Taking YOU Into Account: What's The "Right Way" For News Sites To Integrate Social Media?

Comments, profiles, “friends”, reader blogs, forums, recommendations, thumbs up, thumbs down…eesh – news sites both fear playing host to social media features and have come to recognize that these site-interactions create the engaging social experiences around their content that will drive the page views and ad revenue they so desperately need (hold the phone, here’s a question – why does MS Word still put the squiggly red line under the word blog?). Here are some common questions these media companies are asking themselves as they reach out into the social web - figuring out what exactly they want to hold onto:

Does the news site want to host these user-profile/social networking pages or pawn it off to a third-party platform with the site’s frame around it?

Is it better to surface news from other sources for a site’s user community? Are there advantages to a centralized platform that hosts users across different sites interacting?

Data portability may also pose a major problem. Where does the data reside? Once news sites go with one social platform can they switch or are they locked-in?

Filtering spam? Inappropriate content? Is the world going to end if someone drops the eff-bomb? Trials, tribulations…and spam’s a question for another day. Back to addressing the first few questions regarding use of a centralized or site-specific platform to provide social networking for a user-community:


Pluck’s SiteLife Social platform is currently powering the social networks on washingtonpost.com’s Discussion Groups section, USAToday, and Discovery’s Planet Green among others. Pluck provides user-profiles, reader blogs, forums, photos, friending capabilities, and also indexes the comments users have recently made and the corresponding articles on their profiles. The social network is hosted on washingtonpost.com, for example, and the profiles are specific to that site – there are no links put forth by the Pluck platform that would lead a reader elsewhere. What are the advantages? Keeping the reader on-site as they weave through forums and other profiles does up the page views for washingtonpost.com – and I feel as though it works for the Discussion Group communities because it has found its niche in debating politics (woo hooo DC). This community common-denominator provides enough material and interaction that users may very well stay engaged enough to keep clicking around and kicking up page views – same goes for the Planet Green community and the Green niche (so hot right now).


What can be an issue with this sort of set-up is the fact that web users generally like to consult multiple news sources in a sitting and may not want their identity and their comments tied to one site, one contained community. This is where a platform like Topix steps into the game. Topix powers the social network and comment-engine for Chicago Tribune, but it also integrates its own social news destination site that features localized content across different news sources. Clicking on “read comments” at the bottom of Tribune articles takes you to a co-branded page hosted by Topix itself within the Tribune’s frame. Clicking around between profiles, forums, and headlines within the Topix platform easily leads you to non-Tribune content but the Tribune frame remains (page views!...ad revenue!) and the user can comment on any content or post to any forum that Topix surfaces and have it track back to their Topix profile/persona.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The Topix profile gives the Tribune a chance to be a jumping off point for content-discovery, offers a portable identity where a user can interact with multiple content sources without multiple usernames, and in the short-term is easy on the implementation side of things – but it’s not true integration with the site. What are the chances that a user will migrate back to Tribune pages? Will they associate this social experience with the Tribune? Having to actually register with Topix is also another roadblock that some users may not migrate past on the Tribune site. The Pluck platform keeps users loyal to the washingtonpost.com or USAToday pages – but how sticky is that? How many clicks until a reader feels as though they’ve just hit a dead-end?

In general these news site-social platform partnerships need to get authentication down correctly so that users just create one login on-site. They also need to create more tools that can be plugged-into various parts of the site – the forums, blogs, comments, live chats, etc. – so that these pieces of content are surfaced and users can navigate from their profile or personalized homepage to these various social media features seamlessly. If news sites going to go to all the trouble of social media implementation, there’s no use in having a disconnect between the reader-generated blogs and the user’s forum activities. Ultimately the real kicker is how strong the sense of community is on-site. Users go to the trouble of logging-in and associating themselves with an identity, because when they comment or post they want someone else on your site to read it and/or respond.