NWI Times and New Media Synergy

NW Indiana bloggers and tweeters,

I sent a dm on twitter to @nwi which is the NWI Times profile. I asked them to list my Porter County Politics site on their blogroll ... Which they list on their site but only feature their own sites. Their site features a submission form, but I guess it doesn't actually work.

They agreed to do so after getting my dm. I've also been sending that profile dm's on news stories when I get something they may want to write about. (I need to see if posttrib watches theirs for news too)

You may all want to do the same

I will be adding the Times to mine too in return even though they didn't ask.

I know we all watch and communicate with Jerry Davich at the Post, but frankly he's the only one in the whole Post family that even pays attention. The Times isn't far ahead though, they have the format but use very little of the tools. Like much of old media they pay some li service but don't really engage.

Will be interesting to see which newspaper really connects and engages to new media first.


Daltonsbriefs

Compendium says SEO is best

I haven't been able to post much here lately, but a fun debate is going on in Indiana between Compendium founder Chris Baggot and some members of Smaller Indiana. Chris' company is very very focused on writing corporate blogs that gain SEO traction for search terms important to the company. I heard him speak last year at Blog Indiana and he is very engaging and knows his niche well.

Others have suggested that just plain SEO blogging is old school and have engaged Chris and others in this debate. I'll leave the details to you to go read and even join ... but I did find Chris' post from last night worthy of a quick quote:

In the email business we talk a lot about 'Capacity'. What we are talking about is someone's capacity for email relationships generally and more specifically, "Commercial Email Relationships". According to a recent study from Merkle that capacity is 10. Basically, this means that if you want to get into my inbox and have a relationship with me, you better be one of the first 10, or displace someone who's already there.

Moving on to blogging, the most recent data is from eMarketer (about 15 months old) tells us that people have the capacity to follow about 2 blogs regularly. Proof positive that for most corporate blogging strategies, measureing success based on RSS feeds or regular readership is the wrong metric.

Today I read a great study from the Economist called Primates on Facebook, talking about human's capacity on facebook.

I can see that his position is that bloggers who think they have regular and engaged readers are fooling themselves. Now, for this blog I would agree, we have subscribers but engagement is very low. For my political sites I would disagree, we get hundreds of engaged readers who know each other well ... a virtual community. More than 10 for sure.