Robin Sloan

Gnoming for followers on Twitter

My co-blogger Tim writes and tweets about the history and future of media. If that sounds broad, I should clarify that Tim is very good. He’s one of the most well-read people I know and he’s got dizzying pattern recognition. The word my also-brilliant other-co-blogger Robin most often uses to describe Tim’s work is “magisterial.”

Tim has a good sense of others in the Webosphere who share some of his particular fascinations and obsessions, and he found that several of those folks weren’t following him. So, to remedy this, he asked them to. And here’s how that played out: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Practice, community, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Twitter

July 2, 2010 | 3:20 PM | By Matt

Blogger-rhythms: How to pace yourself

Picking up where yesterday’s post left off, I want to talk about the blogger’s pattern. This is where Robin’s insights about stock and flow really come into play. I think the most essential rhythmic prowess great bloggers develop is the ability to balance these two types of content.

We often talk about finding a rhythm, as though it’s something that’ll happen to you, or something you’ll discover. Just as often, I tend to think a good, sustainable, audience-rewarding pace truly is developed - planned, practiced and polished. Marathon runners don’t “find” their race-winning strides – they set goals and work towards them.

I think a helpful way to approach that goal-setting is by setting goals and organizing workflow on a daily cycle, a weekly cycle, and for the medium-to-long term. I’ll talk about each of these.

The daily cycle

Image courtesy of Flickr user Socceraholic.

There are a couple things to keep in mind about planning for the daily rhythm of the blog:

First, you never want to start your day with an empty slate. Knowing that you’ll start off with a daily link roundup every morning is one easy way to get your engine going. It’s also important to augment that with something meaty, ready to polish and post shortly after your computer wakes up. Previously, I shared Ernest Hemingway’s trick of writing some of his best material late in the day and stopping just as he was on a roll. I think it’s a great idea to end each afternoon by completing 90 percent of a post you’ll finish and publish in the morning. I also think it’s smart to head into each week knowing the original, enterprise pieces you intend to publish each day, news permitting.

Second, make sure you’re addressing each of your overlapping communities with something every day. Remember when I wrote about planning content around your audience needs? To continue the example I laid out in that post, let’s say your topic reaches (1) an audience of people employed in relevant industries, (2) a law/policy audience, (3) a scientific/scholarly audience, and (4) a lay audience mostly interested in the cultural impact of the subject. Make sure that each day, you’re offering at least one post of interest to each audience. You’ve got many types of posts you can employ to hit that target. Switch ‘em up.

Lastly, strive to publish an attention-getter at least once a day. This is a post that you think will be spread around your community, original reporting and cogent analysis that will hook in a broader audience, garnering links on Twitter and Facebook and commentary from other sites. We’re actually building content promotion positions for these featured posts into the site. Lists and guides and explainers will be some of your best friends here, as will any scoops you can develop or news you can break. This will tie into your weekly planning (and it will take planning).

The weekly cycle

Image courtesy of Flickr user Wild_Honey_Pie☂

Set aside some time every week to plan for the following week. This is when you can develop ideas for those attention-getters that will earn you regular exposure to a wider and wider potential crowd. As you plan your banner ideas for each week, think about how to hook different segments of your community. For example, in a typical week, you might plan on developing two featured posts for your business audience, a couple for your law/policy and academic audiences, and another few explainers or analyses or stories that bring in the lay audience.

Of course, the cycles of a particular beat are likely to intersect with your content planning at the weekly level. There are probably regular meetings, briefings, newsletters or document releases that relate to your beat, so you can set up the appropriate live-chats and follow-up posts as necessary.

From week to week, different stories are going to really seize the attention of your crowd, and it’s important to pursue these doggedly and elevate the level of attention you pay them (to whatever degree makes journalistic sense). Sometimes you’ll know when these are coming down the pike (e.g. your legislature is set to vote on a hot-button law). But often, these types of stories are tied to the news – so you can’t necessarily plan for specific stories to take root, but you can be attuned to them when they appear. Make sure to keep them front-and-center for the week, if not longer, altering your weekly content planning if necessary to report new dimensions to the story, write some authoritative explainers and guides, and query your crowd for their insights.

