Cheryl Morris

The Best Way to Share News on Twitter

People use Twitter in a number of ways, from promoting their business or carving out a personality to talking with friends and staying on top of what favorite celebs and brands are doing. Regardless of why you’re on Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ve sent out a link to a news article or blog post. In fact, 12% of tweets are just this. Pinyadda makes sharing news to Twitter easy, saving you time and giving you the most control over however you want to flavor your tweets.

Here’s why Pinyadda is the best way to share news on Twitter, including examples from our community:

Know the best articles and blog posts to share

Pinyadda is like your personal assistant for news and information. Instead of having to go site-to-site or do searches (and often dig) for the news and blog posts that you want to click on, Pinyadda sifts through the firehose of content for you and collects the articles and posts you’re most likely interested in. Pinyadda serves the good stuff to you in real-time, filing each article as it’s published into clean pages you can browse based on topics, sites and people you follow (click for a quick 30-sec video overview).

With Pinyadda, you know the articles you’ll be into sharing to Twitter without lifting a finger:

  • Want to tweet about news on a particular topic? Go to that topic page and see articles being published about it from sites across the web on everything from your city or favorite sports team to things like celebrities, food, social media, autos or green tech.
  • Want to tweet articles from your go-to sites? View a feed of what’s been published most recently from all your favorites, and if you have one site in mind go to it’s individual feed page. (Tip: Here you can even tell Pinyadda to show you only articles published from a few sections of that site. It’s great for big sites like Boston.com where you may only be interested in a couple sections, like sports and events.)
  • Want to share an article that lots of people are talking about? Go to your Home feed to see what articles people you follow are sharing (we call it pinning). You can also toggle to the “All People” feed to see what’s buzzing in the whole community on Pinyadda — lots of people use Pinyadda like a digital water cooler to share and discuss articles with groups of friends and colleagues, so you can always find great stuff.

Craft engaging news-related tweets

Since people use Twitter for different reasons, we designed Pinyadda’s integration with it with flexibility top of mind. This way you stay in the drivers seat of your voice and can mold your tweets as you like. Here are examples of some of the most effective ways to share all the news goodness on Pinyadda to Twitter:

  1. Share a headline. This is the most basic way to share news to your Twitter followers. Just copy and paste the headline from the feed into the comment box. It’s straightforward, easy, and gets the news out quickly to your followers. (Tip: If you you want to legitimize the source of the link, include its Twitter handle, e.g. I know Boston.com is @bostonupdate.)
  2. Share a quote, main point, question, or data point from the article. These are great ways to shake up how you share news articles to Twitter. These often grab your followers attention better than a straight headline, and shows you’re putting some TLC into your tweets.
  3. Add value to the article by including your own commentary. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, opinions, or simply add some humor to the news you share with your followers.
  4. Direct an article to a Twitter follower. Often when we read an article we think of someone – be it an inside joke, something that will help them in their job, or is relevant to other aspects of their lives. If the person you’re thinking of isn’t as ahead of the curve as you and on Pinyadda too, include their Twitter handle at the beginning. (Better yet, invite them to Pinyadda!)
  5. Share a discussion to Twitter. If you’re part of or come across a great discussion on an article on Pinyadda that your followers on Twitter would like, simply enter  something like “check out this great discussion about X” when sharing the link to Twitter. (Tip: Combining #4 and #5 is killer if you know someone’s really into a subject,e.g. tweeting “thought you’d want in on this convo.”)
  6. Promote a site you think is great. If you come across a site on Pinyadda you want your Twitter followers to know about, simply visit that site’s page and click on the big blue “share this site” button. You can even customize the message you want to tweet out with it.
  7. Share your profile on Pinyadda to Twitter. Want people to know what topics and sites you follow, how many followers you’ve gained, and what you’ve pinned on Pinyadda? (We like to call this your news graph.) Simply tweet out the URL to your Pinyadda profile or include it in your Twitter bio.
  8. Share your Yadda shwag to boost your cred on Twitter. Pinyadda’s points system allows you to compete to earn coveted spots as the “Maven” of topics or “Ambassadors” of your favorite sites. You can also unlock fun badges (some even have coupon codes attached) just for pinning the news you’re into. For example, we teamed up with the marketing gurus over at Hubspot and you can earn their Inbound Marketing Ninja badge set by pinning inbound marketing news. You can share all this cred by clicking on what you’ve earned from your profile. Want to be the Maven of Twitter?  Sounds like it’s time to get your yadda on!

Connecting Pinyadda to your Twitter account is easy.

Connecting Pinyadda with your Twitter account is simple. Choose an article you want to tweet, enter text you’d like to tweet in the comment box, select the Twitter checkbox, and hit the “Pin it” button (click here for a 30-second video). If it’s your first time doing this you’ll be prompted with a pop-up to enter your Twitter username and password. Once that’s done, the text in the comment box and a unique short URL will hit your Twitter feed.

When one of your Twitter followers clicks on the link, they’ll be brought to a page with the article. If the text you entered in the comment box exceed Twitter’s 140 character limit, Pinyadda automatically truncates. Rest assured, because when your Twitter followers click the URL they’ll see your full comment.

