A hundred years ago, if you wanted to know what time it was, you had to make a significant investment–in a watch.

Twenty years ago, Timex made it clear that if you merely wanted the time (not jewelry) it would be about $15.

And five years ago, every kid with a cell phone got the time as a free bonus.

And yet there are still watchmakers. Still Rolex and Patek and the rest. Some of them are having great years.

Clearly, they don’t sell the time. They sell jewelry. Exclusivity. A souvenir.

This passage got me thinking again about how newspapers have failed to understand how people consume news. For ages newspapers were in the business of selling access to information through an ad supported platform. Your choices were simple: Television, radio, newspaper or magazine. Things were simple then and they worked well. Newspapers and magazines have always been a ‘perceived media’ whereas radio and television were ‘received media.’

When the internet became mainstream, it changed everything and the playing field was leveled. Passive consumers of media quickly became active publishers sharing blogs, photos and videos. They are now a part of the conversation and newspapers didn’t take notice of this.

In the day and age of everyone being a publisher or aggregator, what are newspapers selling? What’s their exclusivity?

The news organization of tomorrow won’t sell access to information as an exclusivity. News organizations of tomorrow won’t have to sell souvenir front page editions or highlight videos of your child playing football. No, the news organization of tomorrow will have to understand the balance between what news readers consume and how they consume it.

The news organizations of tomorrow will understand that it will take a massive about of data-mining that mixes consumption rates with location, devices and social reach that we haven’t thought of yet.

We live in an age when people buy water when they can get it from the tap for free; a time when growing a garden is cheaper than buying produce and eating out is more expensive than a home cooked meal. If this is the case, why are newspapers failing?

Amidst all the talk of recent hacks, I decided that it would be time to use Google’s new two-step verification process for my account.

Using Google’s new two-step process will make it harder for someone to access your account if they try to guess or steal your password. This extra layer of security prevents someone from completely hijacking your account.

This service is also available to both individual and Google Apps accounts.

Watch the video below to get a better understanding of how this process works:

The verification process works with the follow systems:

• Blackberry
• iPhone
• Android
• iPad
• iPod touch
• Text messages
• Phone calls

The method that we’ll focus on is setting it up using an Android and iPhone.  In the Android Market and iTunes Market download the program called: Google Authenticator. You’ll need that for step two of the process.

Once the program is installed, if you plan on using both phones like I do, you’ll need to go through the process with them together at the same time. If you don’t you’ll have to start the process all over again, like I did.

Head over to the two-step verfication page and get your phones ready to scan the barcode.

To link your phone to your account:

Using the QR code: Select Scan account barcode. If the Authenticator app cannot locate a barcode scanner app on your phone, you might be prompted to download and install one. If you want to install a barcode scanner app so you can complete the setup process, press Install then go through the installation process. Once the app is installed, reopen Google Authenticator, point your camera at the QR code on your computer screen.

Using secret key: Select Manually add account, then enter the email address of your Google Account in the box next to Enter account name. Next, enter the secret key on your computer screen into the box under Enter key. Make sure you’ve chosen to make the key Time based and press “Save.”

In my experience the Google Authenticator app did not work for the iPhone so I was forced to enter the secret key in manually.

Once two-step verification is turned on,your phones will stop working. This is normal. You’ll need to go in and create an Application-specific passwords for both phones.

Application-specific passwords

These are passwords that you’ll have to enter for every program that you use that does not reside on Google’s servers.
For example, it could include the following:

• Google Voice App for the iPhone
• Gmail for the iPhone
• Google account access for Android
• POP and IMAP email clients such as Outlook, Mail and Thunderbird
• Gmail and Google Calendar on smartphones
• ActiveSync for Windows Mobile and iPhone
• YouTube Mobile on Apple devices
• Cloud Print
• Installed chat clients such as Google Talk and Adium
• Picasa, 3D Warehouse, Sketchup, and installed applications
• AdWords Editor
• Sync for Google Chrome

The good thing about the ASP’s is that you’ll only have to enter them once, making the program more secure.