At least once a week, you should be aiming to develop an attention-getter post that can really shine. Don’t neglect your ability to set an agenda and follow up on it. If you think a post is going to make a splash, follow it up early and often with posts that add dimension and enlarge the story. Find ways to relate the story to each of your audiences with different posts.

The medium- to long-term

Image courtesy of Flickr user CIMMYT.

Your daily and weekly planning for the site will keep it flowing, but what will really make it sing is the arc – the long-term vision that will tell your readers you’re taking them somewhere. You’re not just writing a blog, you’re writing something like a book. It’s important not to lose site of that.

Think about the long-term rhythm of your site. How often are you making a splash on your topic? On a monthly or semi-monthly basis, you should be thinking about how to create the solid, informative, high-level content that will get maximum pickup in your community – your equivalents of the Sunday A1 front-pager. We chose topics for Argo that would be “locally focused, but nationally resonant.” I expect that “national resonance” to be strongest in your long-term planning, where your biggest, most important pieces are conceived and developed.

They say long-form narrative doesn’t work well on the Web, but there are a number of ways to deliver big Web stories that will be popular: comprehensive guides to hot-button issues, deep investigative narratives, analytical pieces that lay out a major trend or idea, crowdsourced packages of the most influential people in the topical domain. The key is to imagine the final packages in advance, then break them down into components you can produce as part of your daily workflow. You recognize this advice: package, repackage, repeat.

Done well, the daily rhythm of your blog feeds your long-term strategy, and your long-term planning drives your daily activity. Invariably, though, you’ll find yourself wrapped up in day-to-day matters, devoting less and less attention to the longer-term stuff. That’s OK. I promise not to let you stray too far from the bigger picture.

FILED UNDER: Theory, content planning, first 30 days, pace, Robin Sloan

July 1, 2010 | 6:28 PM | By Matt

Blogger-rhythms: how to develop your blog’s pace

STOP: Before you read this post, I’d like to ask you to read my co-blogger Robin’s mini-treatise on the concept of “stock and flow.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Maurese Polizio.

OK, now that you’re back, let’s talk about the rhythm of the blog.

I like to think about this rhythm in two dimensions: 1) audience patterns and 2) blogger patterns. I’ll talk about them in that order:

I. Audience patterns

Any Web editor with an eye on her stats knows that there are ebbs and flows in her users’ attention. Digital news editors tend to see a prominent spike first thing in the morning, as their users are rising for work and getting booted up for the day, another spike toward the lunch hour, perhaps a mild crest in the mid-afternoon, and some post-work, early-evening traffic to cap off the day. Widen the lens a bit, and you find that traffic tends to surge during the work week and settle over the weekends.

I’ve heard evidence that these patterns are evening out a little as people’s Web reading habits migrate to phones and other devices, allowing them to sneak in some surfing while they’re waiting in line for a mid-morning coffee or waiting for dinner to cook. Also, Twitter and Facebook are often up in the background as folks work at their computers, making it likelier than ever that a post might go viral in the middle of the day. And these patterns shift, of course, according to the location, focus and demographic of the site. Traffic to the arts and entertainment site I launched in Minnesota started to rise as the weekend drew closer, often hitting its peak on Friday in the late afternoon.

Whatever the rhythm of your crowd might be, you’ll discover that one exists, and it’s typically a good idea to accommodate that rhythm, to some extent. On newsier blogs, it’s standard practice to try to have some good meaty posts ready to go when your first users fire up the site in the morning – typically including a morning link roundup. Many bloggers indulge their crowd’s loopier side as the lunch hour approaches, posting fun YouTube videos or opening up threads for free discussion. In the afternoon, people often surf around for quick, digestible info-nuggets, an impulse bloggers often satisfy with more quick-hit content – following up a morning link with an excerpt and some additional insight, writing a few grafs on an interesting news development that day, calling to the crowd to share information that will be processed into a post later in the week, etc.

What’s important is to pay attention. Once you start to acquire an audience, observe their appetites. Note times and days when you achieve reactions you like. Test out earlier and earlier post times for a morning link roundup and see if you detect an uptick worth shifting your day.

