Media Transparent » Breaking News

Twylah, Twitter, News and SEO

Pat Kitano — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:16:30 +0000

Twylah is a service that aggregates a Twitter feed and compiles the articles they link into a Flipboard like display. Many reviewers have explained the mechanics of Twylah in far more detail than I can:

Robert Scoble: “Twylah lets media brands and celebrities monetize their Twitter stream”
Neal Schaffer: “Twitter SEO? Think Twylah“

We’ve been working together with Eric Kim, CEO, and Twylah to create “breaking news” Twylah pages for the Twitter feeds across our 300+ city Breaking News Network. These Twylah rendered pages are subdomains of our Breaking News cities, and can be viewed on many of our Breaking News cities by including the subdomain title “news” preceding the Breaking News URL, such as news.breakingsfnews.com.

The current iteration of Twylah pages sit separately from our Breaking News websites and don’t have a direct link to the website itself, only the Twitter feed. We’ve been waiting for Twylah to unveil their embed system so we can embed the page directly to the site itself. Thus, all of these subdomain pages are completely hidden, findable right now only through search engines.

So our experiment simply measures how Twylah performs to drive search engine traffic based on breaking news to hidden Twylah pages. Here are the results:

Approaching 900 uniques per day

Number of Google indexes over span of 3 months for selected news sites:

news.breakingtorontonews.com/	21,900
news.breakingtwincitiesnews.com/	31,200
news.breakingsfnews.com/	23,600
news.breakingchinews.com/	30,900
news.buzzincolumbus.com/	23,500

CONCLUSIONS:

It’s well documented that Twitter has become the leading social media for broadcasting “breaking news” nationally and locally. People constantly search for breaking news about a city. Twylah’s service allows breaking news tweets to be indexed and discoverable persistently, not forgotten as most tweets are (according to bit.ly, the average half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours). Simply put, Twylah delivers organic traffic from sets of older tweets even when the pages it directs to are hidden (and therefore not discoverable by any other means).
Twylah automatically facilitates conversations around brands. Through Twitter, we can curate the key influencers associated with a brand and, through Twylah, deliver their commentary to an audience who wants this information in a coherent published format. For example, a well curated Twylah page can deliver real time information about specific movie openings by aggregating content from the media, arts and events publishers on Twitter whose use Twitter to monitor movies. Moreover, on the Breaking News Network, every city already has a set of curated local influencers across a variety of topics, so it’s possible now to develop hyperlocal Twylah channels devoted to movies, the arts, sports, or any other topic. This approach to hyperlocal branding is still in its infancy, and we’ll be focusing on this subject extensively over the next few articles.
Twylah, via Twitter, delivers a broadcast solution to brands that other social networks can’t. Eric Kim states: “We are targeting Twitter publishers (brands and personal brands), who consistently create and curate valuable content on any topic.” This type of “broadcast” branding is where Twitter excels over Facebook, which seems to moving towards developing its news feeds favoring personal transparency over commercial branding. It is especially powerful for delivering ticker tapes of breaking news and media feeds that wouldn’t be as effectively distributed across platforms like Facebook where such news might be perceived as excessive.

Hyperlocal media as a free community service could disrupt advertising models

Pat Kitano — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:38:13 +0000

The classic, and perhaps only business model supporting hyperlocal journalistic efforts like Patch.com and other local media is local advertising. On StreetFightMag.com last week, Ted Mann, Digital Development Director for Gannett NJ, discusses why Gannett’s hyperlocal experiment InJersey.com failed. The main and obvious reason is simply local advertising cannot adequately cover expenses. So…

What if local media were positioned as a community service without the advertising model?

Can hyperlocal media thrive and engage the community as a good will service?

1. The value of hyperlocal is in the information

I paraphrase from Alex Salkever’s June 24 article Hyperlocal’s Automated Future. The website platform and curation tools now exist for any individual or business to develop local media cheaply. A WordPress blog is an easily customized platform for anchoring the news system. Curation and aggregation tools, plus hyperlocal social applications like See Click Fix can provide a panoply of local interest content.

