Project ACRONYM Now Available

The SPI team is thrilled to announce the next systemwide tool available for stations and producers. ACRONYM (Automatic Creator for Really Outstanding Names You Mingle) will take any project you are currently working on and automagically create a creative name to enhance your site’s SEO. The tool will be integrated into the Merlin API and COVE and can be accessed using a UUA login. Having passed an initial pilot with DLL users, the product is now available for open roll-out to the system. If you are interested in this product, please visit the SRC for full details ASAP!

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Presented by Incubation Lab: CoveritLive - In the Wild

This week, the Presented by Incubation Lab series shines the spotlight on popular liveblogging tool, CoveritLive. Richard Baniewicz, Online Director for WHYY, weighs in:

CoveritLive is a web-based application used for liveblogging and online question and answer sessions. It allows stations to publish text, images, videos, polls, and more, and is one way to engage users around station events, productions, and other topics.

WHYY started using (experimenting with really) CoveritLive in May 2009, when we hosted our first event – “H1N1 Q and A.” Since that time, we’ve hosted around 25 additional events, including a recent Q and A with organic gardening expert Mike McGrath, host of our radio program “You Bet Your Garden” (WHYY is a joint licensee), on spring growing questions. Upcoming CoveritLive events include Q and A’s on the dangers of sugary beverages and how to get your kids to sleep.

We have not used CoveritLive to liveblog an event. However, we have considered using it to liveblog during the airing of a local production - and then following up the liveblog and broadcast with a Q and A featuring people key to program. At this time, we’re waiting for the “right” people to work with. We want them to be willing and local, but with regional or national recognition, and social media savvy - this last because we want to leverage their networks.

What have we learned?

1. Focus
When planning your event, make sure it has a focus. Our experience has been that the broader the topic, the less successful the event. We stay away from open forums and broadly defined topics like ‘gardening chat’ or ‘healthy eating’. Instead, we’ll focus on fall harvest or our recent “All About Fish” Q and A.

2. Preparation is essential!
Although setting up and deploying a CoveritLive session is easy, a successful event requires preparation. Be sure to gather all of your ancillary content (videos, poll questions, prepared text, images, etc...) in a central place. Use the ShowPrep folder to store and organize this content.

If you have special guests connecting - especially if they are doing so remotely - be sure they understand how and when to connect. Check in with them beforehand to be sure they’ve received invitation emails (these can - and do - end up in spam filters and junk folders). At WHYY, we launch events several minutes before the official start time just to be sure our guests are on-board. If there are problems, we can handle them before the session starts. You can also use these extra minutes before starting to ask your users to submit questions in advance - a way to prime the pump.

Be sure your guests can contact you via telephone (and you them) for last minute trouble-shooting.

3. Promote, Promote, Promote
Your CoveritLive event will be not be successful if no one attends! It’s critical that people know about your event. Use all of your usual means of promotion - air, website, social media sites and the like. Encourage your fans and followers to share with their own networks.

Be sure that special interest groups focused on the topic of your event know about it. Use twitter hashtags to spread your message and reach people searching for particular topics. Be sure that your guests and their organizations are posting to their networks and fan pages.

4. Use the tools
Once your event is underway, you’ll want to make good use of all the prep work you’ve done. Guest is talking about a great Thanksgiving turkey recipe? You have it standing by right? With a photo? Now’s the time to insert them directly into your live event.

Conversation starting to lag? Drop in that poll (or create one on the fly). Nearing the end? Now’s the time to publish those links you’ve been sitting on.

5. Be flexible: Let the audience guide you
One thing we’ve discovered is that, no matter how much you plan and shape your event, sometimes your audience is going to drive it in an entirely different direction. While you do have control over this - you can selectively choose to publish (or not) certain types of questions and comments from your users in order to keep on track - often times it’s better to “go with the flow.” After all, if you’re not giving the audience what they want, it’s a simple click on their part to move on. Keep them engaged. I’ll bet you’ll be able to transition back to your planned agenda easily.

At the same time, don’t feel that every question has to be answered. If you’re talking spring planting, you don’t have to take fall harvest questions. Already answered that healthcare question? You don’t have to revisit it. Users can visit the archive afterwards for that information.

6. After it’s over
Once your event concludes it doesn’t have to disappear forever into the depths of the internet. Consider what its long-tail value may be. Watch your analytics. You may find that certain events continue to generate traffic as people search your site. Make sure they can find it. Perhaps you’ve hosted a session that has some value on a recurring basis (seasonally, yearly, etc...). Dust it off next year if appropriate.

Learn from your experience. Experiment with times of day (remember your audience though - students may not be able to make that noon chat), topics, guests, and content to see what works for you and your users.


The Presented by Incubation Lab Blog Series tackles the digital media topics that matter to stations, while highlighting and celebrating the online efforts of stations. These regular profiles of products, people and trends can provide you with inspiration and potential collaborators for your own projects.

East Tennessee PBS: Re-Design Star

Recently, the SPI team noticed that East Tennessee PBS (formerly East Tennessee Public Television ETPtv) did a web site redesign and I decided to get to the bottom of it.

I rang up Katherine Killen, the station’s Public Outreach Manager, and learned that the web site is not all they changed. Katherine gave such remarkable responses that we hope will inspire fellow stations.

What advice would you give to other station’s considering a website redesign?

A web site redesign needs to be a part of a larger, strategic plan for the organization. Therefore, it’s crucial to determine the overall goals of the organization when building your web site.

Conduct research before you begin any redesign. Ask your members, viewers and target market what they want, need and expect from your station as well as your web site.

Consider what you might want to do with your web site in the future and, if possible, build in the flexibility to do that. Even though we launched the new site several months ago, it still doesn’t offer everything we planned - like watching local programs online, more sharing of content, and more offerings for parents and children. The capability is there, we just have to implement it over time. With a small staff (20 total co-workers and just two in our department) and resources, we had to approach the redesign in phases. We also communicated this to the firm that handled the redesign.

