Comments on: Is there a “must-have” checklist for great content sites?

By: James Gross

James Gross — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:44:08 +0000

Dave-

Thanks for letting me leave a comment with FB Connect, if only I could tip you by allowing you to take a micro payment directly from my AMEX Connect account.

Also, thanks for the shout out to Chas, but it is only fair for Chas to disclose that everything he knows, he learned from Matt Trotta.

I think we are all on the same page and it comes down to how we can execute and really allow for a brand to live up to the principles of what 'publishing' is evolving into.

I tried to write down some of my thoughts on that here:

http://jamesgross.com/2009/10/18/principles-of-th…

By: Matt Trotta

Matt Trotta — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:09:21 +0000

I think its also good to have the individual authors get behind their own content and amplifying it out the larger web. People travel in tribes – the blogs that I read are the same twitter/tumblr feeds that I follow.

If you look at the leaderboard on retweetrank.com, a majority of the top 10 most ‘retweeted’ users are publishers who are taking the content that they put on their blog and putting it out to their users in the form of a shortened url. While clicking a ‘share this’ button on a web site is easy…just adding an ‘RT’ in front of a tweet in my feed is even easier.

…thanks for the FM shout out!

By: Dave Knox

Dave Knox — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:01:12 +0000

Great points for both of you.

Chas – I agree completely with you on the over eagerness of some publishers. I've loved the change that "Share This" made to scale down & customize the number of options. I can see the temptation to list every button on a post but I think fewer becomes more powerful.

By: jawalker20

jawalker20 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:11:34 +0000

Dave - I'm pushing this theme hard in our business too as we hope to convince more and more brands to augment direct mail campaigns with localized social media promotions using our content. For example, I get a "feeling healthy" pamphlet in the mail. It includes eating out tips, exercise tips, and recipes. It's discreet, but clearly published by Whole Foods. We'd like to help them extend that brand online with guides to the best local health and fitness destinations. I think what you listed above is a set of feature best practices. But acting like a publisher means brands need to start behaving like editors and selecting content subject matter that is relevant to their audience - not just features for sharing that content. I think Purina has done that well with their mini-site here: http://petcharts.purina.com. This is a major shift. Glad to see you covering it.

By: Chas Edwards

Chas Edwards — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:39:06 +0000

Dave:

Great post (and thanks for the shout out!).

As I watch publishers — both the traditional media-company variety and marketers with content on their sites — lean into the "sharing" movement (a trend I love to see), I've noticed some sloppiness in their eagerness. Too many publishers seem to think that the more social-media logos they bake into a "share" widget the better. But they are making a mistake. Imagine inspiring a reader to share your content, and then encouraging him or her to do so on a social-media platform that has a dozen users when you could have encouraged that reader to share it on Twitter, Facebook or Digg. (Disclosure: I work for Digg.)

Thanks for the great advice in this piece!

By: Is there a “must-have” checklist for great content sites? (By Dave Knox) « Looppa

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:08:01 +0000

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