April 27th, 2012 at 5:55PM
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

If you’re a fan of a) social media and b) mumbling, you’re bound to be enthralled by a slightly rambling chinwag I had with Sarah Marshall for the latest Journalism.co.uk podcast. Mainly I talk about using social feedback as fuel for editorial, as exemplified by pieces such as this, this and this.

I also said a few words about the awesome image-tagging tool Thinglink, which I’ve used a lot, most recently on this Radiohead ‘Rank The Albums’ infographic. It’s thuddingly simple to use, and lends itself well to music features because you can stream YouTube/Soundloud right there within the image. I recommend it strongly.

TitlePodcast - How the social media community can shape the news agenda
Source: SoundCloud / journalismnews
April 27th, 2012 at 5:37PM
Rebecca Schiller wins NME.COM this week - her fun 50 things you didn’t know about The Simpsons piece has been viewed almost 200,000 times.

Rebecca Schiller wins NME.COM this week - her fun 50 things you didn’t know about The Simpsons piece has been viewed almost 200,000 times.

April 27th, 2012 at 5:28PM
Not wildly exciting this, I’m afraid, but I wanted to get down some of the tweaks I made recently to NME.COM/video before I forget what what I did, or why I did it. This year is all about driving insane video views (as in more than double what we did last year) - I’ve been given some extra budget to achieve this, but it’ll soon be taken away if we don’t hit the targets. So, a quick bit of optimisation. Previously the section was a mess: just a paginated index of most recent videos, topped off with a handful of feature spots. I wanted to show off some of the new franchises we’d launched - such as the NME Office sessions - as well as our older favourites, like the walk-ons. Previously they were difficult to find, so I created a new regulars section in the sidebar, as well as a new most viewed panel. It was really just a question of indexing the content better, and sorting out the metadata. I spent about a day laboriously going through the video archive and adding new tags. Oh, also: we can now serve videos full-screen! Might sound minor, but it’s one of those things I’ve wanted to implement for an entire year, but it never quite made it to the top of anyone’s to-do list. So did these changes have the desired effect of driving extra video views? Yes, they were significantly up in March. Are we actually hitting the targets though? Erm… oh look, a squirrel!

Not wildly exciting this, I’m afraid, but I wanted to get down some of the tweaks I made recently to NME.COM/video before I forget what what I did, or why I did it. This year is all about driving insane video views (as in more than double what we did last year) - I’ve been given some extra budget to achieve this, but it’ll soon be taken away if we don’t hit the targets.

So, a quick bit of optimisation. Previously the section was a mess: just a paginated index of most recent videos, topped off with a handful of feature spots. I wanted to show off some of the new franchises we’d launched - such as the NME Office sessions - as well as our older favourites, like the walk-ons. Previously they were difficult to find, so I created a new regulars section in the sidebar, as well as a new most viewed panel. It was really just a question of indexing the content better, and sorting out the metadata. I spent about a day laboriously going through the video archive and adding new tags.

Oh, also: we can now serve videos full-screen! Might sound minor, but it’s one of those things I’ve wanted to implement for an entire year, but it never quite made it to the top of anyone’s to-do list.

So did these changes have the desired effect of driving extra video views? Yes, they were significantly up in March. Are we actually hitting the targets though? Erm… oh look, a squirrel!

April 27th, 2012 at 5:10PM
Supposedly NME.COM is one of the big winners following Google’s ‘Penguin’ algorithm tweak, which took place on April 24, and aims to reward quality content while penalising keyword-hammering spammers. According to Searchmetrics our search visibility immediately increased by 30%. This is news to me, as I’ve not seen any boost in Google referrals whatsoever. And some of the big “losers”, according to Searchmetrics’ analysis, are high-quality sites like paidContent - hardly the home of churned-out auto-content. So I think I’ll wait and see, before I uncork the champagne and conga across the office to the sound of The Pogues’ ‘Fiesta’.

Supposedly NME.COM is one of the big winners following Google’s ‘Penguin’ algorithm tweak, which took place on April 24, and aims to reward quality content while penalising keyword-hammering spammers. According to Searchmetrics our search visibility immediately increased by 30%.

This is news to me, as I’ve not seen any boost in Google referrals whatsoever. And some of the big “losers”, according to Searchmetrics’ analysis, are high-quality sites like paidContent - hardly the home of churned-out auto-content. So I think I’ll wait and see, before I uncork the champagne and conga across the office to the sound of The Pogues’ ‘Fiesta’.

April 27th, 2012 at 4:57PM
Bit of a traffic update - it’s been a while. So March was another record traffic month in terms of users, though we fell agonisingly short of 8m uniques. Just 30k off! If the month had been just an hour longer we would’ve made it. Oh well. Next time. In terms of highlights, no one article did freakishly well, though this Rage Against The Machine/Rush Limbaugh story topped the news pile, while Priya’s contentious 10 lamest frontmen piece emerged victorious in terms of blogs. Both cleared 100k views. Once again, Stumbleupon referrals were key to most of our big traffic wins (over 70k Stumbles on that RATM piece). The phenomenal engagement we get from Stumbleupon users continues to be a source of both wonder and vague bafflement. They don’t stick around long, these phantom Stumblers - the average site visit lasts less than a minute - but they sure do love to share our articles.

Bit of a traffic update - it’s been a while. So March was another record traffic month in terms of users, though we fell agonisingly short of 8m uniques. Just 30k off! If the month had been just an hour longer we would’ve made it. Oh well. Next time.

In terms of highlights, no one article did freakishly well, though this Rage Against The Machine/Rush Limbaugh story topped the news pile, while Priya’s contentious 10 lamest frontmen piece emerged victorious in terms of blogs. Both cleared 100k views.