We partnered with a marketing agency, a research consulting firm and a web site redesign firm throughout our branding/research process. They donated the majority of their services, which is the only way we would have been able to afford to conduct the research, and make the changes to our web site and brand. These firms helped us know what questions to ask and how. We conducted online polls, focus groups and a tactic we called “feet on the street.” With the latter methodology, we actually took our feet to the street and asked people in public places if they knew about us, what they thought of us, what they liked, what they didn’t like, etc. We targeted places that typical public television viewers would be – places like public libraries, museums, etc.

Broad-based questions about the organization as a whole not only helped us decide what to offer/provide on our web site, but also helped with our strategic planning. This research was key in determining that we not only needed to re-brand ourselves and update our web site, but that we also needed to change our name. We have two transmitters and two sets of call letters. The station, therefore, used an umbrella name East Tennessee Public Television or ETPtv, which led to some confusion about who we were and what we offered. The name change to East Tennessee PBS helped clarify this. The marketing team at PBS was crucial in the decision to change our name.

In addition to our primary research, we poured over the existing suggestions and research from PBS Connect, Station Remote Control, CPB and the National Center for Media Engagement (the PBS Brand Guide was key in the redesign of our brand as well). Combining this information with our primary research gave us a breadth and depth of information we wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise.

Was the web site redesign done in house or through a contractor?

A contractor.

How long did the entire redesign process take?

We began our research in January 2010 and got final approval to change our name in June 2010. Our Web contractor began working on the new site in mid-June. We launched the new web site August 1, 2010.

Which CMS do you use?

Ravine Software.

Have you seen an increase in web traffic or online donations since the redesign?

YES! When we changed our name, we worked extensively with the local media to publicize the change in addition to our on-air spots and promotion. We used the opportunity to communicate what we offer our community and why public television is important. The clarity provided by the name change and promotion coupled with the launch of COVE on our web site in December 2010, helped with the traffic increase.

What would you avoid or do differently in the redesign process?

I would have liked a little more time both to learn the new CMS system and to implement the redesign. The design firm needed most of the six weeks for the redesign itself, which left little time for training. We learned how to manage the site in a little more than a week before the launch. We continued to learn new tricks with the CMS after the web site launched. The public couldn’t tell, but more time would have made it easier for our staff.

The timing of a redesign deserves much consideration. Pledge drives, staff workloads and even other major community events must be considered. For example, we wanted to launch our name change/redesign before the holidays so that our announcement wouldn’t be lost in the abundance of retail advertising and promotion of holiday related charities.

Katherine Killen currently serves as the Public Outreach Manager for East Tennessee PBS who manages their website, special events, volunteer program, media relations and marketing. She also assists the Assistant General Manager on the station’s education initiatives such as “Martha Speaks” Reading Buddies Program, “Scholars’ Bowl” and PBS Kids Go! Writers Contest.

If your station has recently done a web site redesign, let us know about it in the comments section and feel free to leave tips on the process for fellow stations.

Linkbuilding Tactics for PBS Stations – Part 5: Leverage Brand Mentions

Written by Melanie Phung, New Media Director, PBS Interactive

So far we've focused heavily about maximizing link opportunities/value within your own site and within PBS's publishing tools. One other easy opportunity with a high success rate, as we mentioned before, is to encourage COVE video embeds among people/organizations who were interviewed in your program.

In order to compete against other publishers, however, you will at some point need to request links from other sites.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Turning Brand Mentions into Links

Asking sites with whom you have no prior relationship can seem a bit more daunting, but a great place to start is to identify brand mentions that don't include a link. If a site, for example, mentions your show or episode in the context of broadcast, they are very likely to be receptive to contact from you simply letting them know where on your website their readers can find more information.

If a reporter or TV blogger wrote that they were excited about an upcoming episode of your program, why not let them know that the preview clip or the full show are available for them to use or link to? Don't take for granted that even your die-hard fans know about full-episode streaming online or that videos can be embedded. By taking a few minutes to let them know, you can build a relationship or train them to keep coming back to your site on their own to look for content they can share going forward.

Sometimes the opportunities may not be specific to an episode, but still be a great time to do outreach. For example, when the Internet was buzzing about Watson's win on Jeopardy, many sites would have welcomed a friendly note letting them know about the NOVA episode, Q&As with the engineers, and related articles about artificial intelligence and advancements in robotics.

How to do it:

• Set up Google Alerts to get notified when sites are publishing/tweeting about your programs, episodes and personalities.
• Determine which of the listings are appropriate outreach opportunities
• Contact the author/blogger with a short, friendly and personalized note letting them know you saw their post and thought they and their readers might find value in this embeddable clip/article/interview/etc. The key is to keep your outreach email short, to the point, and to focus on providing value.
• Follow up to thank your new contacts if they used your links.
• Keep records of your outreach so you can go back to these contacts in the future if you have new contact that aligns with their sites' content.

This approach can lead to fruitful long-term relationships that will help you build a foundation for future promotion and link-building.

Linkbuilding Series Conclusion

In competitive niches, web marketers are going to great lengths and effort to build high-authority links in order to increase their search engine rankings, and there are myriad "advanced" link building tactics.

The steps outlined in this series, on the other hand, are all low-hanging fruit – relatively low effort, high rates of success and easy to replicate. (If you haven't yet read all 5 tips, start with Part 1 in our "linkbuilding for stations" series.)

Link-building is not a one-time effort, and not every single link is likely to directly result in hundreds of thousands of additional pageviews. However, building up the volume and quality of relevant inbound links to your deep pages will have significant, long-term traffic payoff. The earlier you begin taking advantage of inbound links, and develop processes and workflows for capitalizing on easy opportunities as they come up, the sooner you'll start generating more, and sustainable, SEO traffic.

For more information on SEO please visit our Best Practices for PBS Member Stations. Have more to add? Please share your comments about your SEO and linking strategies below.

Linkbuilding Tactics for PBS Stations – Part 4: Fix Broken Links

Written by Melanie Phung, New Media Director, PBS Interactive

Inbound links are the currency of the web. Not doing anything about inbound links that point to broken pages, then, is like flushing valuable assets down the toilet.

