It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The number of websites out there who pay absolutely NO attention to how their site works. It really is a damn shame, because as someone who likes to share a lot, likes to comment all over the web, there is nothing that will interrupt that flow, that willingness to contribute and engage as much as I’d like, than a site that screws up their social media activity.
Today’s Victim?
The New York Observer. The lovely pink sheet gossip newspaper known to all snooty New Yorkers. It’s something of a cross between the New Yorker, Crain’s (a prominent real estate publication) and Gawker. The Observer is one of those papers that lots of young writers always want to write for, because they get to cover the very things those young writer’s want to become: powerful, influential and rich.
The Observer has not been great about keeping up with trends about social media but I’ve noticed them slowly catching up, turning their popular columns, like the Daily Transom, into blog-like formats. What’s funny is that in many ways the Observer was the progenitor of this style of quick fire reporting and comment. And yet, as the rest of the media world shuffled past them, they stood idly by, unwilling to make the rather small investment to get their social media functionality correct. It’s really not that hard folks. Look at how the best do it. NY Times has a Twitter button next to every story. GigaOm’s retweet button immediately takes you to Twitter’s home page, appends the Title of the post to the tweet, shorten’s the URL for you, and even adds the “via @gigaom.” This is an example of exactly what you want to do.
The Observer screws this up in a number of ways. And the result is that people aren’t sharing their stories. Unless you make it exceptionally easy to share things on the web, you are done. People just won’t do it. That is all there is to it. In fact, I won’t retweet a story if the URL isn’t shortened. I see big organizations (looking at you Nylon Mag) that to this day won’t shorten their URL’s.
Let’s take a look at the image below:
New York Observer Retweet Fail
So far so good right? Yep, ok cool, got a little teaser for a blog post. It’s on the front page of their Daily Transom blog/ column. Oh lovely I can tweet right from this teaser. Lovely.
Except, shit, wait, when I hit the retweet button, it takes me to Twitter’s homepage. And what does it have there? The post title and a shortened link ready to go? NOPE!
This is the message it readies Twitter to send: “http://www.observer.com/2010/daily-transom/museum-invites-you-take-bat-warhol”
Oy vey. So you simply want me to Tweet out the URL? No title, no via @newyorkobserver? Are you kidding me?
So for someone like me, I don’t do anything, I close the tab. And then I close the tab that has the Observer open in it. And I vow never to come back. Does it seem silly to you? Well it doesn’t to me. For someone who spends as much time around the web, my next activity is only a click away. If I get any kind of disruption in the flow of social media, I get pissed. I blame the entity that is doing the disrupting. It would cost nothing for the Observer to fix this. I hope they do. Take a look at GigaOm or the Times. Just copy them! Seriously.
ok, rant over.
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