Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm

Experimentation in the newsroom is one of the best ways to learn new skills and discover full potential of your team. Now that you understand why it’s time to innovate, how to create a web-centric newsroom and how to invest in your staff, it’s time to start experimenting.

To get you thinking, this video presents a few ideas as a starting point for your next staff meeting.

If you still need a little more ammunition, CoPress’ summer design camp has a great series of discussions about news wikis, landing pages and article layouts, among other ideas to get you started.  Our blog and wiki also have resources  about setting up a Facebook fan page, e-mail newsletter, web-first workflow and open-source software.

These are just a few of the project ideas we’ve discussed at CoPress. Do you have a better one? If so, head on over to our forums or leave a comment on this post and let the community help you brainstorm.

After three months of hard work, the Minnesota Daily has a brand new design to improve its layout and usability. Son Huynh gives us his take on theming Drupal, changing a paper’s workflow and reorganizing news content.

In addition, just last March, the Minnesota Daily teamed up with developers from NewsCloud to create a Facebook application as part of a not-for-profit research study sponsored by the Knight Foundation to find new ways of engaging young people in news readership and community engagement. As an incentive, the Minnesota Daily hosts challenges and implemented a point system to reward active readers with prizes for their participation (such as posting on the Facebook page, tweeting, following the paper on Twitter).

Son also talks about the challenges of building an online community around the paper and his plans to revamp the app by adding Facebook Connect, so users can access the paper while being logged on to Facebook, and a selection on the paper’s site to better connect student groups and campus events. The newest version of the Minnesota Daily is set to launch on Sept 8th. Be sure to check out the new multimedia section, which was in part inspired by the Onion.

Have feedback for the Minnesota Daily? Leave a comment or email Son at shuynh [at] mndaily [dot] com.

• The New York Times is leveraging the communication skills of their journalists in an entirely new way: by having them teach. It’s a first-time experiment for the publication that hints at the importance of area expertise for the 21st century journalist. (tks Brian Manzullo)
• Need ideas for reinventing your J school this fall? Suzanne Yada has your back. The best, most pragmatic idea, in my opinion, is hosting a BarCamp. Make it happen.
• In the forum, I’ve released the 0.1 version of a plugin for properly redirecting your old College Publisher URLs to your new WordPress website. It should work with both College Publisher 4 and College Publisher 5 URLs, although the caveat is that I haven’t tested it fully yet, and requires that your old article IDs are stored somewhere in the database (or that they are your new post IDs). Also, Andrew Robinson of the College Heights Herald has done a bit of research into the best plugin for integrating Facebook Connect into your website.
• Rebooting the News, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer’s podcast loved by everyone (or Joey, Greg, and I at least), had Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab on as a guest this past week. Zach presents a thoughtful, well-informed perspective on the Associated Press’ DRM announcement that caught me completely by surprise, and Jay and Dave conclude the episode with a conversation about the type of information news stories traditionally lack that would actually make the reporting more useful.

Add your links to the mix by joining the CoPress Newsgroup on Publish2.

Listen live as Online Manager Son Hunyh and others from the Daily’s staff discuss the redesign and their ideas and plans for this year, including tactics to increase readership engagement. Be sure to join our live text chat below and call in to give feedback.

If you’re not able to listen live, please add your question as a comment.

When: Sunday, Aug. 30 at 5 p.m. ET

Where: BlogTalkRadio (or listen here with the embedded player)

Call-in number: (347) 843-4589

A Fan Box widget fixed that problem. And it can do the same for you.

What is a Fan Box?

I first saw a Fan Box in use with the launch of StudLife.com and immediately knew I had to use it too. It’s a minimally customizable widget that you can throw into the sidebar or footer of your website.

The upper portion of the box lists the name of your page, shows thumbnails of current fans, a stream of your updates and gives visitors the option of becoming a fan straight from your Web site. Of course, all these options are customizable. If you don’t want to show your fans, for example, you don’t have to.