Find and Fix Your 404s

Sometimes your site's error pages are due to broken links on your site, maybe as a result of a hiccup in your CMS or because you moved or deleted pages. Find where the links occur on your site and fix them. But also make sure you redirect the URL that generates the 404 and create a "permanent redirect" to the correct place.

Other times, the 404 error is caused because external sites are linking to you with the wrong URL. Maybe they accidentally put an extra space in the URL, misspelled something or just plain mucked something up.

If it's a high-value site, you may want to contact them and let them know about the bad links (and mention any other content they might also be interested in). This is an opportunity to build a relationship with the owner of the site and to ensure (if they fix the link) that you're getting the full value of that link in the eyes of the search engines. But regardless of whether you have the time to reach out to the linking site, make sure to redirect the mistyped URL to the correct location on your site if you can.

A 301 redirect (an HTTP status message that tells browsers and spiders that a page has permanently moved to a new location) will pass the value of the link to the right page. Cleaning up broken links is an easy way to recapture traffic and link value that would otherwise be lost.

How to do it: Check your server logs for errors generated by a referring link and/or go to your Google Webmaster Tools account to identify Page Not Found errors that can be redirected. Create a 301 redirect table mapping 404s to whatever the closest existing page is. Fix the sources of the bad links to point directly to the correct location, when possible.

For Google Webmaster Tools:
1. Log into https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and select your site. (If you don't already have a Google WMT account, they are free to create and we highly recommend you create and utilize it. Use the link above to get started)
2. In left nav, expand "Diagnostics"
3. Click on "Crawl errors"
4. Select "Not Found"
5. Download the files
6. Fix broken links, where possible
7. Create 301 redirects pointing to closest matching existing page



Don't miss the others in our series about leveraging easy link opportunities:
1. Maximize Internal Links
2. Make Full Use of Related Links in your COVE portal
3. Promote Embeddable Videos
4. Fix Your 404s
5. Leverage Brand Mentions

JUST RELEASED: No problem, Keepin’ It Social

In 2007 when PBS embarked on a grant funded experiment called PBS Engage, most PBS stations had not even heard of social media. A select few had MySpace pages and even less had Facebook or Twitter accounts.

The Engage project ended last year, but the legacy lives on, through the original Engage team (now integrated into different groups within PBS Interactive), and most importantly, through the tremendous strides that stations have made in launching social media initiatives.

Now, 90% of all PBS member stations have an active presence on social media platforms – a HUGE achievement that makes us all very proud on the SPI team. These initiatives enable audiences to get the maximum engagement by following, friending, watching, and looking into all the wonderful things stations have to offer.

To celebrate and support this station social media explosion, the SPI team is releasing two new offerings this week:

Social Media @Stations
This aggregated resource list of member station social sites is designed to help you follow, friend, like, listen, and look at what's happening around the web with local PBS stations.

Social Media Best Practices
We’ve added to our comprehensive Best Practices for Member Stations by creating a social media best practices area designed to help stations navigate the many possibilities and challenges related to social engagement.

We hope that these two additions will help you keep in touch with your fellow stations and help keep your initiatives going and growing. If you have anything to add, please let us know in the comments below or by sending us an email. Happy engaging!

Linkbuilding Tactics for PBS Stations – Part 3: Promote Embeddable Videos

Written by Melanie Phung, New Media Director, PBS Interactive

In yesterday's linkbuilding post, we discussed why it's so important to utilize the Related Links feature in your COVE portal.

One of the other fantastic features of COVE is that COVE videos can be shared by users around the web. When users grab the player embed code of your locally produced videos to share on their own sites, part of that code includes links back to the video and to your program site.

When you encourage your viewers to share the video, therefore, you are not only helping to build up your total video views, but you're also helping new audiences discover other content on your site, reinforcing your brand, keeping users engaged, encouraging them keep coming back, etc.

High-quality video is the kind of asset that's in demand even by top-tier websites, but many people won't think to look to PBS.org for embeddable video. That's why it's important to encourage sharing explicitly. (Many sites go to YouTube and find pirated copies of your content, which don't help your video views or get viewers back to channels that you control. Most of those sites would be just as happy to use a COVE asset, if only they were told about it.)

PBS stations and producers have had good success getting the COVE viral player (as well as links back to their sites) placed on high-authority sites such as those of local government entities, popular TV critics columns, official sites of major performing artists, etc. Those are the kinds of links that will help your SEO, and the effort to get those kinds of strong editorial links is minimal when you can offer them content they want!

How to do it:

• First, make sure embed/sharing capabilities are enabled in COVE.
• In the COVE admin, fill out the Content Producer Website field with the full destination URL (don’t use a vanity URL) and the Episode URL field.

Then:

• Tell site visitors/fans about the embed feature.
• Ask featured guests to include video on their own sites
• Include specific mention of the embed feature in pitches to journalists and bloggers
• Do these things regularly and in the normal course of promoting video views.

Figure 1: Examples of great video embed placements:




Our next posts about how high-ROI linkbuilding tactics for stations will discuss the value of recouping the value of dead links and leveraging brand mentions.

Linkbuilding Tactics for PBS Stations – Part 2: COVE Related Links

Written by Melanie Phung, New Media Director, PBS Interactive

Keyword-rich links that point to your pages will help those target pages rank better in search. As we mentioned before, the easiest opportunity to get more links to your pages is to build internal links from your own site.

In part 2 of our linkbuilding series, we show you how COVE gives you several more opportunities to create those links yourself.

Make Full Use of Related Links in your COVE Player

If you're not including "Related Links" to each episode you're adding to COVE, you're missing an important opportunity to create relevant links and help users find more content on your site.

Not only do Related Links back to your station site help SEO, but heatmaps of where users click on the page show that visitors do rely heavily on these links to explore more content (thus, they drive more traffic back to your site).

In the National COVE example below, notice how visitors see and use the links to other pages on the series’ program site.