Coming tomorrow: The blogger’s pattern.

FILED UNDER: Theory, community, content planning, first 30 days, pace, Robin Sloan

June 17, 2010 | 2:10 PM | By Matt

More thoughts on Twitter

After thinking about it a bit, I realized the quick bit on Twitter in yesterday’s post didn’t do it justice. Saying that it “has the potential to be a key driver of engagement with the site” undersells its value. Twitter’s not just a place to promote ourselves. It’s also a tremendous place to learn from our community and to discover what makes folks tick. In fact, it might be today’s most effective teacher of what works on the Web. Why?

It offers some quick, transparent measures for gauging influence.

Follower counts on Twitter can be driven by any number of variables. Some Twitterers pursue followers through brute force – following every account they come across and counting on some percentage of those accounts to follow them back. Other folks got boosted into the Twitter A-list after the kingmakers at Twitter HQ handpicked them to be featured users. For all these reasons, follower counts alone are a very crude measure of how much people value a particular Twitterer.

The Twitter stats of my co-blogger at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan. The high followers-to-following ratio suggests that Robin produces a high-signal feed. And he does!

But. Every metric on the Web is a very crude measure of value. Compare a site’s standing on Quantcast with their Technorati rank with their own internal traffic measurements sometime – you’d walk away with three drastically different pictures of their place in the universe. On Twitter at least, every follower is a distinct, persistent account that opted to subscribe to the followee’s feed. When you see that a person has 3,000 followers on Twitter, you know that every one of that person’s tweets is transmitted to 3,000 accounts (some fraction of which represent people who actually read those tweets). In many ways, that tells you a lot more than a numbering of pageviews or unique visitors.

When I’m evaluating an unfamiliar Twitter account, I often take a look at the followers-to-following ratio: how many others are following that account compared to how many others the account is following. That helps me determine whether folks tend to follow this account because it follows them, or whether folks folks far outside the Twitterer’s immediate network also tend to find it valuable.

It’s a great headline-writing coach.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of a particular tweet’s resonance on Twitter is the retweet. In other words, retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery. In written storytelling, I don’t think there’s any feedback quite as visceral as tweeting something and watching it spread, retweeted again and again.

Spend some time on Twitter, and you’ll quickly start to glean the factors that make a tweet particularly retweet-worthy. Similar information couched in different ways will draw very different results. Cleverness and pith certainly help, and if you’re linking to something, the content of the link itself is paramount. But mere wording affects a lot, and I’ve found that some of the same principles that make for good Web headlines hold true in the Twitter context as well.

Keep in mind that linking to content on Twitter isn’t a one-shot deal. If you’ve tweeted an item you think is important and didn’t see the response you expected, there’s no harm in trying again later with a slightly different approach. Jay Rosen does a stellar job of reiterating or rejiggering his tweets to reach slightly different audiences. I mean, don’t go crazy, but don’t feel crippled by the perception that you only get 140 characters to make an impression.

Which brings me to the next point …

True engagement on Twitter is cumulative.

One of the hardest habits for classic news-people to shed in their approach to the Web is their tendency to care more about individual articles than about the stream of their work. I recently spent a semester working with journalism students, and they seemed to come in two varieties – those obsessed with clips and clip counts, and those watching the Feedburner stats on their journalism blogs. Don’t get me wrong – individual posts are important. Although each post doesn’t have to be a lavishly crafted viral gem, each post should provide some value for your community.

But the stream is more important than the fragment. Kudos to you if you produce the definitive, heartwrenching story on the little girl separated from her parents in an immigration raid. Now can you become the definitive clearinghouse for information on how that story is playing out? The two things reinforce each other, of course. Having a series of terrific posts means you’ve got a terrific stream. But it’s always worth keeping in mind, when our aim is engagement, 1,000 new subscribers to our RSS feed are more valuable than 1,000 extra pageviews on a post.

Twitter constantly reinforces that message. As you engage on Twitter, you’ll find yourself watching your retweets spread through the tweetosphere with delight, but the real payoff comes as those retweets turn into followers.