I love this tool because it makes it so much easier for your fans to engage with you on Facebook. Let’s face it: people are generally lazy. They won’t take the extra effort to hunt you down on Facebook and become a fan. But if you put it in their faces, there’s no reason for them not to.

Since installing one of these handy boxes on the sidebar of mustangdaily.net on July 14, we’ve gotten 60 more fans. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, that’s a 71% increase that happened in six weeks. It took 7 months for us to get the first 85 fans.

People are finally starting to interact with our content, suggest story ideas, ask questions about articles that prompt further reporting and even just say, “Good job, thanks for interacting with us!”

The point: people will engage if you make it easy.

Before you install it

To put a Fan Box on your page, you of course need to first have a Facebook Fan page — not a group. A fan page can be better utilized than a group because it functions just like any other profile.

The best part is that any status updates you make on the fan page will be sent out to all your fans’ newsfeeds, just like any other status update. This gives users the ability to respond to links and updates you post. A group is static and incapable of this. And groups don’t come with a cool fan box.

A few tips for your Fan Page:

• Update it often. Although this can mean linking it with an RSS feed or with your Twitter updates, the best Facebook pages have custom updates.
• Interact with your readers. If people have questions or respond to your links, write back to them or tweet their comments to encourage others to add their own. I’ve found that just getting one person to comment will be a catalyst for at least a few others to chime in.
• Don’t overwhelm your fans. Facebook isn’t Twitter; update often, but not too often. Posting 10 updates a day might annoy your fans and cause them to block your updates from appearing on their newsfeed.
• Make it personal. You’re representing your organization’s brand, but that doesn’t mean have you have to sound like a PR machine. Things like “Hey, Happy Monday! Anyone have ideas for our story meeting today?” make your page feel approachable. One thing I do is make it clear that our page is not the Mustang Daily page, but the page for editors of the Mustang Daily to interact with readers, so it’s clear that it’s OK if we have some personality in our updates.

Installing the Fan Box

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably ready to get that handy tool on your site.

Facebook makes the installation really easy — it’s basically a matter of checking a few boxes and copying the code.

Step 1: Go to your Facebook fan page. Beneath your profile image, click “Add Fan Box to your site.”

Step 2: Customize your options. You can show your stream, show fan thumbnails, or simply embed “become a fan” without any of the other bells and whistles.

Step 3: Paste the code where you want it to appear. If you’re using WordPress, you can paste that code as a text widget.

Facebook’s developer wiki explains a few advanced options for manipulating the code to change height, width, number of fans that appear, etc.

You’ll also notice that there’s an option to use a “live stream” box which is similar to what CNN used during the presidential inauguration and Michael Jackson’s funeral. (I have yet to use this tool, so perhaps that will be another blog post.)

If you’ve used a Facebook Fan Box or if you have any other advice for maintaining a fan page, let us know in the comments!

• Facebook news application source code open to college news sites – NewsCloud has open sourced a Facebook application specifically for student news organizations. The application reportedly incentivizes activity around the news org’s content through a point system and rewards.
• TWiT 197: Steal This Diploma – Jeff Jarvis joins Leo Leporte for a discussion on newspaper collusion, Google Wave, and education.
• How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing – Detailed, enlightening essay on how the web has changed writing formats.
• The Daily Tar Heel’s new social media policy – Sara Gregory, incoming Managing Editor for Online, lays out the DTH’s remarkably open and earnest social media policies for the coming year.

Around the network

Conversation on the forum was light this week with Daniel asking about different styles of navigation. Joey quickly replied with:

My point: think about nav bars from the user’s perspective. I’d propose http://newser.com as a good example of a newsorg nav bar.

• It’s dynamic: content changes based on what the top stories are.
• It links off to topic pages. Only the most timely and relevant topic pages are easily accessible.
• You can still get to the traditional sections if you really want to navigate that way.