In the rare case that there is absolutely nothing on your site that's related to your local video clip or episode (which shouldn't ever be the case), you can still add other useful links like "check local schedule", a link to your newsletter, etc. When you add "Related Links", the system also automatically adds a link back to your program homepage and the episode homepage (if you've entered this info in the COVE admin).

In the example below, the "check local listings" link added by the producer allows visitors to easily get tune-in information related to the clip. Note that tune-in links aren't great for SEO, but they are a good option if there isn't other related content you can point to. There is always something you can link to that will provide value to users and/or generate SEO value for your site.



Yes, adding related content is an extra step in the publishing process, but it's a lot less work than trying to get an equally valuable link from external sources, and if you don't do it, you're leaving easy traffic on the table.

How to do it:
1. Access the COVE Resource Center for documentation on how to add related links.
2. Use keyword-relevant text in the "title" field.
3. Use the description field to provide a compelling reason to click on the link.



To add links to your homage and episode homepage make sure you fill out the following fields in the metadata form when submitting a new asset.
• Content Producer Website
• Episode URL

If you have questions about COVE, please contact the SPI Team. And check back tomorrow for another easy tip for leveraging your COVE videos for linkbuilding.

5 Part SEO Series: Linkbuilding Tactics for PBS Stations – Part I

Written by Melanie Phung, New Media Director, PBS Interactive

Links are one of the most important ranking factors for SEO, and it's no longer enough just to publish outstanding content and wait for people to link to you.

To rank well for competitive (high-volume) queries and pull in qualified traffic, you will also need to work at getting inbound links to your site and to make those links count.

Unfortunately, when most people think about "link building", they're probably thinking of the kinds of cold pitches and spam that they get in their own inboxes. "Dear sir or madam, I'm interested in a mutually beneficial link exchange. Please place a link to [spammy URL] on your PR6 homepage with the text "[spammy anchor text]." When you have placed the link on your site, we will link back to your site from [our page 'o spam links]."

You are right to send those straight to the trash! That approach to link-building (even if you don't initiate it), is going to do you more harm than good.

In this 5-part series, we're going to cover basic, often-overlooked link opportunities every local PBS station site should be taking advantage of.

1. Maximize Internal Links
2. Make Full Use of Related Links in your COVE portal
3. Promote Embeddable Videos
4. Fix Your 404s
5. Leverage Brand Mentions

Below we start with our first tip, but please check back over the next couple of weeks for the next four "must-do" tips for stations.

Part 1: Maximize Internal Links
We've mentioned internal cross-linking in previous SEO webinars and it's part of the SEO checklist for publishing new pages. We can't stress enough that: 1) links are critical for SEO; 2) there is no easier opportunity to create highly relevant, anchor-text-rich links than editing your very own pages.

Any time you mention a proper noun, specific concept, event, or item, about which you have more content on another page, turn the relevant keyword phrase into a link that points to the main page for that keyword. (The "main page", in this context, doesn't have to be a "topic" or index page; it can just be whatever page has the best chance of ranking for that search term.)




How to do it:
A. When trying to promote a specific page
1. Pick a page about a specific keyword (this should be your best page for that keyword phrase)
2. Search your site for other mentions of that keyword or topic
3. Fire up your CMS's page editor and turn those phrases into links that point to the page you picked in step 1.

Don't dilute the link value by pointing at lots of different pages about that keyword phrase; try to point all the links about one subject to a single page in order to get that one page to rank (but it is okay to vary the anchor text up a little, as long as each phrase contains the relevant keywords).

B. As you're creating new pages:

If you make internal linking part of your everyday publishing workflow, it'll save you a lot of effort in the long run.
Before you publish a new page of content, scan the text for keyword phrases that you could turn into links to point to other pages on your site.

(If you have questions about what makes for a good keyword phrase to target, please see the previous post in the Producer Exchange on keyword research.)

Please check back later this week for the next tip in our linkbuilding series.

Calling all PreK-12 Educators: Dive Into the "Innovation Immersion Experience"

Written by Donovan Goode, Director of Marketing, PBS Education

PBS and its local stations are calling all preK-12 educators who use dynamic and innovative practices to improve education to enter the PBS Teachers Innovation Awards program by April 14. As the driving force behind America’s future, educators are constantly evolving their practices to ensure students learn the skills they need to be successful outside the classroom and become the next generation of innovators. The second annual PBS Teachers Innovation Awards, sponsored by the Henry Ford and SMART, showcases the best practices for introducing new teaching methods into the classroom to foster student engagement and improve learning.

PreK-12 educators from all different backgrounds, including classroom teachers, library media specialists and homeschool educators are eligible for the PBS Teachers Innovation Awards program. To enter, teachers must join the PBS Teachers online community and share their story about how they use PBS educational resources to support innovation in their classroom. Educators are required to submit a video demonstrating the innovative instructional method with students (inside or outside the classroom), or an innovative project that was a result of an instructional activity they conducted. In addition each entry must show how a PBS resource was used or modified to enhance the lesson or project. Entries will be evaluated by a panel of judges that includes previous Innovation Awards winners and PBS TeacherLine® course facilitators, all of whom are expert teachers with extensive experience in the classroom. Winners will be selected based on their level of creativity and student engagement, among other criteria.

First prize will be awarded to the top 12 educators, two from each of subject and grade-level groupings. These educators will participate in a weeklong “Innovation Immersion Experience” at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Mich., from July 31 to August 5, 2011. The “Innovation Immersion Experience” offers a unique professional development opportunity designed to inspire educators to transform learning in the classroom. The Henry Ford celebrates yesterday’s traditions as well as today’s innovations with a rich and diverse offering of exhibits, demonstrations, programs and reenactments. First prize winners will also receive a SMART wireless slate, and free enrollment in a PBS TeacherLine professional development course. For second prize, 36 teachers will receive a bag of PBS gifts that will include best-selling and award-winning public broadcasting programs in digital formats and much more. All prize winners will receive the title of “PBS Teachers Innovator” and will be invited to work with PBS and local stations to encourage the utilization of public digital media and innovative teaching practices in classrooms across the country.

