Community in Practice

A collection of articles, resources and commentary focusing on
social communication and new media strategy.
edited by
Michael David Thomas

I hate your listicle. theatlantic: The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’ For a time, people measured site ‘traffic’ by the number of page views on that site. So, any time someone opened a page on that publication, it counted as one. Shortly thereafter, people started juicing the pageview stats by throwing up a bunch of pictures and asking people to click through them. It was a lot easier to generate 20 pageviews with 20 photos than it was to bring 20 people to the site by other means. Of course, the fact that these pageviews are not all worth the same is obvious to everyone: readers, writers, editors, advertisers, advertising agencies, etc. So, many forward-looking media companies like Gawker went away from pageview metrics back in early 2010. The company’s head Nick Denton wanted to focus on unique visitors to his site. Many of us have followed suit. And yet still, today, nearly halfway through 2012, we find this story on The Atlantic Wire. The president of the Washington Post, Steve Hills, told his team that “awards ‘don’t matter’ [and] urged more traffic-driving slideshows.” Now, I’ve got nothing against slideshows. At their best, I see them as a kind of horizontal storytelling. They are a tool you can deploy to tell certain stories. In fact, as storytelling widgets, I think they’re actually underexploited. You can embed them as a sidebar to convey some complicated set of ideas without interrupting the main flow of a narrative. And I’ve got nothing against a well-curated set of images a la our own In Focus or BuzzFeed’s random weirdness.But that’s not what the WaPo’s slideshows are all about. Instead, they are seen as a cheap and fast way to produce “traffic.” The problem is that they are not producing “traffic” — which in any other context would mean the number of people in a space — they are producing page views. This is not a simply academic distinction. The company’s president is calling on his workers to juke the stats, effectively. These companies want you to think that more pageviews equal a larger, more engaged audience, but that’s a quantitatively and qualitatively shaky proposition.  Read more.

I hate your listicle.

theatlantic:

The Pernicious Myth That Slideshows Drive ‘Traffic’

For a time, people measured site ‘traffic’ by the number of page views on that site. So, any time someone opened a page on that publication, it counted as one. Shortly thereafter, people started juicing the pageview stats by throwing up a bunch of pictures and asking people to click through them. It was a lot easier to generate 20 pageviews with 20 photos than it was to bring 20 people to the site by other means. 

Of course, the fact that these pageviews are not all worth the same is obvious to everyone: readers, writers, editors, advertisers, advertising agencies, etc. So, many forward-looking media companies like Gawker went away from pageview metrics back in early 2010. The company’s head Nick Denton wanted to focus on unique visitors to his site. Many of us have followed suit. 

And yet still, today, nearly halfway through 2012, we find this story on The Atlantic Wire. The president of the Washington Post, Steve Hills, told his team that “awards ‘don’t matter’ [and] urged more traffic-driving slideshows.” 

Now, I’ve got nothing against slideshows. At their best, I see them as a kind of horizontal storytelling. They are a tool you can deploy to tell certain stories. In fact, as storytelling widgets, I think they’re actually underexploited. You can embed them as a sidebar to convey some complicated set of ideas without interrupting the main flow of a narrative. And I’ve got nothing against a well-curated set of images a la our own In Focus or BuzzFeed’s random weirdness.

But that’s not what the WaPo’s slideshows are all about. Instead, they are seen as a cheap and fast way to produce “traffic.” The problem is that they are not producing “traffic” — which in any other context would mean the number of people in a space — they are producing page views. This is not a simply academic distinction. The company’s president is calling on his workers to juke the stats, effectively. These companies want you to think that more pageviews equal a larger, more engaged audience, but that’s a quantitatively and qualitatively shaky proposition. 

Read more.

Excellent…

adverdict:

‘The Best Ads are Answers’ Campaign for Google by @GSP … Simple and true message to convey to amateur and professional marketers. #Advertising #copywriting #creative

“Social platforms provide one of those modes of communication where you can be absolutely horrendous and not worry about it. When we talk to someone on the phone we are primed to respond to voices and it’s a much more intimate way of communicating. When you remove social cues and reactions, it becomes easier to not think about it. So you can have a one directional rant and it’s easy not think about the reaction at the other end. We are social creatures and any form of rejection is painful and upsetting. I don’t think that we will evolve psychologically to be resilient to that sort of attack. We respond very strongly and emotionally.”

–

Why We Get so Angry Online and How to Deal with the Rage

Nathalie Nahai is a psychologist who specialises in activity on the Web

(via thenextweb)

“Everything we do ripples through our network. If you feel better because you did a good deed, this will have a positive effect on your friends, your friends’ friends, and even your friends’ friends’ friends. Your own positive change can affect hundreds of people. And who wouldn’t want to make his/her corner of the vast human social network a better place?”

– James Fowler (PopTech 2009) shares 10 Points On The Science Of Spreading The Word, excerpted from our first Edition on harnessing social contagion for social good.  (via poptech)