Max Cutler also offered his opinion,

In my experience/opinion, the reality is that that most college news orgs publish about the same limited set of topics repeatedly, and that’s why the section model can make some sense. That’s not to say that tags shouldn’t be used; they definitely should, and virtually all college news sites could do a better job of integrating tags into their navigation and exploration flow.

On the wiki this week, Daniel edited the Edit Flow Page with the latest info on the project.

New Facebook users will now be able to create Facebook accounts using their Gmail credentials and existing users will be able to associate and thus log in with Gmail or any other OpenID account that supports “automatic login.”

The move is likely to make the internet a much more open playing field, as other social networking sites and Web sites typically took to Facebook as a leader on the Web.

Around the Network

In the forum, Andrew Spittle lead an introduction with the prospective participants of the first session of the Web Design Camp as each described what they were expecting from the virtual camp.

Jake Paul from The Eagle said,

I am a designer but I have lots of development experience, and I knew how to make a site with HTML and CSS before I knew how to mock one up in Photoshop, so I’d be able to ground a discussion of typography in practical details as well (including issues of web standards and accessibility). We might consider combining the session on article design with the typography session as well, perhaps?

On the wiki this week, Daniel updated the CMS page, while Lauren continued to help with the reorganization.

In the news

Last but not least, here are the top fewlinks from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Owned? Legal terms of video hosting services compared – The best sites for video sharing seem to be the most restrictive.
• 4 productive summer projects for j-students – Lauren takes a look at some projects for various skill levels of student journalists to partake in this summer.
• Outside.in is looking for summer interns! – Outside.in is looking for unpaid interns this summer to work out of their NY office.
• A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) – Why topical landing pages will add value to the general web audience.

The best way to get traffic to your site is from links, and if your Facebook page is used correctly it can bring a great amount of traffic to your site.

Here are my top 10 ways to make sure that your Facebook Page doesn’t get overlooked:

1. Use RSS Feeds. It will be a great load off your shoulders to know that every time a new article is put up on your site, it will appear automatically on your Facebook Page. You can bring RSS feeds to your page by do adding Applications in the edit area of your page. The one I recommend is Simply RSS. It’s quite reliable and does the job well.

2. Use the Status Feature. Since the redesign, Facebook now has given Pages the opportunity to update their Fans without having to flood them (the old Facebook page’s version of statuses that went into their own separate inbox which often became overwhelming). Since the newest version of Pages include statuses, you can update your fans that will appear in their News Feed, which will make your publication’s Facebook page that much more visible than before.

3. Update Your Fans. The feature from the old version of Facebook pages can still be effective, so don’t overlook it. Some Facebook users have a tendency to ignore updates when they are sent to them but not all. Updates also allow you longer form communication with your Fans.

4. Use multimedia to make your Facebook a mini website. Consider putting the main slideshows and videos you put on your Web site onto your Facebook Page too. This content can then enter your Fans’ News Feeds. The NY Times’ Facebook Page is a good examples of this.

5. Make sure your digits are current. This seems like a no-brainer but think about how quickly info can become irrelevant when information is not updated. If you list your editors on your page, make sure the editors names and information are up-to-date.

6. Include Contact Info. In addition to the typical info, like phone number and address that Facebook asks when you start a page, how about also having someone on the page info on who should be contacted if a fan has a tip?

7. Be human. Transparency is all the rage these days, so why not use your Facebook Page as a means to get with the game. Just got out of an editorial meeting? Update your fans about it in your status: “The Whit just had a really productive meeting about how we’re going to better cover X” People enjoy getting what is an inside view of your inner workings. You’d be surprised at how quickly your Facebook Page will be more active once Fans realize there is a human behind it all.

8. Start Conversations. This goes back to the whole “being a human” thing. When people leave comments or explain how they enjoyed a particular piece, respond! People like to know that this isn’t just some page you started just so you can “seem cool with the kids.” Make sure you mean it.

9. Have Favorite Pages. Most likely the pages your publication will favorite will either be other papers or companies that you’re affiliated with that help you do your jobs better. Good! Let your Fans know who you’re connected with and plus, once you favorite them, chances are they’ll favorite yours.