Winners will be featured on the PBS Teachers website. PBS Teachers is the Web portal to the PBS’ preK-12 educational services and its searchable library of more than 9,000 free local and national standards-based instructional resources, including on-demand video and interactive games. For more information and to enter, go to www.pbs.org/teachers/innovators/

Reminder: COVE API Incubator Sign Up

PBS Interactive is opening the COVE API for "friends and family" to participate in collaborative Incubator build sessions – and there is still time to sign up to participate!

We already have an all-star cast of stations signed up to work with each other during the month of April to build unique video experiences from the COVE API. Even if you are not a developer, there are still plenty of ways to get involved.

If you would like to gain access to the COVE API, the process is simple: drop a comment below or send an email to station_video@pbs.org with your name, station and video portal URL. We will contact you to get you started. Sign up closes Friday, March 25th.

The Incubator is a collaborative product-building initiative created as part of the Incubation Lab. By aggregating your feedback, Station Products & Innovation brings station professionals together to help solve some of your most difficult product challenges in quick, managed build sessions.

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FYI Corner: Twitter Tips

Written by Daryl Johnston, Station Products & Innovation Intern

Twitter is what I personally like to call a communications jungle because there is always so much going on and it is easy to get lost in all the chatter. So if your station’s timeline is anything like mine when you come back from an hour long meeting, you already have 200 or more tweets. Add all the other things you have to do into the mix and interacting with your audience on Twitter is no longer a priority. Before you throw your hands up and run away from the computer, here are a few tips to help you better manage and navigate this communications jungle.

• What is the impact your station’s Tweets have on viewers? If you have no idea, get your Klout score. Use Klout to find out the influence your station has on Twitter, how many times you have been retweeted, and how many @mentions your station has in total. You’ll also learn what kind of influence you may have on your audience by finding out if you are more of an explorer, specialist or other type of Tweeter.
• Want to make sure viewers are easily able to find your station or do you want to search out others in the public media industry? Use Listorius which has the easiest to use people and list search by name, region, or topic. Promoting an upcoming local or pledge program about area restaurants? Type a related search term into Listorious and connect to all the local folks who may be interested or who could help you promote the program.
• Follow keywords and #hashtags to easily find content you are able to retweet to your viewers. The SPI team has even created a #localpbs hashtag that we’d love local stations to use and create conversations around.
• Let your viewers know you. Have multiple people post Tweets for your station because it humanizes the organization and they now have someone to contact should they ever have the need. Tools such as Co-Tweet and Hootsuite are great for stations who have multiple Tweeters.
• Does your station have a blog? Crosspromotion is key – do what the SPI team does by posting a teaser on Twitter with a link back to the blog.

For more on how to improve your communications strategy on Twitter, click here.

See what other stations are doing on twitter and other social media sites with our new social media directory . And if you have any other successful tips or apps that have improved your communication with viewers via Twitter, let us know in the comments below.

Local Video Metrics for COVE Now Available

A new COVE feature is now available that allows stations to receive video metrics for local content. This feature has been a top priority request for a long time, and we are very excited to now offer it as part of the COVE Pro product feature set.

The new feature uses the event tracking handled by Google Analytics, so you will be able to track all of your valuable metrics information from one dashboard.

To download and implement this feature, you will need to access Station Remote Control’s COVE Resource Center (which will require your station’s SRC login). Click the link below to access:

http://www.pbs.org/remote.control/toolsindex/services/COVE/index.html#vga

As an added bonus, we have enlisted the help of stations participating in the Incubation Lab to create tutorials and documentation that helps you setup and navigate all of the metrics available through this feature. Special thanks to KLRU, WHYY and Wisconsin Public Television for creating these helpful materials for your COVE peers.

Presented by Incubation Lab: Giving a Hoot(suite), About Managing Social Media

The Presented by Incubation Lab series shines the spotlight on popular social media tool, HootSuite this week. Montana West, Integrated Media Producer for New Hampshire Public Television, weighs in:

HootSuite is a web based social media management tool. It allows the user to manage social media interactions across many different platforms quickly and efficiently. Here at New Hampshire Public Television, we use it to manage a couple of Twitter accounts and a handful of Facebook pages. The customizable tabbed interface gives us the ability to see spam, mentions, retweets and direct messages from multiple accounts and pages without having to actually switch accounts or navigate to different pages which helps alleviate some of our resource challenges.

Among the best reasons other stations could use a tool like HootSuite is that it allows you to schedule posts. Being able to post evenings and weekends, without having to actually log-in on evenings and weekends, allows you to appear more active than you have time to be, and to spread your messaging evenly if you have a lot to say. In a perfect world, scheduling your posts also allows you to review pending posts (by you or by others) for copy editing and hash-tag-adding purposes.

HootSuite has a built-in analytics feature that (until last week) was one of my favorite things as it was the only service I’ve seen that links together Facebook Insights, Klout (twitter metrics), and Google Analytics (web site metrics) so you can try to gauge the impact of your social messaging efforts on web traffic. But as of last week, HootSuite’s reporting feature has changed significantly to a pay per report (!?!) model for custom reports. Also, the HootSuite analytics features use the built-in URL shrinker (ow.ly) to track click-thru, so if you don’t use HootSuite for every post, these stats become less accurate.

There are a number of other features that may be interesting to some:
The ability to post to other social sites such as ping.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, and WordPress to name a few. Hootsuite also has the ability to import RSS feeds for posts. In addition, a robust “team management” feature (for Pro+ customers) can help manage workflow among groups of contributors; it also means that you can give a person permission to post to a Twitter account without sharing the username and password of that account which is quite useful if you have interns or other temporary staff helping with your social media.

