One of Pluck’s primary goals, according to Panos, is to determine the best use for social media to achieve social editorial objectives, a feat distinct from merely engaging readers.

User-generated content and social media can redefine what journalism means on a website. Logically, journalism is about creating new content, so why can’t journalists gather brand new source material from readers? They may find it makes their own work more diverse and interesting. Traditional publications can easily use citizen photos, read the opinions of their consumers and engage in conversation with them about any subject.

Pluck offers two main products for newspapers: SiteLife and BlogBurst.

SiteLife

“SiteLife products give your audience the power to contribute their ideas, expertise and interests to your site. The result is an energized community of online users generating content, interacting with each other and coming back to your site and your brand,” so reads the company’s website.

Panos, emphasizing that each of his company’s clients have varied uses for social media, used the example of USA Today, who called upon Pluck to help it boost interaction with readers, effectively making conversation the centerpiece of its site. After implementing SiteLife technology, the national American daily experienced a 400% increase in reader site registrations.

This showed that people weren’t coming back to usatoday.com to read the news, but to follow the conversation surrounding that news. In the changing dynamic, hot conversations, not necessarily the articles chosen by the paper’s editors, are driving readers to content.

BlogBurst

Whereas SiteLife has some competitors on the Net, another of Pluck’s products, BlogBurst is alone in its class. With the plethora of blogs out there, it is difficult to find good content. So Panos & Co. decided to help bloggers – and newspapers – by finding the best of those blogs and syndicating them for easy access.

BlogBurst doesn’t let any blog into its system although anyone can apply. Each blog goes through a quality assurance test before it can be entered into the system. BlogBurst seeks out material in which mainstream publications would be interested, musings that would add value to their own quality offerings.
Once a blog becomes part of the service, it gives BlogBurst some licensing rights and publishers that pay a fee, similar to a traditional syndication service, have the right to use certain content from blogs. The blogs are simply divided into topics and easily searchable by paying member publications.  

Blogs are quite often very topic specific. For instance, Panos mentioned a blog that covers only the San Francisco real estate market, one that has been picked up a couple of times by newspapers covering the same subject. By joining the BlogBurst program, these papers could easily find quality content that supplemented their own findings, giving their articles more balance and ultimately enriching the news experience for their readers.

BlogBurst has found that by quoting the name and integrating a link to a blog next to an article on a traditional newspaper website, that about 9% of readers click through to the blog, driving the author traffic and earning him or her recognition.

Panos said that many bloggers aren’t competitive, that they actually find peers in the BlogBurst community that have a blogroll (a list of a particular blogger’s favorite blogs) with similar links and similar topics. Several have banded together to create little “cabals”. Panos emphasized that most bloggers blog because they enjoy doing it, so any extra recognition they gather is especially pleasing.

BlogBurst has begun an awards program, giving the top 100 bloggers some monetary compensation at the end of each quarter. Even after introducing this program, Panos found that participants were still in the game more for recognition than money. Around 40% of BlogBurst bloggers don’t even monetize their sites!  

If you’d like to learn more about the social media phenom and how newspapers can maximize their opportunities with the budding medium, join Dave Panos and many more at the 14th World Editors Forum, June 3-6 in Cape Town, South Africa.