To manage your Twitter account on Pinyadda, visit the Contacts tab of your settings. There you can even see who out of the people you follow on Twitter are also on Pinyadda.

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Do you have other examples of great ways to share news to Twitter?  How can we make sharing links to Twitter better for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Kevin McCarthy

Wikileaks Media Data

So I asked Austin to write an intro for this piece.  He said “No”.  Then Chase and Cheryl laughed.  Then Greg said that the internet was everywhere.  So, in light of all of this, I’ve decided to forgo a introduction and just jump into some data revolving around the latest Wikileaks shenanigans.

First off, what’s the deal with Wikileaks recently and why is it being talked about everywhere?  To get a good snapshot on what is going on, I searched for the most popular words in articles about Wikileaks from the Pinyadda index.

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Chase Garbarino

3 Things the News Media Industry Should Learn From #Leanstartup & @SeanEllis

For those of you who don’t live in the echo chamber of internet startups, over the past year or two there has been a movement called the “Lean Startup” which has been all the rage amongst entrepreneurs and developers trying to create the next Facebook, Twitter or Google.  Eric Ries, the leader of the lean startup philosophy, has outlined a set of processes to efficiently develop web products and effectively measure the minimum viable product (MVP) for adoption in market at a low, “lean” cost.  Sean Ellis, a serial web startup marketer, writes arguably the best blog on this topic and has developed a number of strategies for measuring the key metrics to determine whether you’ve got your MVP.

As I’ve mentioned before, we are all about helping publishers succeed online, so I wanted to share the 3 things I think online news sites and bloggers could take from the lean startup philosophy that could help their businesses:

1. Don’t write a single sentence of a post/article without talking to potential readers – Both Ellis and Ries stress the importance of testing the market for a web app before wasting the time of writing any code.  There is no reason journalists and bloggers should be any different.  Before starting a blog or new media property, create a simple landing page through Google docs with a description of the content you will be creating with an email form for interested users to fill out so you can notify them when you launch.  You can simply email the link to the page to people you think may be interested, post the link on social networks or even buy some Google AdWords for targeted keywords relevant to your content type.  From the number of people who fill out the form, you will be able to get a small sample size of early reader’s you can speak to about the direction of the blog that will give you some good data on your target audience.

2. Test several content types and then kill some – Ellis and Ries are big advocates of killing features early in a products lifecycle in order to develop the “Minimum viable product” for adoption in market.  Assuming you see some demand for the general topic you plan to cover, next you should develop several different content types you intend on creating on your site.  For example, some content types might include opinion/analysis pieces, list posts (i.e. top 10’s), summaries or reviews, etc.  Once you have created one or two items for each content type, ship them off to the users who expressed interest in your content type and see which type users like the best.  You should be able to tell from certain metrics (clicks, comments, link backs, retweets/pins, etc.) and from speaking to users what the minimum viable content types for a site would be to continue to retain them as readers.

3. Published doesn’t mean complete, optimize and iterate quickly - If a developer finished writing the code and designing his app, opened it for users and then didn’t continue to improve upon the product after it were live, they probably wouldn’t be very successful.  Now that we are no longer restricted to printing stories permanently on paper, there is no reason we shouldn’t iterate on our content after it is published online and we have been able to collect some data about how readers are taking to that piece of content.  Some of the simplest metrics we can gather to test how a piece of content is performing are click-through rates, time on page and bounce rates.  If an article isn’t getting clicks or retweets, trying changing its title on the fly.  Here is a great example of how the HuffingtonPost A/B tests their headlines in real-time.

These are just a few of the principles we can apply to help us create successful online content.  Are you a practitioner of the lean startup methodology?  Have suggestions for how this can be applied to online news and journalism?  Share them with us in the comments below!

Cheryl Morris

No User Left Behind: Sam Butcher

“Pinyadda collects the news from the sources that I usually use and also brings me new sources that I did not know about.  It’s much faster and more efficient than stealing the paper from my boss.

This week in no user left behind we’re happy to spotlight Sam Butcher. Contrary to Sam’s profile photo, he’s  not a Pinyadda Rookie by any stretch of the road; he’s been using Pinyadda since last fall, contributing to our growth and certainly the development of our community ever since. An environmental consultant, you’ll find Sam spreading his knowledge through pins on everything from China’s carbon emissions to new “peel and stick” solar panels. Here’s how and why Sam has been on Pinyadda all this time:

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Kevin McCarthy

ProBlogger vs. Copyblogger: Sites to Follow to be a Better Blogger

*Author’s update:  the Compete.com data should be dismissed.  Darren Rowse of Problogger states that his site receives upwards of 500,000 uniques, not the 28,000 uniques as reported by Compete.com.  Shame on me for trusting Compete.com.  Anyone have a (much) better public web traffic tool?

There are many, many sites that produce helpful content for bloggers.  How does a blogger determine which blog is right for them?  To help out our readers who blog themselves, I figured I’d dive deep into two blogs that have been indexed by Pinyadda for over 6 months: ProBlogger.net (PB) and Copyblogger.com (CB).

