news:rewired - Building Online Buzz #newsrw

Tony Curzon Price:

Job one: Unfolding Democracy. They tell the story of democracy as it expands across the web. They’re funded by donations. Their agenda is to get news and analysis (quite serious) to the right audience.

Job two: Online editor of Intelligence Square – they do live and online events.

The goal is efficient distribution – the most efficient is everyone in the world consuming exactly the right piece of media. Our goal is create that. The goal of spammers is to disrupt it, the role of journalists is to create it. The Internet has made information distribution more and more efficient. It’s far less likely now that you will miss an important piece of information to you.

He’s giving a potted history of the Internet, from USEnet and gopher, through listservs, then forums and then search, blogs and RSS. Now we’re moving beyond RSS into social distribution.

There are key hubs – for example, the Richard Dawkins forum can send an avalanche of traffic. But there’s are diffuse networks, which compensate for lower traffic with higher. But the era of diffuse networks is ending. most of our time should be sent identifying the small, powerful networks. E-mail continues to be incredibly important.

Informational distribution efficiency is just getting better and better – and it’s becoming less centralized, which ia bad news for search companies.

Vikki Chowney: Has split feeds for professional and personal, so people have a choice between interaction or just following the stories. Its about making it easy for people to read and share the content. One tool is AddThis, which they put on all stories. The started using Disqus comment management tool on the site earlier in the year. It makes it easier for people to strategy tracking the thread of conversation.

However, it’s pointless trying to create buzz if you don’t have great content. Reputation Online is in a fierce community. Traditional tools are useful: newsletters, meeting people face to face at events.

There’s a limit to what one person can do. When you reach a certain size, you need to think about community manager who can track and get involved with conversations across the web.

Mike Harris, Libel Reform Campaign: Most visits come from links from communities like forums and blogs, the second group is from Twitter. People are referred to the site, people don’t search for it. Even links in traditional orient media are important – but Twitter and Facebook are more important than a good Google ranking…. Stephen Fry drove nearly 2000 visits.

Social media is important: which bloggers, celebrities, people will drive the most attention? What do you want? We wanted money and signatures. We collected postcodes, and there were complaints, but we needed to prove that this wasn’t just a niche campaign. Twitter and blogs make a lot of noise – but you need to work out how to translate that into action.