I like HootSuite, but their hay-day of being a free & cool tool ended around 6 months ago. Since then they have become the poster child for monetization strategies (not that there’s anything wrong with that), creating various levels of service for payment, and moving popular features behind increasing pay-walls. This coupled with major improvements to Facebook’s and Twitter’s new interface have started to erode my official “HootSuite fan-boy” status. Though it may not be perfect HootSuite has helped us organize our social media efforts, which is a good thing. It is still free to try for the moment, and worth a look.


The Presented by Incubation Lab Blog Series tackles the digital media topics that matter to stations, while highlighting and celebrating the online efforts of stations. These regular profiles of products, people and trends can provide you with inspiration and potential collaborators for your own projects.

What Are Your Biggest Hurdles in Leveraging Your Online Audience?

PBS Interactive is planning a three-part workshop to help stations tackle the task of developing and implementing a digital strategy during the PBS Annual Meeting this May. 

In preparation for this Annual Meeting workshop, we would love to know the biggest problems/issues facing your station when it comes to capturing and leveraging your audience online. 


We also want you to tell us about your station’s online success stories (and failures too). Your suggestions and stories may be incorporated into our hands-on interactive workshop. 

If you will not be able to make it to Orlando this year for Annual Meeting, we will have all the documentation and follow up information from these sessions available to you.

Please leave your feedback below or email Eric Freeland, Director of Online Programming & Promotion (ejfreeland@pbs.org).

National Online Prospecting Project: New Status Update

The National Online Prospecting Project -formerly known as the Online Fundraising Initiative - has been established to prospect untapped, online audiences for the purposes of identifying, engaging, and cultivating new qualified donors to give to member stations. Through various testing and counsel from our advisory groups, the project will finally enable PBS Interactive to harness the power of PBS’s national web/mobile presence to identify new prospects that we can ultimately influence for their support of PBS and member stations. Many thanks to our advisory groups, who have given us valuable, ongoing feedback for this project.

To promote communication and further discussion,  we have launched the National Online Prospecting Project Resource Center on Station Remote Control,  which includes comprehensive documentation detailing the project and key milestones.  The goal of the Resource Center and webinars is to answer your questions, provide additional detail and gather suggestions that you have.

*The National Online Prospecting Project webinars scheduled during the week of March 21 have been temporarily postponed due to lack of registrants.

Be sure to look for the new dates here and in your SPI Weekly Updates.   

If you have specific questions or topics you would like us to cover during the webinars, please send them to pbsi_stationservices@pbs.org.

What To Do at iMA and SXSW

Are you one of those lucky people who will get to escape your cubicle for a few days and go to the iMA Conference and South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival ? The media world will take Austin by storm this week and I am sure your events calendar is probably overloaded.

Here are a few of the iMA and SXSW sessions and events we, on the SPI Team would like to suggest you add to your calendar - Plus, the SPI team’s own Kristin Calhoun and Max Duke will be there so be sure to say "howdy!":

Friday 3/11
7:30-9:00am

• iMA Breakfast: The PBS & NPR Local/National Strategies with Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager Digital Media of NPR and Jason Seiken, SVP, Interactive, Product Development and Innovation of PBS

9:45-11:00am

• Take Advantage of PBS & NPR! Tactics You Can Implement Now!
• Panelists include John Keefe, WNYC; Libby Peterek, KLRU; Mike Bauhof, Nine Networks of Public Media, Hawk Mendenhall, KUT; Jennifer Strachan, KPLU; and Tim Olson, KQED.
  

2:45-4:00pm

• Web Metrics Will Make You a Superstar with Robert Bole of CPB, Tammy Carpowich, KPBS, Jayme Swain, PBS, and Mike Reszler, MPR

4:15-5:30pm

• Going Mobile Without Going Crazy, or Going Broke, with SPI's Max Duke as a panelist.

Saturday 3/12
9:30-10:30am

• Putting the Public Back in Public Media
  

Monday 3/14
5:00pm

• Our Media: Building an API for Public Media

Lastly, in celebration of the SXSW, PBS & Friends will throw a party at The Parish on Sunday, March 13, starting at 9:00 PM for those who have a SXSW Interactive or Film badge only. Click here to R.S.V.P for the party.

Don't forget us back at the office! Remember to tweet all the conference happenings by using the hashtags: #iMAConf and #SWSX. Keep the twitpics of your steak dinners to a minimum.

If there are any other events you think members of the public media should attend while at iMA or SXSW, post them here.

Presented by Incubation Lab: Does CNN.com’s ‘Poll’ Underestimate Public Media Funding Support?

The Presented by Incubation Lab series shines the spotlight on CNN.com's recent 'Quick Vote' asking people to respond with their opinions about funding public media. Michael Keefe-Feldman, Online Managing Editor for WMHT, weighs in:

On the homepage of CNN.com earlier this week, a ‘Quick Vote’ poll question asked, ‘Should federal funding be stripped from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to save more than $400 million a year?’ As of the time I write this, approximately 345,000 votes have been recorded by CNN.com and 56% of those are ‘No’ votes, while 44% are ‘Yes’ votes.

This is a bad poll. Even if we could look past the unscientific nature of the poll (though we shouldn’t), the question itself is designed in a way that will produce skewed results—likely to the disservice of public media and its legions of supporters.

CNN.com’s poll question is dangerously close to what pollsters would call a ‘push poll.’ At best, it is leading. This is because the question includes the rationale as to why one might vote ‘Yes’ (to save taxpayer money) but doesn’t include the rationale as to why one might vote ‘No’ (some hint of the societal value of educational, non-commercial media). If you’re trying to be as objective as possible, you should either include both rationales or neither one.

‘Should federal funding be stripped from CPB?’ would be a fair question. Though it’s a bit of a mouthful, another fair question might read something like this: ‘Should federal funding be stripped from CPB—the agency which funds non-commercial, educational PBS and NPR programs such as ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘All Things Considered’—in order to save taxpayers $400 million a year?’ Instead, CNN.com included one motivational factor but not the other, which is just poor methodology. I suspect that these results will be tacked on to a story on CNN and thereby given the weight of some sort of journalistic truth or meaning. Blech!

