In mid-April, Spiral16 did a pro bono research project with the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, a non-profit that houses its international headquarters in Kansas City.
In a two-week period we found nearly 400 websites mentioning their brand. Of these, 8.1% were news organizations that mentioned CFCA.
There were 658 first-order links in the entire ecosystem. Guess how many of these come from news organizations?
Only three.
The value taken from that statistic is clear: you can’t rely on other people to properly promote your online content. The virtualization screenshots below visualize these numbers. The one on the left shows the entire CFCA ecosystem, the one in the middle shows only news organization websites, and the one on the right shows only news websites that link to the CFCA website.
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The Internet has a sort of “pirate code” that is a loose set of understood guidelines (name that movie), and linking to your sources is one of them. Linking to a source or an organization mentioned in your posts not only drives traffic to their sites, but it helps validate your arguments. If bloggers or journalists don’t follow the pirate code, you can take some action to help your cause.
Let’s say you monitor your social media presence on a regular basis. How can you engage with the readers of these sites to monitor their influence and reach a new audience beyond text information?
The simplest solution is to leave a comment. Many comment platforms take simple HTML, so you can link directly back to the site. Try not to be mean (“WHY DIDN’T YOU LINK BACK TO OUR SITE?!”) and add useful information that the story doesn’t provide (like linking to the trailer for the Zamboanga movie, which wasn’t mentioned in the article.)
One last tip on commenting in this situation – if you’re the one who forgot to give the writer the information, own up to it! Don’t make them look bad on your behalf.
If the commenting feature doesn’t allow HTML, then leave the comment anyway. However, consider emailing the editor to have them make the change. Speaking from my experiences as a Web producer, it’s not a big deal to make a small change like adding a link.
If you have a self-created presence in this type of situation, you could potentially add thousands of new members to your community… all for a few seconds of work.
Do you have other ideas for making sure you receive proper coverage in the online media? Leave them in the comments!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Just to clarify the most common reason for websites not allowing links or html in the comments is due to spam and search engine indexing. Just because someone contributes to a conversation on your property doesn’t mean they should automatically get a link back through this method. Allowing this ruins the back-link model for many engines.
As a side note, I have always been a fan of the rel=”nofollow” method of allowing links in comments. It gives the commenter the opportunity to leave a link for other people, but that link does not get taken into consideration when engines index the site.