Almighty Link

There was a time when reporters worked hard to write stories that editors chose to appear on the  front page of a newspaper. But the front page isn’t what it once was.

1. For microbloggers getting most of their news from Twitter, the front page is wrapped in 140 characters (with links bringing them to the full story).
2. For old friends who count on former classmates and colleagues for newsworthy links, the front page is a Facebook stream (with links bringing them to the full story).
3. For the student using search engines to find information, the front page is the first page of search results is the front page (with links bringing them to the full story).
4. For digital nomads who rely on alerts to deliver timely news, the front page is a short text message on a phone (with links bringing them to the full story).
5. For people relaxing with their new tablet, the front page might be an app like Flipboard (with links bringing them to the full story).
6. For news junkies living on the cloud, the front page might be a group of RSS feeds displayed by Google Reader (with links bringing them to the full story).
7. For time shifters like me, the front page might be a list of headlines gathered througout the day and saved on Instapaper (with links bringing them to the full story).

With all of these ways that people get their news and information – not to mention my6sense, paper.li and umpteen other services – journalists have more opportunity than ever to appear on front pages. The best part is that these are front pages for very customized publications where people get only the news that they’ve either chosen to follow or actively sought.

Image by “whurley” via Flickr

Recently, a colleague mentioned that he thinks increasing page views is different from growing an audience. He’s right. Here are a few definitions of the phrase “page view” and the word audience.

Audience: One Merriam-Webster definition of audience is “a reading, viewing, or listening public.” Dictionary.com defines audience as “the persons reached by a book, radio or television broadcast, etc.”

Page view: Google defines a page view as “an instance of a page being loaded by a browser.” The Wikipedia definition is “a request to load a single HTML file (‘page’) of an Internet site.”

So page views measure how many times a page has been requested or loaded, regardless of how many many people (an audience) made those requests.

Imagine each reader as a diner in a restaurant, and each page as a menu item. One person could visit three times a day and consume three hearty investigative reports. She is still one diner. Maybe another patron really likes tasty pictures, and orders 20 of them in one sitting. He is still one person.

But that restaurant analogy only represents one part of a reading audience. What if one person reads three of your articles on his tablet, skims two of your blog posts on his mobile phone, glances over one of your tweets on his work computer and enjoys three of your pictures on his personal laptop. Although he has looked at nine pieces of content – three of which aren’t traditional “pages” – he is still one person.

So if not page views, what do you use to measure your audience? Leave your comments below.

Oh, and make sure to read these important posts about page views as a metric.

• News Media that use Galleries to increase Page-views don’t increase Time-spent (Attention)
• Gawker Gives Up Pageview Addiction, Quickly Picks Up a Monthly Uniques Habit
• Page views: bad metric #3
• Page view metrics? Bah, humbug!
• Measuring Visitor Engagement Take Two: Unique Visitors and Page Views
• The Death of the Pageview

Image courtesy of Stuart Mudie via Flickr.

Bit.ly can help you track how many times people click on links you’ve shared on social networks, and Klout can measure how much “influence” you have online, but if you’re a journalist here are seven other numbers you might want to consider. Sorry, I don’t know of any advanced system to track these metrics, but an old-fashioned notepad or Google Docs can work.

1. How many story ideas were inspired by messages you read on Twitter or Facebook?
2. How many sourced did you find on social networks?
3. How many questions did you answer for people on social networks?
4. How many experts answered your questions on social networks?
5. How many times did people reshare or retweet your message?
6. How many of the people you follow actively discuss the topic you cover?
7. How many of your followers actively discuss the topic you cover?

If you liked this, you might find these posts on other sites useful.

• How journalists are using metrics to track the success of tweets
• Social Media Assignment: Free Metric and Measurement Tools

Image courtesy of ‘David K K‘ via Flickr.

I’m at #SMMOC and conducting an experiment with unique content and search engine results. The assumption is that not too many people have covered tangerine whiteboards.

If I actually knew something about tangerine whiteboards then this is where I would write about that topic. Let’s pretend that most whiteboards come in other fruit varieties. If many blogs have already talked about apple whiteboards and orange whiteboards, then a blog post of tangerine whiteboards might be in high demand.

So the theory is that writing unique content will make your blog post rise to the top of search engine results when people search for that unique content. Here is the process:

1. Write the blog post
2. Hope that Google crawls this page within the next 60 minutes
3. Search for tangerine whiteboards in Google
4. Pray that this post comes up near the top of the search engine result page