Although still an immature technology, an automated news aggregation and publication service like paper.li or Twylah can be embedded to display in newsprint “Flipboard” format.

2. It’s not just the website… hyperlocal spans across social and mobile media

A community media service must now span across all social media for hyperlocal engagement. Twitter, a perfect media for broadcasting real time local news, can be used to curate the best local Twitter feeds into lists.

Facebook is becoming the arena where the locals will gather to discuss local news, events, even the Daily Deals around town. (Ted Mann’s point #9 – use Facebook as the local watering hole). The social “metrics” for engagement are high for local news:

3. Partner with everyone

Ted Mann’s #4 recommendation for developing hyperlocal content. Companies developing applications serving hyperlocal audiences, like SeeClickFix above, want to partner with local publishers to gain traction. Local publishers want to partner with new application developers to deliver unique local content to their audience. It’s mutually beneficial to overlay new social content, even social commerce applications across national hyperlocal networks. Even better if there is a business model associated with the application for revenue share opportunities between publisher and application provider. One long term mission of a national community service network is to create exposure for a variety of social hyperlocal applications that would not normally get exposure from traditional media.

4. Support the business community

Local businesses are integral to engaging the community because they have the commercial incentive to create content that helps to publicize their business, directly or indirectly. Local food critics own restaurants, real estate columnists are Realtors. Yet, the classic advertising model forces them on the sidelines because that kind of publicity has tangible dollar value that traditional publishers need to extract. So why not support the business community by embedding the most compelling websites and blogs of local merchants into hyperlocal media as content free of charge?

A full website presence has far greater utility for the featured businesses and for the reader than a tiny banner ad selling at $500-1,000 per month. Engage the business community, and they will make the effort to engage locals because 1) it’s free to them, and 2) it’s their marketing vehicle.

5. What is the business model anyway?

Hyperlocal media systems like Breaking News are easy and cheap (often less than the cost of a one-month banner ad) to develop for individuals and groups wanting to create a community media presence in their city. The business model for the owner is not to make money, but to serve the community and be positioned as a local media star in order to enhance the business development prospects of their “day job”. It’s the same rationale for serving as a Chamber of Commerce president, or even 50 years ago, starting your own local newspaper; it just helps your career. The owner of the community media service pays it forward.

6. What is the impact of hyperlocal media as community service?

The greater impact of the community media service model may be disruptive. The perpetual discussions revolving around how to monetize local journalism have yet to point to a cashflow positive solution. An automated media model that requires few resources and supports the local business community can put pressure on traditional local publishing models. Yes, the content is curated, aggregated and automated, but it’s real time local information that readers want. In time, the new social local applications now being developed can be easily added to supplement the information stream and generate the local engagement needed to survive, even prosper within the hyperlocal media landscape.

Reference:

The Breaking News Network, a community service network

View more presentations from Pat Kitano

Geolocation spurs the commercial social media

Pat Kitano — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:33:31 +0000

Get ready for the commercial social media...

———————–

The latest Facebook metrics are powerful: 400 million active users (7% of the world), 50% of them logging on each day and spending more than 55 minutes daily on Facebook.

The sudden concentration of traffic on the social media led by Facebook has caught business by surprise. In particular, small and local businesses don’t quite realize their consumer is now spending a majority of their time on the social media, but they continue to rely on the old online standard: their website. Websites and blogs are critical as marketing collateral, but local businesses need to develop an online marketing presence that spans across the social media ubiquitously.

