April 12, 2011 by Vadim Lavrusik
Social media has created a human filter for quality content. The social web, like the old water cooler, favors conversations around news and even in-depth journalism that may not otherwise receive the exposure it deserves. Recent analysis of the most-tweeted stories from The Daily iPad app revealed that users shared more hard news stories over gossip and opinion pieces.
This doesn’t necessarily mean these are the stories most people are reading. The gossip articles (or “fluff” pieces) often out-perform news items in pageviews, often because that is what people are searching for. But the tide may be changing.
The incentive to share quality content is simple: A person may be more likely to read gossip, but they may share a news piece to shape their followers’ perception of them. They may even view it as a public service. I tend to believe it’s usually the former rather than the more altruistic latter. As a result, news organizations producing quality journalism are being rewarded with accelerated growth in social referral traffic — in some cases, growing at a much faster pace than search referrals. More notably, social media is enabling the citizenry to be active participants in producing journalism by giving them platforms to publish to the social audience. This has made journalism more efficient and, in many ways, enhanced the quality of storytelling.
Searching for Quality
The social filter for content has been around for a long time on the web, but prior to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it was conducted more privately via email messages or impersonal recommendations from a search algorithm.
The public perception was a non-factor, and users were more likely to share softer stories or those based on utility. There was a trust factor between the sharer and the recipient. Before, you were just sharing that funny cat video with your trusted circle. With social media, that circle has now become more of an open field.
So what about search? Search engines like Google fueled an explosion of “so-so” content, but it has also fueled an explosion of quality content, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. The idea was that quality content would get linked to most. But when media organizations and writers began to better understand how the search algorithms ranked content, they started to create content “optimized” for search results by inter-linking content on their sites or monitoring search trends and filling the coverage with sub-par content to capitalize on search traffic, Sullivan said. And so we saw the explosion of content farms and a race for unique visitors to appease the advertising gods.
The Human Quality Vote
LinkedIn share often serves as a human vote of approval. “We have depended far too long on looking at links as an idea of what people are voting on,” Sullivan said.
But links have been devalued over time because they have been sold, he added. For search algorithms, a link is a key component of where the piece of content ranks in search results. But because people began to sell links, they became less valuable over time, Sullivan said.
He said social links and shares are more trusted because the structure of social networks provides an easy way to recommend content to a network. That network consists of people you trust and are more likely to click on a link shared by a friend than a stranger. However, because these recommendations are more public than before, there’s an incentive to recommend quality content.
A More Valuable Reader?
It’s not easy to compare social to search because the behaviors and demands from a user are completely different. A user goes to search with an immediate need to find a specific piece of information and discovery is secondary. With social sites, users are consuming content in a leisurely and social state. Discovery takes the front seat.
This may explain the difference between referral traffic from search vs. social. In a recent analysis of Mashable‘s social and traffic data, I found that Facebook and Twitter visitors spent 29% more time on Mashable.com and viewed 20% more pages than visitors arriving via search engines. This may suggest a more engaged or exploratory reader, at least in terms of how much time they spend reading the content.
At The Washington Post and other media organizations (including Mashable), referral traffic from social sites — particularly Facebook and Twitter — are outpacing the growth of referrals from search, said Raju Narisetti, managing editor at the Post. Though Narisetti wouldn’t quantify the growth, he noted that on a given day, 5% to 8% of referral traffic to the Post comes from social media.
So what kind of content is bringing them to the Post? Breaking news, quality analysis, offbeat features and quality photo galleries and videos. Similar to search, social presents challenges in attracting an audience. Factors such as the time of day and frequency of distribution on a social channel can affect how successful the Post is in engaging readers, Narisetti said. But the Post hasn’t had to change its content strategy to attract more social referrals.
“While we have aggressive goals for our social team, the goals are based off [the] Post‘s unique content rather than trying to rethink our content to get more social referrals,” Narisetti said. Instead, the Post is focusing on making it easy for social media users to interact with content via Network News and other integrations.
Social Media Optimization
From linking standards to meta tags, news organizations have been working for years to improve their content’s search engine optimization (SEO). Now we’re seeing the rise of social media optimization. Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said news organizations will need to get into the “SMO game.” But that doesn’t mean gaming the system. “They should look for ways to make their content more social to take advantage of the new ways in which readers, viewers, [and] consumers think,” Sreenivasan said.
This means, among other things, providing easy ways to engage content using social media and having reporters take part in conversations on the social web. It means having the entire organization think in “social terms” — not just broadcasting materials out, but participating in the social ecosystem.
In many ways, social media makes it harder to “game” for the purpose of simply driving lots of traffic to a story that may not be of high quality. Social media’s effect on quality isn’t quite as systematic as search has been. Mathilde Piard, social media manager at Cox Media digital, said social media is having a positive effect on content.
“I’d rather editorial decisions be driven by what editors and reporters think people will read and be moved to share, rather than by keywords,” Piard said. With the latter, she said, you end up with content such as, “What Time Does the Superbowl Start At?”
Social Search
The tide may turn with developments like Google’s recent updates to its algorithm, which favors original reporting, and its recent launch of +1. The +1 product adds a social recommendation layer across Google Search results.
When you’re searching for a specific piece of content, you can see the results that your friends have recommended. The integration brings the social filter into search, while staying true to Google’s core product: search. It also creates a social identity for users. After all, what you recommend using +1 can be seen on your Google Profile.
Though +1 isn’t a social network, it is certainly a big step toward building one. But perhaps most important is its implications for quality. The number of +1s on a story link affects its placement in search results.
This essentially applies the social incentive to share or recommend quality content to search results and gives Google a good potential footing in remaining the dominant referrer to content sites.
Social Content
Content creation is one of the missing links and perhaps the cosmic difference between search and social. Search points to content that has been made, while social enables users to create content on the platform itself. How the two affect the quality of journalism are fundamentally different. Sure, social does a big amount of pointing itself, which enables news sites to grab referred traffic. But the people formerly known as the audience are also creating videos, status updates, tweets, photos and more.
“Curation helps cut through that noise to find the most relevant voice, amplifying the media that helps inform and enlighten.”
- Burt Herman, Storify
Burt Herman knows this all too well. It’s the reason why he launched Storify, a site that enables you to easily curate social content into one contextualized story. Herman said that social media improves the quality of content because it is content.
Social media has revolutionized content creation, which is now a collaborative process with readers who contribute and verify it. Though social media makes content publishing easy for everyone, it can also be overwhelming, Herman said.
“Curation helps cut through that noise to find the most relevant voice, amplifying the media that helps inform and enlighten,” he said.
Journalists have always “curated” content by grabbing pieces of information and contextualizing it into a story. The difference is that social media now provides efficiency in getting that information, often through first-hand sources who are micropublishing to their social profiles. This social journalism has spawned other content curation companies like Storyful, Curated.by and ScribbleLive.
“We now have many more voices who can be included in stories,” Herman said. “This means that what we read is richer and gives more information to the reader.”
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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Goldmund
Source: http://mashable.com/2011/04/12/social-journalism-quality/