Logging into your account

Once everything is set up, you’ll probably want to log into your account for the first time.

When you pull up the Gmail screen you’ll be prompted to enter your username and password. The sign in button has been changed to verify and you’ll need to enter a time based password from the Google Authenticator program. This password changes at random intervals to ensure a safe log in method.

You’ll have to do this with each browser and each computer that you use, which can become a pain, but it can remember your account for up to thirty days.

One downside to this approach is that it’s harder to log in from someone else’s computer if you don’t have your phone with you. Fortunately, Google will give you a print out of 10 codes that always work. They recommend you store them in your wallet, I recommend you memorize some of them and destroy the card! You can never be too careful.

If you don’t have your phone or your wallet, the third option is a phone call from Google to a trusted phone number you have. If you don’t have any of these options available, you might want to give up on checking your email for the time being.

Things to consider

• This process is much easier if you have a smartphone
• This process does depend on your smartphone so don’t lose it
• If you lose your phone, there are other options for recovering your password
• Logging into your account without access to your phone is difficult, so that that into consideration.

Following on the heels of yesterday’s post, I thought it would be interesting to see how Facebook pages handles custom status updates and sharing links.

As you can see from the image above, just like custom status updates for individual pages, facebook will also let you customize who can see your updates for your fan pages.

If your a small business, you probably don’t need to worry about this unless your running special deals in specific areas around your state, but let’s think about it from a large companies point of view.

For example, if you’re Starbucks, you might want to target consumers in a specific area about deals. There are two options, a geo-targeted ad and status update. You’ll pay for the ad, but you won’t be paying for the update.

Once you’ve decided on the general geographic area similar to the image above, you can also choose states and cities separately. You cannot however, drill down to street-level, so you can’t target people within five miles of a store in the 29205 zip code.

If you only have one store in a given zip-code it, might be easier, but it depends on how things are set up.

One option I would like to see added is the ability to target facebook’s ‘Questions’ to certain geographic areas. It would be nice to see an integration where we could ask users “We’re thinking of starting a new chapter/business/whatever here, Where do you think it should be?”

What an end to an amazing weekend!

This morning started out as a very cold and dreary day, but ended with the announcement by President Barack Obama that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

“For over two decades, bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement televised around the world. “The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

So after reading the news on facebook and twitter and following the Presidential address, I grabbed my camera and headed over to the White House. A short trip in a cab and I was ready to join the mob of people already assembled near the White House.

People were already gathered from the gates and filling most of Lafayette Square. Here’s what the New York Times said about the event downtown:

The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the Ground Zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “USA, USA!” In New York City, crowds sang the Star-Spangled Banner. Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.

I’ve been trying to teach myself how to do more interactive visualizations using free tools. I made this visualization using Google Fusion Tables and data from data.gov.

I’m still learning, so bear with me!

Another project that I’ve been working on is converting Shapefiles into a KML file for South Carolina County Boundaries.

If you need polygon files for South Carolina counties, feel free to download the table and reuse it for your purposes.

While it is easy to look an overall “All Visits” metric in website analytics, it actually does not reveal the true intent of readers. In most newsrooms and on most blogs, people are given copies of the most popular stories of the day or week and then go about their business. But the most popular stories of the week might not be most popular among your most dedicated group of readers.

Typical Segmentations

Below are a list of regular segmentations that you might see in most analytic programs. Of these three, I consider direct traffic to be the best indicator of what readers really want when viewing your site. If managed properly, the other two segments should convert to direct traffic or an advanced segment of traffic.

Direct Traffic:

Direct Traffic are people who perform one of two actions. 1. They type in a website everyday or 2. they have the site bookmarked to visit us. Direct Traffic is good because it means that your site is a household name with this reader. We’ve made an influence on them and they’ve made your site part of their daily routine.