Since June 1st, here is some data for both PB and CB:

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Austin Gardner-Smith

News Industry Roundup: Gannet Pulls the Plug, WikiLeaks Rocks the Boat, and Mad Men’s Need for Newspapers

Despite being the midst of the summer doldrums, the last week in the news industry has been relatively eventful. WikiLeaks provided us with plenty of fodder for discussion about the place of anonymity in new journalism, Gannet shut down publication of one of its papers in the U.K., and the season four premiere of Mad Men saw the news media play a central role in the unfolding drama. I took a little journey into my Pinyadda feeds today to find some of the best content about each event, with a little contextual commentary about how they play into the future of news.

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Greg Gomer

10 Reasons Why You Need Pinyadda at Work

How long can you sit at your desk with your head down just banging out work? Maybe 2 hours before having to get up, walk around, or peruse the internet. The internet provides us a vast place to cure ADD and boredom, but can also be a huge time suck and major waste of your day. We all know the feeling of hearing someone come up behind you and quickly hitting Alt+Tab to switch windows and make it appear like you are working and not just socializing on the internet.

Even though it’s normal and healthy to take breaks during the day from your job, where is the balance? Do bosses frown when they see you surfing the internet or socializing? Is there an online resource that companies would actually encourage the use of? What qualities would a resource have to possess to get the employers OK?

Of course the first few sites that come to mind when talking about socializing on the web are MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And just as obvious a statement is the fact that 1 out of every 2 companies block those sites. That’s right, even though these social networking sites can sometimes provide value to the user in the form of content sharing, 54 percent of U.S. companies say they’ve banned these sites.

The next thing I want you to think about is how many emails you get during the day to your work account (because we know your personal email is probably already blocked). If you’re like me the number is well over 100. With 100 work emails flying through my inbox, how am I going to find time or even find those email chains from my friends that I actually love answering every day? There is no good answer to that question; just simply reply email jail.

So, let’s take Pinyadda into the workplace and count the top 10 reasons why you need Pinyadda at work:

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Cheryl Morris

Maven & Ambassadors 7/26

AmbassadorBadge

AmbassadorBadge

Topic Maven and site Ambassador earners from last week are below.

Know who you should follow and who to catch!

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Austin Gardner-Smith

For Regional Papers, It’s Innovate or Stay and Fight

While most publications seem willing to do just about anything to bridge the gap between their legacy print businesses and emerging internet models, it strikes me that there’s a contingent of publishers – mostly small to mid-size local and regional newspapers – who seem destined to ride their proverbial print horses into the sunset and disappear for good. For many, it’s a fate that may transpire despite best efforts to avoid it; the result of aging newsrooms, lack of resources, and inability to move quickly enough. But for a subset of these publications, it may be a conscious choice that reflects and unwillingness to upend a business model that’s served them well for a long time – in some cases, a century or more.

This week, Google issued a response to the FTC’s Discussion Draft on the future or journalism in no uncertain terms. Its language paints perhaps the most realistic view of the print publishing industry to date:

“The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers. With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance. No policy proposal will be able to restore newspaper revenues to what they were before the emergence of online news. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.”

This statement, which I believe to be wholly correct, is the truth that most of the news industry has been running from as their revenue graphs dive swiftly toward the x-axis. But it does shed some light on why some smaller publishers might be willing to stick by their businesses to the bitter end. As Google’s statement hints, what we are witnessing is not an incremental shift in the publishing industry but the emergence of an entirely new model for content creation and distribution. It’s not, as many publishers seem to think, a matter of turning the knobs and twisting the dials until the money starts pouring in the door again. It’s about fundamentally re-thinking the way readers and publishers interact in the digital world. In order for existing institutions to survive, they will have to undergo a metamorphosis on a massive scale. All aspects of the business – from newsroom makeup to management strategies to distribution channels to ad sales – need to be disrupted, re-organized, and cleaned out. Excess infrastructure needs to be dismantled and discarded. Ingrained policies and procedures need to be uprooted, new skills need to be acquired.

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Cheryl Morris

Badge Digest 7/23

See below for those who earned badges this week. Click the images to see all the fellow badge holders you should follow!

Paperboy Badge Image

Pinyadda Paperboys: Joel Abrams, Andrew Decker, John DiGilio, Tracy DiMarino, Amy Dumont, Michael Edwards, Daniel Flynn, Daigo Fujiwara, David Harris, Mitchell Kotler, Katya Laia, Mark Marino, Daniel O’Connor, Mickey Palone, Andrew Parker, Cell Phan, Todd Wallack, Nora McDonald

Curator Badge ImagePinyadda Curators: John DiGillio, Peter Drumgoole, Matt Dunning, Daigo Fujiwara, Katya Laia, Michael Dichio

Distributor Badge ImagePinyadda Distributors: Caroline Cahill, Zach Cole, Sarah Gordon, Heather Witmer

Pinyadda Franchise: Nicole Traficante

Pinyadda Mogul: Pat Mylett, Tom Nickerson, Gregory Rogan, Casey Sullivan

Pinyadda Baron: Scott Soderstrom

Pinyadda Empire BadgePinyadda Empire: Kristin Maguire, Sanj K.

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