Once again, Stumbleupon referrals were key to most of our big traffic wins (over 70k Stumbles on that RATM piece). The phenomenal engagement we get from Stumbleupon users continues to be a source of both wonder and vague bafflement. They don’t stick around long, these phantom Stumblers - the average site visit lasts less than a minute - but they sure do love to share our articles.

March 5th, 2012 at 5:39PM
Quick note on the NME Awards. I guess the overarching theme of this Tumblr to date has been simplification and decluttering. The way we’d always covered the Awards in previous years was via frantic individual news stories, one for each category. You’d get home at the end of the night and think, ‘Wow, fifty articles, what a great night’s work’. But of course the user experience was hopeless - people came to the site and didn’t know where to click. This year, I wanted everything about the night to be housed within one article, so I ditched all the news stories and funneled everything into a liveblog (using an embedded Cover It Live widget). That enabled me to use a more conversational tone - and it gave our reporters time to head out into the room and actually talk to bands, rather than keep nipping backstage to write endless bitty news stories. Hopefully our Awards coverage was a bit less clod-hopping this year as a result. Traffic was up - 400k visitors on the night, up from 300k in 2011. Obviously I know what users really want is a proper livestream of the event, but since Channel 4 own the rights to the broadcast, that’s not really up to us, sadly.

Quick note on the NME Awards. I guess the overarching theme of this Tumblr to date has been simplification and decluttering. The way we’d always covered the Awards in previous years was via frantic individual news stories, one for each category. You’d get home at the end of the night and think, ‘Wow, fifty articles, what a great night’s work’.

But of course the user experience was hopeless - people came to the site and didn’t know where to click. This year, I wanted everything about the night to be housed within one article, so I ditched all the news stories and funneled everything into a liveblog (using an embedded Cover It Live widget). That enabled me to use a more conversational tone - and it gave our reporters time to head out into the room and actually talk to bands, rather than keep nipping backstage to write endless bitty news stories.

Hopefully our Awards coverage was a bit less clod-hopping this year as a result. Traffic was up - 400k visitors on the night, up from 300k in 2011. Obviously I know what users really want is a proper livestream of the event, but since Channel 4 own the rights to the broadcast, that’s not really up to us, sadly.

March 5th, 2012 at 5:28PM
Speaking of Buzzfeed, fans of that site might recognise our new, chunky (ie hacked) Facebook share button. Consider it a, er, ‘tribute’.

Speaking of Buzzfeed, fans of that site might recognise our new, chunky (ie hacked) Facebook share button. Consider it a, er, ‘tribute’.

March 5th, 2012 at 5:18PM
Love this - starting to see our stuff on Buzzfeed’s Hot List and Partner Buzz sections. We’re not seeing huge referrals from them yet - never more than 3000 in one day - but I think that’s going to change. They’ve got phenomenal momentum - I have no doubt at all that they’ll have 50m users by the end of the year. They’re the next Huffington Post, only - unlike Huffington Post - they delight their users every day, instead of exploiting them and insulting their intelligence. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a slightly tragic Buzzfeed fanboy. My wife calls it “a happy site”, and it really is, but the cutesy dogs-in-scarves stuff conceals a ruthless editorial streak. Their instinct for virality is just phenomenal.

Love this - starting to see our stuff on Buzzfeed’s Hot List and Partner Buzz sections. We’re not seeing huge referrals from them yet - never more than 3000 in one day - but I think that’s going to change.

They’ve got phenomenal momentum - I have no doubt at all that they’ll have 50m users by the end of the year. They’re the next Huffington Post, only - unlike Huffington Post - they delight their users every day, instead of exploiting them and insulting their intelligence.

I don’t mind admitting that I’m a slightly tragic Buzzfeed fanboy. My wife calls it “a happy site”, and it really is, but the cutesy dogs-in-scarves stuff conceals a ruthless editorial streak. Their instinct for virality is just phenomenal.

March 5th, 2012 at 5:05PM
At risk of making this blog a non-stop journal of smugness, February was a record traffic month for NME.COM - just a shade off 8m users. Powered in large part by a sharp increase in social sharing via Facebook and Stumbleupon.

At risk of making this blog a non-stop journal of smugness, February was a record traffic month for NME.COM - just a shade off 8m users. Powered in large part by a sharp increase in social sharing via Facebook and Stumbleupon.

March 5th, 2012 at 4:53PM

Blog section enhancements

  • The first step was to ditch the static blogs front and replace with a classic, cascading, most-recent-first format. I rationalised the categories, down from 15-odd to just four (why we had four different new music blogs is beyond me), and funneled them all into one  central feed.

      • I widened the available space by reducing columns from three to two, which enabled bigger pictures and more impactful headlines. I might be the only web editor in 2012 who actually reduced the number of sharing buttons on the page, but I’m glad I did. My theory is that nothing triggers social sharing like a beautiful photo, and the traffic has borne that out (incidentally the world’s most shared article in 2011 featured no social buttons on at all).
  • In a bid to bring magazine-like variety to the page - and a dash of colour - I introduced new styling options for bloggers, including numbered subheads:

    • Aligned photos: 

    • Block quotes:

    • Text highlight:

    • Plus, using CSS we built this nice little tool that enables users to mouse over thumbnails to reveal quotes. It’s perfect for user-generated pieces like this Richey Manic tribute, where the goal is to foreground social feedback. 

  • The result of these improvements? Page views within the blog section have increased by 70%. Interestingly, even though I made social buttons less prominent, sharing actually increased sharply in response to the new-look section. We’re now getting well over 1m referrals via Facebook per month, and about half that via Stumbleupon. In fact our Stumbleupon traffic has gone mental in 2012. It’s not uncommon for individual blog posts to get 40k+ Stumbles, and in one case, well over 100k.