Search Traffic

This segment includes traffic from all search engines, but mainly from google.com. They have used a variety of keywords to reach your site, the main being a variation of your brand name. If your SEO needs improvement not all stories will return results when searched in Google. So this list includes people who may have been searching for your brand and then further when on to read stories on your site. Consider these people to be “flirts but not lovers.” If they were to convert on your site, they would move into one of the other segments of traffic.

Referral Traffic

This segment includes traffic from sites that have linked to articles or to your site in general. Sometimes this is helpful because it gives you a better idea of whether you are meeting your current readers needs.

Creating Custom Segmentations

Creating custom segmentations in your analytics program will allow you to move beyond the standard package of segments that Google Analytics or Omniture offers. It allows you to get down to the meat of your traffic and really start gaining insights! These are a few of my favorite segments:

Email Campaigns

This includes readers who come to your site through the daily emails that readers have subscribed to. It means that they’ve moved beyond the “direct traffic” level and have chosen to opt-in to reading your stories. You could consider them a more dedicated group of readers.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers are considered by some to be the “holy grail” for web traffic. Since they’ve opted to have your sites content pushed to them, they are sometimes considered the most engaged.

Social Media

This traffic includes visitors from facebook, twitter, digg and reddit. They may be fans of your site but they’re not quite to the commitment point of direct traffic or email campaign readers. They may have a general interest in your site but spend the majority of their time on other sites. Consider this type of traffic a “drive by viewer.”

Returning Traffic

Returning traffic is comprised of visitors who regularly visit your website. Consider this segment to be your “regulars” at a local bar.

Stories Forwarded by Emails

This segment (hopefully) are stories that people have sent to their friends. This also includes constant contact emails that people have forwarded to friends and family and then that traffic has viewed a story on your site. Consider this segment as a “gawker.”

Geographic traffic

If you run a local news website that covers different cities or counties in your state, you should be segmenting your traffic to see what readers from your key areas are looking at. This can help influence stories you write about for their area.

Conclusion:

These are some of the most important segments of traffic to your website. It does not include all of the segments on your website though. It should give you a better understanding of who views what and why it may be important to them. Hopefully this will help with story planning going forward. It’s also only one piece of the puzzle!

What do you consider to be some of the most important segments on your site?

One of the strongest features in WordPress is the ability to change your site design as often or little as you please.

When you design your site, do you consider your readers’ wants and needs, or do you pick a design based purely on aesthetics?

One important thing to take into consideration when designing a site is monitor resolution.

If you’re using an analytics program like Google Analytics, it’s pretty easy to see screen resolution size. But this includes all traffic to your site. We want to focus on a unique segment of visitors: the most engaged visitors.

By creating a custom segment in Google Analytics, we can create a profile of users who stay on our site for at least three or more minutes. This allows us to look at users with a higher degree of engagement then fly-by visitors.

Take a look at the graphic below:

We can easily see that the majority of users who stick around on our site for at least three minutes has a monitor resolution of 1280 x 800. That’s an average size resolution for a 15 inch notebook computer. Users with 1280 x 800 account for 19.34% of total site visits for this segment.

Look below that and you’ll see that I have a pretty dedicated group of visitors with a screen resolution of 800 x 600. Yikes! They account for 8.36% of traffic that stays for more than three minutes.

You could easily ignore them and go with a layout that’s 900 pixels wide, but you would be ignoring a decent percentage of my traffic. As you can tell from the Avg. time on site and Bounce Rate, if this were an e-commerce site, this traffic would be pretty coveted. So I have to pick a design that balances a clean modern feel and looks good in browsers from 800 x 600 and higher.

You don’t always have to sacrifice good design to please everyone. You just need a starting point for what’s acceptable and you can build up from there.

By the numbers:

• 4,400: Number of pictures taken
• 7,983: Miles traveled by plane
• 32: Subway rides in New York
• 9: Plane flights taken
• 4: Metro rides in Washington D.C.
• 2: Amtrak rides taken
• 1: Best year yet!

I told a friend earlier this year after being laid off from The State that 2010 would be “The Year of the Chip!” What I should have said is that it would be a “year of firsts.”

Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how great 2010 would turn out to be. The good news is, I’m only getting started and 2011 looks like it’s going to be even better!

The year of the firsts

Here’s what’s happened to make 2010 a year of firsts:

1. This is the first time since graduating from college that I have not worked for a newspaper. I was laid off in January 2010, along with numerous others, in a cost-saving-reduction plan (boo-hoo). Leaving The State was probably one of the best things that could have happened for my career. Presently, I’m employed at The South Carolina Policy Council, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank in downtown Columbia (another first!). Although I do miss working in the newspaper industry on occasion, it’s been very exciting and rewarding working for SCPC so far.



2. I took my first Amtrak ride this year. Originally, I planned on traveling from Charlotte to D.C., D.C. to New York and then New York back to D.C. I still have the ticket from NY to D.C. because I never went back. You can read my old post about the Amtrak ride here. Let’s just say Amtrak is not the most efficient way of traveling. It took us nearly 13 hours to get from Charlotte to D.C. If you can drive and don’t want to fly, just drive – it’s much quicker.



3. Speaking of New York, that’s another first. My first trip to the ‘Big Apple.’ I was in NYC from February until the middle of March before I returned home. Looking back, I could write an entire series on every aspect of New York, but let’s just sum it up in one word: Amazing! Living in New York for the short time that I was there was beyond my wildest dreams. Most movies and pictures I’ve seen don’t really do it justice. It’s something everyone needs to experience for themselves firsthand. One thing that amazed me most about New York is how many people live in the city. With population of 8 million over 468.9 sq miles of city compared to Columbia, SC which has a population of 129,333 and the city covers 133.8 sq miles. The density of New York mind-boggling. When I returned to Charlotte for the first time, it amazed me how much more “breathing room” there was. If I get the opportunity to return to New York or D.C. and spend a few years there, I will be going.



4. 2010 was also the first year I flew on a plane. Amazing right? I use be afraid to fly on a plane, but after my first few trips to and from New York, I was able to conquer those. Then after joining SCPC, I was flown out to Denver and up to Cleveland. Flying isn’t really that bad. I’m sure it’s worse now with TSA pat-downs, but I had no trouble going through the back scatter machine at the airport. The worst part about flying though is the layovers in airports. If you can, always fly direct it’s totally worth it!



5. Denver was my first trip out west. When I first arrived at the airport, I had no clue where we were. I expected Denver to be more mountainous, like Asheville’s airport. Instead, we just landed in a field and drove 30 minutes into town. Denver was amazing. The land in the Rocky Mountain National Forest is so open and vast! The temperature change from downtown Denver (90) to the top of RMNF (52) was a little drastic, something I wasn’t prepared for. While in Denver I also went to my first Major League Baseball game and a concert at Red Rocks.
6. I also went to Cleveland and visited the Great Lakes Brewing Company and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I wish I had more exciting things to say, but we were at a conference the entire time, so I didn’t really get to go out and explore, but I did learn a lot at the conference.

Ok, it’s time to get serious about this site, no really!

Starting next week I’ll be doing a weekly column every Friday called online tools for small news organizations.

Since I’ve worked in small and medium sized newspapers my whole life, this is the market that I know best. I also know online journalism tools pretty well. I’m also fed up with crappy news sites that just don’t work.

So I’m going to give back to society and do my civic good. I’m going to share everything that I know with you.

This will serve as an online repository for all my collective knowledge. I’m going to help you build and produce a better online news site with a small or limited budget.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a small daily, weekly or even a nonprofit, this will help you improve your online presence.

Next week’s post will focus on building a content management system through WordPress.

When newspapers were still king, CEO’s loved to tout how many “subscribers” their print circulation carried. 1.5 million daily and 3 million on the weekend was something to really be proud of. Bigger numbers mean higher rates for advertisers. ‘Look at all the eyeballs that will see your ads’ they exclaimed, when secretly, they knew not everyone was reading every single page of the paper. How could they?

