The Newsonomics of social media optimization

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

This week’s buzz is all about Google Buzz, the search giant’s entry into the status-update world. But the humming of social media — and its implications for news media — just keeps getting louder and louder. News people are in the social web, use the social web and write about the social web — but can they can make the social web part of their digital publishing businesses? That’s a big, important question, and one just dawning on many people in the news business.

First, let’s consider a number of datapoints:

— Nielsen reports that Internet users worldwide now spend 5.35 hours a month on social networks, up from just three hours a year ago. The social web is the new home page; remember how news sites all put up “make us your home page” buttons just a decade ago. News sites, of course, are lucky to break into double digits — 10 minutes — per month in usage.

— Facebook Mobile just announced yesterday that it busted through the 100 million user mark, up from 65 million in September.

— Bit.ly, one of the top “URL shortening service providers” — sends about two billion link referrals a month, largely given its Twitter stronghold. Question, of course, is how many of those may link to news or information; try, maybe, 20 percent, according to a recent Rutgers survey of social use that shows that 20 percent of posts in the statusphere come from “informers,” those that share news and information. The other 80 percent: the what-I-ate-today people.

— A recent study I did with Outsell said that 44 percent of news readers say they use social networks to share news and information. Of those, half use Facebook to do it; one in five use Twitter.

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Newspaper’s top 5 search queries are commercial brands

A very quick lesson in search engine optimization: Brent Payne, the Tribune Co.’s head of SEO, whose wisdom I wrote about last week, posted a video yesterday demonstrating a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools. In the process, he offered a brief glance at The Chicago Tribune’s dashboard on the site, pictured above. What you’re looking at are the top search queries on Google that return pages from chicagotribune.com.

The Tribune is doing pretty well with its own name, its hometown president, and its hometown football team. But I was stunned to see that the top five queries are all commercial brands with no particular connection to Chicago or the Tribune. (The semi-exception is CareerBuilder, which is 30% owned by Tribune Co. but isn’t exactly linked to Chicago in the popular consciousness.)

In each case, Google is returning the Tribune’s topic page for the brand, where you get a list of articles that mention the company. (Here’s Ticketmaster, for instance.) Payne speculated that one of Google’s periodic algorithm updates might be driving the paper’s new strength with some of these keywords.

Of course, very few people who search for “craigslist” or “home depot” are looking for news coverage of those brands. The traffic those keywords are generating for the Tribune is likely accidental. But the pageviews still count, so whatever work Payne did to rank well for “bank of america” was worth it.