To make matters worse, the poll question itself and the corresponding results box do not mention the fact that this is not a scientific poll—as is the case with most online polls, which typically reflect the views of a self-selecting group of highly-engaged or motivated respondents rather than a random sample of the general population. Though you probably already know this about online polls, not everyone does—so what often gives this kind of a poll its journalistic heft is the masking of its actual irrelevance. When that happens, people are apt to develop a distorted sense of public opinion.

So far, CNN.com’s poll indicates that a majority of Americans favor continued funding for CPB. But given the numbers we’ve seen in the past, you have to wonder if it might in fact be a super majority with a fairly-worded question.


The Presented by Incubation Lab Blog Series tackles the digital media topics that matter to stations, while highlighting and celebrating the online efforts of stations. These regular profiles of products, people and trends can provide you with inspiration and potential collaborators for your own projects.

CPB Public Media Audience Survey

I love a good survey. I like taking them and I like giving them. The feedback you can get from a survey can be invaluable in helping to inform a project or provide valuable information about your audience. Currently, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is working with iStrategy Labs on a project that will help inform CPB about public media’s social media usage. And... they have released a survey that they would like for local PBS stations to share with their local communities on their social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

The survey, which closes this Friday, March 11th, is designed for the public media audience to share information about how they interact with their local stations on social media. Although the results of the survey will not be compiled into a formal report, the results CPB and iStrategy Labs hope to receive will help inform the research they are doing. So, in the interest of good research that can help us all learn a little more about social media and our audience, we hope you’ll help them out by sharing this link with your community: http://istrat.gy/public-media-survey

Editors note: CPB is aware that stations are reaching out to their audience for pledge at the moment, but any additional help from stations would really improve the number of responses and value of the survey.

Gowalla A-Go-Go

Earlier this year, PBS’s Marketing and Communications team started talking to Austin-based, Gowalla about various ways PBS could use the location-based social networking platform around TV program promotion. And on Feb. 24th PBS’s Gowalla account actually checked into the White House and the White House Press Briefing Room during rehearsals of In Performance at the White House to officially start the ball rolling with updates and check-ins.

In addition, anyone following PBS’s Gowalla account and is attending SXSW or iMA in Austin this week will likely see the “highlights” supplied by local station KLRU. What does this mean for you? PBS’s marketing team is working with the Station Products & Innovation team to reach out to stations for even more exciting partnerships with Gowalla. Stay tuned to this space or let us know if you’d like to be included in some upcoming projects in the comments area here.

KQED: Making News Social

KQED just threw down the gauntlet for how stations can use social media as an extension to their traditional web presence. The new KQED News Facebook page is a “source for news and insight” from northern California. The new page also features news from PBS and NPR.

We caught up with Ian Hill, KQED News’s online community engagement specialist, to find out more about this exciting new venture.

Where did the idea of a Facebook page come from?
KQED has a very active page at Facebook.com/KQEDPublicMedia that is run by our marketing department and does a phenomenal job of letting people know about all our content across KQED’s television, radio and online platforms. KQED News now produces more than 18 daily radio newscasts, a statewide radio news show that can be heard on more than 35 stations, several blogs and a weekly news program on television so it became clear that we had more content than we could fit into one Facebook page. We wanted to make sure Facebook users were aware of all the news we had to offer and were given the chance to discuss our work and the issues we cover.

In addition, some studies have shown that Facebook users are more likely to get engaged with media content when that content is presented on topic-specific pages. We realized that presenting KQED News content on a news-only page makes it more likely that Facebook users will discuss that content, which furthers our goal of starting conversations about the news we provide.

Finally, we believe that Facebook's growth in popularity has made it a vital tool for reaching Bay Area residents when we have important information about breaking news in their community.

The KQED News site on your web site is very robust – so, what should we expect to see on the Facebook page? We've worked hard to strengthen our online news presence since launching KQEDnews.org last summer. The Facebook page is in some ways an extension of that effort in that it helps Facebook users learn more about the great online content we're producing. Much of the content we’ll post on the Facebook page will include links to content on KQEDnews.org and will seek the opinions of our Facebook fans on the issues we cover.

Several of posts will link to News Fix, our Bay Area news blog that's updated several times daily. If News Fix includes a post about a city proposal on leash laws in parks, we might update the Facebook page with a link to the post and ask fans if dogs are given too much freedom in recreation areas. Some of their comments then may be used in future blog posts.

We'll be following the same format with links to posts from our blogs that cover health, the environment and state government and politics, as well as online streaming audio of our local and state newscasts. As the page grows, Facebook posts will seek sources for news stories, help start discussions about news events like elections and serve to distribute breaking news when it's necessary.

How often are you posting information?
We're posting information about 12 times throughout the day, although our post frequency is dictated by the news cycle. If we have a breaking news story that demands multiple Facebook posts in a short span of time, that's what we'll do. Our posting times also won't be limited to the 9-to-5 business day, unlike some pages run by businesses. Facebook users are on the site when its convenient for them, not when its convenient for us. We need to respect that to be successful.

Are you working with community partners?
We're not working with community partners directly in respect to the Facebook page, however, we will share some of their content via Facebook as it's appropriate. For example, KQED News has a partnership with California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting. We're happy to share California Watch posts that are of interest to our community on Facebook.

How long did it take to get this off the ground?
The page itself took less than 15 minutes to set up and launch, and thanks to cross-promotion from the KQED Facebook page, we had 50 fans by the end of our first day. Prior to the launch of the page I did a fair amount of research online about best practices for news organizations and media on Facebook. I presented the results of my research to our newsroom managers, who endorsed the proposal for a KQED News page, and then to an in-house advisory committee on social media comprised of KQED employees representing several departments.

What one piece of advice would you give to another station who may want to do the same thing?
Just do it. There's a tendency at any large organization - whether it be a corporation or public media outlet - to approach social media with caution. But keep in mind, Facebook users have to click "Like" on your page before they start receiving posts from you in their newsfeed. Your content isn't automatically posted to everyone. As a result, the risk associated with starting a Facebook page is pretty small.