With all the buzz around Foursquare and Gowalla, why is hyperlocal media suddenly hot? Geolocation is changing the social media by providing nothing more than the tagging mechanism to define social networks by localities. Geolocation facilitates the development of a new, more practical, more intimate Twitter/Foursquare network of friends who just happen to be living down the street. It’s far more compelling to build a social network of folks you can have coffee with than the national networks than generally evolve in Twitter and Linkedin. I myself see this… I am starting to socialize with San Franciscans…

The Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunity

So we’re seeing social apps like Twitter and Yelp quickly adopting location “check-in” functionality, with Facebook in the wings. And this presents a huge opportunity. It’s a no-brainer for local retailers and businesses to see that they need to provide the most effective online venue for their local customers to “check-in” to. The new local “websites” are the Facebook business page, the new local advertising vehicle is the Twitter coupon, and the new reviews column is Yelp.

You haven’t seen them yet, but Facebook is primed to evolve into a massive Sunday advertising circular for local businesses:

And why not? It’s free. Enterprising local media publishers (for example, Breaking News sites) will curate and compile these merchants into local online directories.

Twitter will develop hyperlocal couponing systems that will be online equivalents of PennySaver coupons and Valpak:

And why not? It’s free. Couponing is effective because it is perceived by consumers as “found money” while straight advertising may now be considered “spammy”. You’ll see the advent of new local social media based advertising agencies that will create turnkey Twitter / Facebook / Foursquare couponing campaigns for merchants. And these campaigns will be accepted because online data is more efficient for tracking and analysis than traditional advertising channels like radio / TV or inefficient direct mail offerings like PennySaver. There is a defined ROI.

Conclusion

2009 was the year when the masses found Twitter and Facebook. 2010 will be the year when local business begins to recognize the power of leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare et al to achieve a level of community engagement that standard “one-way message” advertising can’t achieve. It’s about being ubiquitous across the social media so your community of customers can find your services via their preferred channels – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Related slideshow: Ubiquity marketing (Jan. 2010)

Related webinar: I’ll be discussing “The Impact of Geolocational Media” on the Virtual Bar Camp April 6 at 2:15pm, Room #4. Register and join our discussion.

Hyperlocal Advertising Model using Twitter Couponing

Pat Kitano — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:47:29 +0000

Hyperlocal Advertising Model using Twitter Couponing

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

Being first to break local news has its rewards – eyeballs

Pat Kitano — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:06:44 +0000

Based on the web statistics presented in the previous slideshow, I’ve been asked for reasons why breaking local news receives 15+ clickthroughs per tweet across Breaking News Network city sites. With a little analysis, we discovered that the Breaking News sites are generally the first to tweet out a newly published article from local news media sources.

A Breaking News Twitter feed like @breakingsfnews automatically configures the RSS feed from the local news source SFGate.com into a tweet. Tweetmeme and other influential Twitter news aggregation sources recognizes @breakingsfnews as the first tweeter, and subsequent retweets add to @breakingsfnews’s clickthrough total.

Getting the story first is key to news organ credibility. Tech blogs fight to get their gadget story out first. Digg aficionados try to post public interest articles on Digg first to gain recognition. It’s all about attracting reader traffic.

Breaking News Twitter feeds automatically “break” local news first from various sources like an AP syndication system. This has compelling web traffic implications for curated breaking news, particularly on the hyperlocal level where online local syndication is still not practiced as is done on a national level like Huffington Post. In fact, many local publishers purposefully don’t publish RSS feeds so their content can’t be syndicated.

The Powerful Web Traffic Profile of Local Breaking News in a Community

Pat Kitano — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:40:49 +0000

We recently experimented with broadcasting local breaking news across various social media channels including Twitter and Facebook.

This slideshow reports web traffic results that confirm in part:

the demand for local breaking news in a city is powerful. Everybody wants to know what is going on in real time and local publishing organs are focusing more on journalistic content over “real time Web” content.
breaking news for a city is easily found and followed by locals on Twitter and Facebook
local media properties that broadcast real time news across social media channels not only attract local traffic, but also well with search engines
local media properties that automatically deliver real time news grow in web traffic with little promotion

The Powerful Web Traffic Profile of Breaking News in a Community

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

The sea change in brand management within the social media

Pat Kitano — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:46:45 +0000

The title of this blog post took me a long time to figure out, and it still seems a bit off.

