Alert Blog Reviews

2009 cannot be over quick enough for the newspaper business. The year was full of bad news, followed by worse news, which in some cases, ended in business ending news. The prognosis for the future is not real rosy either so what can the reeling industry do? One thing is to erect pay walls but we’ve heard enough on that one. One thing that the industry can do is embrace social media and in particular, Twitter, to get the attention of the digitally inclined. The Bivings Report decided to do conduct an imperfect study of the use of Twitter by the newspaper industry. To their credit The Bivings Report themselves noted that the study was imperfect which shows some considerable integrity and makes their findings of greater interest to someone like myself. Their blog states: …..we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter. Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often and the manner in which the accounts are updated and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion. So the results are just that: thought provoking. Here is a sample. Only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website – A head scratcher for sure. Why wouldn’t you promote your use of Twitter? 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website – Another curious thing since most major newspapers can have several accounts for individual reporters etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to make it easy t find these people. The study noted that the LA Times does a nice job of this . The average account has 3,447 followers if you removed 4 statistical outliers who had over 100,000 followers. Include the outliers and the average jumps to over 17,000 per account. Gotta love statistics! The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture, The Denver Post’s Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald). 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The findings also showed that the interactivity of the newspaper Twitter users was not very high but it also was not completely void. The fear of most is that the newspapers were simply automating tweets but that didn’t appear to be the case. So this certainly shows some areas of hope for newspapers since they seem to be adopting Twitter as a resource to reach potential readers. It also shows that there is a ways to go before the full impact of a service like Twitter may be felt in the newspaper industry. Do you follow any newspapers? Do you care to do so if you are not currently? What would be your expectation of a newspaper’s Twitter feed? Give us your opinions as quickly as possible so we can put the print edition of Marketing Pilgrim to bed. Oh that’s right, we don’t do that. Sorry.

See the original post here:
How Newspapers Use Twitter

Is this a classic case of “meet the new boss, it’s the same as the old boss” (hat tip to Roger Daltrey and the boys)? It is being revealed that AOL has a plan to bring itself back to prominence and it is oddly reminiscent of the company’s past AND its CEO’s past as well. How you ask? Well, apparently there is a concerted effort underway to generate as much ‘craptent’ (that’s crappy content for those of you who need an assist) as possible to try to gain some ground in the search engine results. Techdirt has a little fun in helping us remember the days of mailboxes full of AOL CDs . How patently ‘ungreen’ of AOL. I don’t miss those days, do you? Remember how AOL first became “famous”? It cluttered the world (and our garbage dumps) with millions upon millions of CD-ROMs offering “try AOL for free!” It seems that pollution is in AOL’s genes, and it just can’t get away from it. How else to explain AOL’s new plan to rebuild its brand: to flood the internet with poorly written, but quickly written, content based on whatever search terms are hot . Danny Sullivan points out the amusing fact that AOL is looking to leverage search engines for more traffic this way, at the very same time as others, such as Rupert Murdoch, are claiming that Google is “stealing” from him in sending traffic, and he’s considering opting-out . So that addresses the company’s past, now let’s take a look at Tim Armstrong’s history before he became the Google Golden Boy which then landed him at the head of AOL. An article from ClickZ back in March brings to the fore an interesting piece of data that Armstrong seems to want to forget happened but he apparently isn’t afraid to apply some of the tricks he learned. It is widely recognized that Associated Content was the master of ‘craptent’ generation for search engine gain. Earlier this year it looked like Armstrong was looking to be at arm’s length with that fact. Associated Content has been criticized for helping to fuel poor-quality Web content, but is it rewriting history, too? Since Tim Armstrong, once touted as co-founder of AC, has been making headlines for ditching Google to take the CEO role at AOL , I figured I’d poke around the AC site and see what his affiliation with the firm is currently. Well, lo and behold, Armstrong’s name seems to have been scrubbed from the corporate info on the site. Once more than willing to broadcast that Armstrong was a co-founder of AC, the company’s site currently states, “Associated Content was founded by Luke Beatty in Denver, Colorado, in 2005.” I guess Armstrong went back in time and disassociated himself. Armstrong held a board position with Associated Content until March 2008 but as of the writing of that article back in March of this year he was still a an “active investor” according to a company spokesperson. So it seems that Mr. Armstrong is determined to keep the word associated in his bio, as in he may still be associated with developing crappy content to get search results. You think his time at Google taught him a thing or two? I guess we’ll see. That is if we can wade through the dreck that AOL is looking to offer to the masses. Good luck with that “strategery” which many are already bemoaning. Effectively, it’s a plan based on adding crap into the system to trick search engines. It’s pollution and web spam as a business model. But as folks like Umair Haque are fond of pointing out, business models based on tricking people and not adding any real value aren’t business models that will last. Ouch.

Go here to read the rest:
AOL’s SEO “Strategery”