You can also follow @KQEDNews on Twitter.

Presented by Incubation Lab: Wordpress vs. Drupal

The Presented by Incubation Lab series shines the spotlight on Content Management Systems by enlisting two station proponents to look at their favorite options: Drupal and Wordpress. If you have any thoughts about either CMS, or have a favorite of you own, add a comment below.

DRUPAL - Julianne Lamsek, KCTS 9 The Technology Director at KCTS 9 in Seattle for 5+ years, Julianne Lamsek manages the station’s Interactive and IT departments. She serves on the PBS Interactive Station Advisory Council and as board chair of a local grocery co-op, PCC Natural Markets. How do you use Drupal on your site? Drupal is the CMS that powers KCTS 9’s website, KCTS9.org. We began using Drupal in 2008, and are currently on Drupal 6. Why is Drupal the solution for you? The prior CMS we used for KCTS9.org was proprietary, difficult to manage and challenging to support. Since we implemented Drupal, we’ve benefited from the large number of contributed modules, the ease of scalability and the support provided by the Drupal community. The most useful feature you found so far? The Content Construction Kit (CCK) module allows us to easily and quickly build feature rich pages from a point-and-click interface. Additionally, the Drupal community has been a helpful resource as we develop and support our site. Other thoughts: Drupal is not necessarily intuitive to those who are new to it. If a station is considering transitioning to Drupal they should plan to invest in Drupal training for their staff so they can learn the framework. This is especially important for web developers if they are not already versed in Drupal.

WORDPRESS - Phil Meyer, WTIU The Station Manager at WTIU in Bloomington, Indiana, Phil Meyer is currently the chair of the PBS Interactive Station Advisory Committee, and has also served on PBS Advisory Groups for Communications, Development, PBS Connect and PBS Express. Before WTIU, he worked at WCET in Cincinnati for nine years and at WGBH Boston while in college. How do you use Wordpress on your site? For about three years, we have been building the WordPress infrastructure for indianapublicmedia.org. Why is Wordpress the solution for you? We are a joint licensee in a small market with news, regular series and robust local production pipeline, so we needed a solution that was easy for almost everyone -- producers, reporters, marketers (and even station managers) -- to be able to enter content, while still keeping the structure and navigation consistent. The most useful feature you found so far? If I can post content through WordPress, it's got to be easy to use. We have also started developing our own plug-ins and are always looking for third-party solutions that have been developed by the WordPress user community. Other thoughts: The biggest drawback so far has been a server issue. When we see a spike in traffic, our current server has trouble handling both the requests from us to post content, and the requests from users to access the content at the same time. We are hoping that separating the database onto two servers (one for us, one for users) will resolve this issue.

The Presented by Incubation Lab Blog Series tackles the digital media topics that matter to stations, while highlighting and celebrating the online efforts of stations. These regular profiles of products, people and trends can provide you with inspiration and potential collaborators for your own projects.

New Incubator: Dive into the COVE API

Calling all station developers and designers!

If you or someone at your station has a penchant for API development, you can dive in and start cooking up your video experiences using the COVE API!

PBS Interactive is opening the COVE API to "friends and family" to participate in collaborative Incubator build sessions. These sessions will give you access to the API and a group of fellow station developers to help in the build process. The Incubator isn't only for hardcore developers; we also need front-end designers, idea people and even folks with a talent for documentation. Upon completion of the Incubator session, which will be a few weeks long and take place in the open.PBS space, your station will have access to the API for whatever project you are working on.

If you would like to gain access to the COVE API, the process is simple: drop a comment below or send an email to station_video@pbs.org with your name, station and video portal URL. We will contact you to get you started.

The Incubator is a collaborative product-building initiative created as part of the Incubation Lab. By aggregating your feedback, Station Products & Innovation brings station professionals together to help solve some of your most difficult product challenges in quick, managed build sessions.

Talk Amongst Yourselves: Getting Social with Social Media

Last week, the SPI team introduced a new weekly feature to its blog where stations are able to share their opinions and discuss popular topics in public media. Joining the discussion is simple - just share your thoughts in the comments section of each week's discussion post.

This week's topic is social media. Feel free to discuss your favorite social media services, your station's social media strategy, you favorite Foursquare mayorship, or anything else related to social media.

Calling All Bloggers: Become a SPI Blog Contributor!

Do you enjoy writing about interesting topics related to public media? If so, now is your chance to show off your blogging skills and share your ideas with the rest of the PBS system. The SPI team is looking for talented writers from PBS member stations who would like to contribute posts to this blog. This is a great opportunity to have your voice heard by fellow stations from across the system. If you are interested, please leave a comment below or contact the SPI team directly at PBSi_StationServices@pbs.org.

FYI Corner: Social Media App Round-Up

Written by Daryl Johnston, Station Products & Innovation Intern

It is official, almost everyone has now jumped onto the social media bandwagon. Organizations everywhere have either a Facebook page or a Twitter account. So now that your station uses social media, do you know how to get the most out of it? Sure status updates and tweets about the newest NOVA or Great Performances episodes are good, but are they getting to the people you want them to? If not, here are two apps you should consider using in conjunction with your social media outreach.

"Where My Friends Be?" is an app developed to locate a user’s friends on Facebook. Stations can use this online application to visualize where their viewers are located on a Google map. Based on that information, stations can develop a plan to increase viewership in areas where not many viewers are located or better promote local station events where the most viewers live.

"Friend or Follow" is another ingenious app because it allows stations to learn more about the people who are following them – or not. Enter your Twitter username and Friend or Follow will show you the people who you are following, but are not following you. You can also see how many people are following your followers, how often they tweet, and when they were last active. Why does this matter to stations? You want your investment in social media to reach as many people as possible and to create valuable engagement opportunities for your audience, having more insight into those you follow and follow you can help give stations a greater community impact.

Do you know of any interesting applications that help you better communicate with the community through social media? Post a comment about the tools you use and you may be the next SPI blog contributor writing your own FYI Corner!