Simply put, the social media rewards value and service, and devalues self promotion and advertising. Up to now, most social media marketing methods simply wrap traditional push marketing methods into a new package. Facebook fan pages and Twitter broadcasting deals replicate websites and coupon advertising. In this new age of social media, push marketing appears obvious and may detract from the marketing intent. We’ve been advocating that entrepreneurial business people focus more on delivering valuable services to their community to attract business opportunities. One way to do this is to create local media resources.

The following slideshow describes how to create a new local media brand that leverages the many channels of the social media. The concept is simple: online media brands no longer reside solely on TV, on a website or as a Facebook page. Media brands now span all the channels of traditional and social media. Any local media property that delivers content across a panoply of channels becomes “ubiquitous” to the community. You’re always found. And if you or your company are behind the media brand, you benefit from association.

Social media reinforces the concept of branding because your brand is judged by what you do and who you are online. This couldn’t happen ten years ago, you would have needed to advertise who you were and what you did.

Ubiquity Marketing

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

Slideshow: Upgrading a Breaking News City site using Twitter List Widgets

Pat Kitano — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:09:43 +0000

This slideshow is a more elegant follow up instructional guide to embedding Twitter List widgets into a Breaking News city site that I discussed in the previous article regarding building community news resource sites. You can see examples of Breaking News city sites for SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, London and many other cities listed on the right sidebars of these city sites.

Upgrading Breaking News City Sites with Twitter List Widgets

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

Building a Breaking Community News website with Twitter Lists

Pat Kitano — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:18:25 +0000

Two weeks ago, we showed you how to build a dynamic community news resource in one hour on Twitter. Today we’ll show you how to use Twitter List widgets to build dynamic community news resource website that aggregate and display the best local Twitter feeds.

1. Best is to start with an existing Breaking News Network site.

2. First, build a Twitter List of the best local Twitter news feeds. Then build separate lists for Events, Sports, Shopping, Foodie, etc.

3. Configure each Twitter List with a widget at http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_list

4. Configure the appearance and display features

5. Configure the widget size for your Breaking News site or blog.

6. Embed the widget into the page of the Breaking News site using html cut & paste.

7. Breaking Seattle News.com has many of its categories using Twitter List widgets:

8. Breaking News sites are community resource websites that work complementary with their accompanying Twitter feeds:

9. This Community Engagement strategy positions the builder of these sites and Twitter feeds as a community media source.

TV returns to live broadcasting 50′s style with Jay Leno

Pat Kitano — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:47:32 +0000

This week’s Time declares on its front cover ” Jay Leno is the Future of TV”. By parading Jay’s new show at 10:00 to compete with expensively produced dramas like CSI: Miami and other scripted shows, NBC is beta testing whether live content will be as attractive as or more cost effective than canned content.

What’s the revolution? PC monitors are already used like TVs for on-demand programming. Add time-shifting digital video services and Tivo, and it’s notable that TV no longer can provide instant programming gratification with the touch of the ON switch. Canned programming is more efficiently watched by time-shifting to one’s own schedule.

So what is TV good for? Real time news… breaking news… sports… programming relevant to the here and now. Jay Leno will break the mold to see whether a TV audience will tune into live programming just because it is not canned. If it works, the cost of paying Jay Leno playing talk show host for 5 hours per week is a magnitude lower than producing a series of 5 one-hour dramas. If it works, scripted content will go direct to big screen, YouTube or Hulu, and TV will be littered with sports, talk shows, news shows, reality shows and talent shows, all designed to force people to set an alarm to watch them. Then social media converges with TV because everybody sitting on their coaches watching a national football game or Dancing with the Stars can participate live with others, and make that experience relevant to their lives.

Conclusion: PCs became TV proxies, and now TV is going the route of emulating the real time relevancy of PCs. This is simply a manifestation of media convergence; in fact, it’s cross-convergence.