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.

Keep reading »

The Internet golden age of local policy debate

Sure, the digital age might be killing professional muckraking in local markets, and most of the spadework that becomes local news stories might still come from newspapers. But a new empirical study suggests that all the new online din isn’t crowding out serious policy debate.

Just the opposite: Startup news sites are drawing far more attention to actual local policy than newspapers, TV, or radio.

That’s my take on this study, first presented in December, of where discussions about Portland’s city government are happening online. As reported by the Portland Mercury, social media consultant Jamie Beckland dug through six months of articles and comments from a variety of local sites for uses of the words “bureau,” “city,” “government,” “agency,” or “department” in conjunction with “Portland.”

He found that topical local blogs ran rings around traditional media when it came to such references. The site that racked up the most posts and comments about those dry topics was bikeportland.org, a professionally reported blog for the city’s intense bicycle scene. Number two: mentalhealthportland.org, a daily filter of articles about people with mental illness and their run-ins with the law. Also in the top six: hipster hangout Blogtown PDX, hyperlocal aggregator neighborhoodnotes.com and libertarian opinionator bojack.org. (Full disclosure: I’m friendly with many of these sites’ creators.) And finally, down at #9: The Oregonian. Keep reading »