10. Link! This should go without saying but make sure that the possibilities are endless for visitors of your Facebook page to reach your Web site. Use photos, video, articles, anything; just make sure that they are getting a teaser for the fuller version of a great product they can get on your Web site.

I think it begs a mention, however, that there are not one, not two, but three BarCamp NewsInnovation jam sessions going down this weekend: Portland (9 to 5 Pacific) and Chicago on Saturday, and Miami (11 to 5 Eastern) on Sunday. These one of a kind events will be discussing the full spectrum of journalism and news, including business models, formats and hopefully not too much Twitter.

Check out this interview David Cohn did with Jason Kristufek to learn more:

If you can’t make it, or don’t live in these cities, NewsInnovation Portland will be livestreaming and liveblogging and NewsInnovation Miami will be livestreamed if connectivity allows.

Around the Network

#collegejourn is hosting a conversation Sunday from 8 to 11 Eastern called “Bring A Prof.” The goal is to figure out how to bring j-school into the 21st century and, considering it’s a controversial topic and been well-publicized, it should be quite the conversation.

In our Google Group, J. Ryan Zambon started a thread on bounce rates for college newspapers, wondering if the numbers he was seeing for The Hoya were anything out of the ordinary. Max and Joey reported similar statistics, and Joey added that “the bounce rate stat is very inaccurate. Compare it to your exit rate which theoretically should be 100%-bounce rate. This is rarely the case. Don’t worry too much about those detailed analytics – they’re just not accurate enough to really be trusted.”

I spent part of the summer studying analytics, and one of the biggest takeaways was that the numbers themselves don’t matter. It’s what you do with them. For instance, in a study of bounce rates you take what you start with as your baseline and judge your experiments on how you shift your numbers from the baseline. If your goal is to lower the bounce rate, then you might A/B test with a couple of new designs and see which produces the most favorable results.

We started off the week (well, Tuesday actually) asking, “what strategies do you have for bridging the print/digital divide?” In terms of engaging the campus audience, integration with Facebook appears to be the easiest win. Mo Jangda argues that it’s important to tailor your services to your core demographic, saying that ”it’s nice to incorporate Twitter, Digg, etc, etc. into your site, but if they students that read your paper aren’t on board with those services, then there’s really no point.” He says that they installed the share button on their site a year and a half ago with “huge success.”

If you’re looking for numbers to quantify success, I would (and this is building off the previous paragraph) set a baseline for number of referrers from Facebook, install the widget, and see how your traffic coming from Facebook grows over the next six months and a year. It doesn’t really matter what those numbers are; rather, you’re looking at the rate of change from point A to point B.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers - Another roundup of ideas for newspapers. My favorites: “Focus on original content, do not rewrite wire stories or press releases. If newspapers start charging for content people are more likely [to] pay for content they can’t get anywhere else. [...] Become the host for all important discussions about local issues and politics. Moderate the discussions to ensure civil discourse. Nothing kills discussions faster than offensive comments made by anonymous people. [...] Hire additional salespeople. It is is a different sales environment today and it requires a fresh approach. Salespeople used to selling full page or half-page print ads are not the going to be able to transition easily.”
• Washington Times releases open source projects – The Washington Times development team releases four projects under the Apache license: django-projectmgr, django-supertagging, django-massmedia, and django-clickpass.
• Group Action Just Got Much Easier: Video Interview with Clay Shirky - Shirky talks more about the power of people to organize with out organizations, and brings up an interesting example of steamboat design to illustrate how technology can make us rethink our fundamental assumptions. CoPress is all about this.
• MediaShift . 5 Challenges for Small College Media and How to Overcome Them | PBS - Bryan Murley has some ideas for addressing the paradigm shift challenges at college newspapers, including marketing websites better. I think they need to be more ambitious.

Have an idea for a discussion topic in the forum for next week? Leave it in the comments!