All Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Cheryl Morris

The Best Way to Share News on Twitter

| July 29th, 2010

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!

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Posted in Publishers, Social, Top Yadda | 596 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

Thoughts on a Unified Payment System for News

| June 22nd, 2010

Chase pinned a great article a few hours ago from the Media Decoder blog over on the New York Times that ruminated on a leak from Google indicating their supposed plans to roll out a “one-click payment system for content called ‘Newspass’” (if you’re unfamiliar with Decoder, you’re missing out on some great content about the future of the news industry. You can follow it here, and I highly recommend that you do).

The system, as real or fictional as it may prove to be, isn’t alone in concept or execution. A number of other entities, including Journalism Online, a venture that recently received additional backing from Rupert Murdoch, are jumping into the news payments game. While it may seen inevitable that subscription models will make their way to the web, the prospect of these products attaining long-term viability is tenuous but not completely out of the question.

While it’s easy to knock the subscription model as a legitimate revenue source – after all, it’s never been the way newspapers stayed afloat – there’s some reason to think that it may fit the online model better than the print model. Chris Anderson,  in his controversial but insightful book Free: the Past and Future of  a Radical Price, makes the contention that bytes (digital content) are fundamentally different than atoms (printed content). Since bytes are produced once and copied, distributed, and replicated at a price that’s always approaching zero, our traditional business models inherently fail.

There’s no cost per unit for producing a story on the internet, as there’s no additional paper, ink, delivery costs, or distribution fees associated with each additional copy. So what we’re essentially receiving when we read a news story is not a product but a service. We may not pay for the news itself, but are we willing to pay for the service of news? If so, the subscription model makes perfect sense. We already pay for the service of television, the service of internet, the service of the health club and, increasingly, the service of mobile data. But we’re not quite ready to pay for the service of news. Why is that?

This is where both a unified payment system and some bright young entrepreneurs come into play. The payment system is an obvious but significant hurdle to paid content. It’s awfully hard to get someone to take out their credit card and type 15 digits into a web form, for reasons that relate to both financial security and user experience (have you ever forgone an online purchase because your wallet was in the other room? You’re not alone…). In order for web content to survive a subscription basis, someone needs to make this as easy as possible, and many, including Google, will try. There’s an obvious model to follow in Apple’s iTunes store, but that company has always possessed the rare superpower of being able to pry thousands of dollars from innocent, unsuspecting victims who then turn around and shower the thieves with praise. To steal a phrase from New York governor David Paterson, on planet Apple, there is no gravity and light bends right around Cupertino…

But assuming someone solves the credit card challenge, and assuming our hypothesis about news as a service is correct, there’s one fundamental problem that remains to be solved. No one has yet to make the news experience pleasurable in all the ways the internet makes possible. We’re stuck in a half-integrated world, where newspapers exist as strange islands drowning in an online sea. To make a long story short – the service isn’t that good. We’ve come to expect more of our online content, and I think we deserve it. Want to publish a print version online and make me visit your poorly designed destination site? Fine with me. Want me to pay for that service? Think again.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, a different scenario. A scenario where content is delivered to you by a hand-picked group of curators who can provide filtration, context, and added value. A scenario where you’re rewarded for providing opinions and adding perspective to content that’s judged on merit alone, regardless of the size of the publication that produced it. A scenario where publishers, advertisers, and readers all work together to create value for each other in a way that’s unobtrusive and beneficial for all. That’s the future of Pinyadda, and we’re building it, together, right now. Come join us.

Read more about Newspass here and here. Who do you think will win the news payment war? Will it be Google, Rupert, or some other upstart? Let us know in the comments.

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Posted in Product, Publishers | 347 Comments »