Do you have your own column at USA Today yet?

USA Today has been making news this week following a major site upgrade. The update includes a redesign and the addition of new ’social media’ type features. According to USA Today:

While we’ve refined the design, we’ve also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events.

They go on to further explain the reasons for their new system:

It is an extension of the mission we set for ourselves nearly 25 years ago… but it is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience.

Some of the new features you will find include:

• Scan other news sources directly on USATODAY.com;
• See how readers are reacting to stories;
• Recommend stories and comments to other readers;
• Comment directly on stories;
• Participate in discussion forums;
• Write reviews (of movies, music and more);
• Contribute photos;
• Better communicate with USA TODAY staff.

Unfortunately for USA Today, the feedback has been overwhelmingly negative from longtime site visitors; although, my experience is ANY change, even for the better, will generate a lot of negative comments (we all get used to things being a certain way and unless we personally need a specific change, most of us don’t look favorably on any change.)

That being said, the comments seem to indicate that USA Today has gone and ruined pretty much everything their target audience enjoyed about the site (including easy navigation, easy access to the Dow Jones and simple design), and traded it in for a bevy of social media features (like blogs, comments, opinions etc.)

Personally, I think one of the most interesting things about USA Today’s new move is allowing all of their free members to host a blog at USAToday.com. So it just became easier to get potentially quality links from an authoritative PR 8 site!

Check out my new eCommerce blog at USAToday (ooo! Doesn’t that make me sound important!) The URLs could definitely use some help, and there are some unfortunately spammy PPC ads at the bottom, but this may turn out to be an exciting resource for your future SEO efforts

At the end of the day, I applaud USA Today for trying something different, but I don’t think they quite got it right. Realistically, if you go to USA today to read an article on the latest big business merger, do you really care what Jenny from Cali has to say about it?

SEO/SEM & Social Media 06 Mar 2007 01:06 pm

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Social Network Marketing

At the dawn of the social network era, early adopters and forward thinking marketers were able to take advantage of opportunities that networks like Digg and Del.icio.us offered; they were new, they were cool, and they had rapid base of users just waiting for the next story to come along.

Things are changing. Now every marketer thinks about how they can use these sites to their advantage, and the social network demographic has become increasingly savvy in dealing with overt marketing attempts.

Gone are the pre-Internet days when people would simply turn the page, or change the channel if they didn’t like your advertisement. Online, the eyeballs you’re targeting are attached to fingers that have their own blogs who aren’t afraid to flame you.

But love them or hate them, Social networks are making an evolution as a marketing vehicle.

Not because they’re cool, and with a new social network opening daily, certainly not because the genre is unique, but because each new social network provides a doorway to a new, niche, target demographic. And every new community that sprouts online offers the savvy marketer a new channel to spread their message across.

But a Word of Warning…

Like people on the other side of any doorway you ever walk through, online communities that have grown up around your favorite social network are going to take offense if you barge in and start throwing your sales pitch around… And then the flaming begins.

In a social environment, subtlety works much better.

So, how do you start your subtle social network marketing program?

This resource is an excellent place to start!

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