

Use common sense on the Internet.

6 gorgeous Twitter visualizations — There are a lot of really cool ways to visualize Twitter and all its tweets, but my favorite might just be Just Landed:

Just Landed is a beautiful geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…”. It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they’ve landed in, and the location they were sent from, and shows all this on a 3D map of the world. For more information check out the author’s blog,blprnt.org.

Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

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community building, search.twitter.com, Twitter

How to attract followers on Twitter and build a useful network

Twitter’s power only becomes apparent to new users once they get some followers and find worthwhile people to follow.

Unfortunately, many people don’t know how to attract followers or build a community on Twitter. Without a good community of people that you are following and that are following you back, Twitter offers little value. But Twitter is a fantastic tool for journalists, content creators and just about anyone really, and that’s why if you take a little time to first build your own little community on Twitter, you’ll find much better results in the long run.

Twitter is a phenomenal powerful reporting tool. We have a tutorial that will help you learn how to use Twitter as a reporting tool.

Thankfully, it’s not hard to build a community on Twitter that will offer you real value. Always keep in mind that Twitter is not about you. It’s about being social. It’s about the community.

Here is a little guide to getting people to follow you:

1. Make your account complete before anything else — Don’t have a profile photo? Don’t list a real name? Don’t have any profile information? Then you’re not ready to attract followers. Have a profile photo, use your real name, link to your personal site/blog/company, write a thoughtful profile and pick a background that works for you. This must be done first if you want to be taken seriously on Twitter.
2. Join the community – If you’re using Twitter for work (or to talk about your favorite hobby or personal branding purposes or whatever), there is a specific community that you want to connect with (or should want to connect with). If you’re a education reporter in Baltimore, you want to connect with educators, school administrators, parents and students in the Baltimore area. These are the first people you should target to follow and engage with.
3. Find followers — Wait, isn’t this post about attracting followers, not following other people? Following relevant people is a good way to attract followers. Sites like WeFollow (a Twitter user directory) can help you find followers to get started and doing a few Google searches will help yield quality people to follow as well. If a colleague recommended joining Twitter, go through their friends list and follow relevant people on it. Once you start following people (and you enjoy their tweets), start looking through those users’ friends lists to find additional people to follow. The #followfriday hashtag isn’t a bad place to look for people to follow either. If someone you really enjoy following recommends someone, then that person is probably worth following too. Also, search.twitter.com is a good place to search for topics and find people to follow based on those topics. Here is a tutorial on getting the most out of search.twitter.com.
4. Don’t follow people blindly — Finding value on Twitter is all about building a quality community. If you indiscriminately follow people, your Twitter stream may be all but worthless to you. Back to our example, if you want to find value in the Baltimore education community, you should primarily follow people in that community.
5. Offer value — Perhaps even before you join the community and start following people, you need to begin offering value. It doesn’t matter if you have zero followers, because if you start following people before you offer value, they won’t follow back. If you want to enter the Baltimore education community, start tweeting links relevant to that community, ask questions and offer some of your thoughts on education in the Baltimore area. That way when people come across your page, they’ll know what you’re about and will be much more inclined to follow you.
6. Start discussions – Once you’ve joined a community, started following relevant people and started offering value, it’s time to start conversations. Twitter is a social media site. You need to be social. One of the best ways to be social on Twitter is to start discussions. Ask questions and respond to @replies.
7. Be social — Starting discussions is part of being social, but it takes more than that. Monitor your Twitter stream and engage people when they say something interesting or link to something worthwhile. The @reply is your friend. Don’t be afraid to have back and forth exchanges on Twitter. It enriches everyone’s experience. And retweeting (RT) is fine as long as your retweeting something of value (especially to your followers). Better yet, add your own take to that RT. But be judicious with RTs, because too many RTs — especially those of dubious quality — will not please your followers.
8. Don’t just be about yourself — One of the biggest traps people fall into (especially those coming from traditional, one-way media) is that they make their Twitter account all about themselves. These people just link to their existing content (such as newspaper stories they’ve just written). Others just talk about themselves. People who are all about themselves rarely, if ever, interact with other people on Twitter and don’t understand that social media is all about being social. Unless you are Oprah or someone similar, you need to interact. Otherwise, you’ll never have a chance of building a worthwhile network on Twitter. Is you’re not prepared to give something to the community on Twitter, you will not find success on Twitter. It’s that simple.

If you find this post of value, you might find my Twitter account, @jiconoclast, of value too.

1 Comment

Kindle, mobile video, Shaq, smartphones, YouTube

Thursday Dose of social media: YouTube mobile uploads exploding

YouTube Mobile Uploads Up 400% Since iPhone 3GS Launch — We said that the iPhone 3G S was a game changer and early returns support that. The 3G S makes it so incredibly easy to shoot, edit and upload video on the go. It might just be a must-have tool for mobile journalists.

YouTube has seen an explosion of mobile uploads in the last year, and this trend appears to be picking up. If journalists don’t get in on the action now, they risk being supplanted by citizens with mobile phones really fast. Look at Iran, most of the video coming out of there is from mobile devices.

Expect mobile phones with 3G s-like capabilities to become the norm in the coming years.

Nielsen: Teens Spend Much Less Time On The Web Than Older People – Adults spend more time online than teens. Teens apparently really like TV and are watching more of it than ever.

So what does this all mean for journalists? Adults, the people with disposable money, really like the Internet. That key 18-49 demographic? They’re all about the Interwebs. It’s not tomorrow’s readers, but rather today’s readers that are flocking to the Web in droves.

The Real Genius Of The Kindle? The Return Of ‘Unitasking’ — “When’s the last time you did only one thing at a time? If you’re reading this—particularly if you’re in the news or content business—there’s a good chance you’ll have trouble answering that question.

But one new technology is taking consumers in the opposite direction, and I’ve found it has unexpectedly helped me reclaim control of my attention span. It’s the Kindle. Unlike most digital devices, Amazon.com’s e-reader makes it difficult to multitask.”

This is an excellent argument for the power of the Kindle. Journalists are struggling on the Web, because the Web naturally takes advantage of people’s willingness to multitask. But the Kindle isn’t a multitasking device, and it has the ability to get people to spend more time with a single kind of content.

That is surprisingly powerful.

Did Shaq Just Find Out He Was Traded On Twitter? — I can’t say if Shaq 100 percent found out he was traded via Twitter, but that’s what it sure looks like.

Twitter is breaking news left and right.

Story of Neda’s Death Reveals 7 Elements of Next-Step Journalism — This is a great read about how pros and amateurs can work together to report news. And even though average citizens are able to report more and more, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for professional journalists.

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