When website tracking and analytics came along, it blew everything publishers knew out of the water. ‘What do you mean this story on ‘A-1′ only got 500 pageviews?? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!’ they cried. Little did they know how many people actually read their stories.

If newspapers’ A-1 were composed of front page stories driven by daily analytics, we would see a very different section front.

If CEO’s salaries were tied to the well-being of online news sites, we would see a very different type of care and compassion for how well online sites perform.

So what’s wrong with page-view journalism? If you’re approaching it from a very straightforward numbers only point of view, there’s nothing wrong. You can tell your advertisers that you get 1.5mil pageviews per day. But just like the old days, you’ll be leaving out some very key selling points for those advertisers.

Consider if you will a site that gets a reasonable amount of traffic, around 500,000 pageviews per day. This site has a bounce rate of 65%, users stay on average for less than one minute and the regular depth of visits are only 1-2 pages. Wouldn’t it be better to have a site with 300,000 pageviews, a bounce rate of 9% where users stay an average of 10 minutes and their depth of visit is between 10 and 15 pages?

Heck, if I were a journalist, I would have an adwords account that used time segmentation and a bunch of crazy keywords to drive tons of traffic to my stories just to make me look good. On the flip side, if the bounce rate to your stories is 100% is that really a good thing?

Old ways of measuring traffic

Previously, you would be inclined to measure your traffic with the following stats:

• Pageviews
• Unique Visitors
• Bounce Rate
• Exit Rate
• Content by title
• Popular time of day

These metrics give you some very basic ideas of what’s going on around your site. They answer the Who, What, When and Where. What’s missing from this equation? The Why

Outcomes and Conversion Rates

One of the goals of your news website should always be improved outcomes and conversion rates. Your tracking funnels and goals aren’t you? If you don’t have goals, you need to think long and hard about what you want your site to do. This isn’t the same thing as your mission statement. These goals directly affect your bottom line. It doesn’t matter if your site is an E-commerece site or not, your bottom line will always be money.

One of the most simple goals you can have is to get new visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. If they’re tech savvy, you’ll one them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Having someone choose to receive your content is sort of the holy grail for news sites. RSS subscribers are usually some of your most dedicated readers and subscribers. They’ll most likely be willing to support your site through purchases or donations.

Another way to look at traffic is by segmenting your traffic. Your three main categories of traffic will be Direct Traffic, Search Traffic and Referral Traffic. You should also segment your traffic into social media, email and RSS campaigns. Not tagging and following campaigns will result in inaccurate results for Direct Traffic. This could give you a completely different view of what’s going on with your site.

Segmenting your traffic can also help you establish your Conversion Rates for goals. It will let you know where your most valuable traffic is coming from. It will also let you measure how you can increase conversions for other types of traffic. You might find that direct traffic is most likely to donate money to your site or buy one of your products while search engine traffic and referrals are simply passerby’s. Referral traffic is also a good source to help you accomplish your first goal of signing up for email updates or subscribing to your RSS feed.

New ways of measuring traffic

Consider if you will these new metrics for traffic:

• Visitor loyalty
• Depth of visit
• Recency
• Length of visit

These metrics, while seemingly irrelevant, will actually build a very important picture for your site: Engagement. Why is facebook so popular? Because if people could, they would spend all day on it. It’s an extension of their physical social lives. I’m not suggesting you build a news site that everyone would want to spend all day on, that would be silly. I’m suggesting that you look at an aggregate total of engagement on your site. If designed and maintained properly, people will start to frequent your site more often. Things like related posts, social media tools, comments, and a strong user community give readers incentive to return.

If your site is slow, hard to navigate, or doesn’t have a good internal site search, you’re S.O.L. and it needs to be fixed A.S.A.P.

Conclusion

Using goals, outcomes and conversion rates, you’ll be able to increase your visitor loyalty, depth of visit and recency. When you couple those numbers with pageviews and present your advertisers how engaged your most valuable customers are, you’ll be presenting them with a true snapshot of what’s going on with your site.