Media, meet Social Media

Wow, it looks as if they’re really getting it. SDNN lets us know that you can now easily share a story via multiple social media outlets. They have added a widget to their stories that is powered by ShareThis that allows you to easily push a link to a story out through your favorite social media outlet.

The ShareThis Widget as it appears over a story

Unfortunately it doesn’t play well with embedded media on the page.

The ShareThis Widget falls behind a media object on the page.

It also did not appear to work for me when I selected Twitter. It opened Twitter in another Firefox tab but did not submit a Tweet. It is also curious that they failed to add this feature to their “A Conversation with San Diego” section.

The NC Times has also added a social media sharing widget to their site. I had complained about the poor social media integration back on March 11th. They have selected a widget from AddThis at the bottom of their stories.

The AddThis Widget appears over a story at the North County Times

Alas, this Twitter link did not work for me either, nor did the one on the AddThis homepage.

I will research how both widgets are expected to work and post a follow-up to this item, it is however good to see both outlets focusing on having their content shared and promoted in the social media outlets.

[Update April 02]

I was just able to tweet a story from the NC Times using their AddThis widget. Unfortunately the URL supplied and the (via @addthis) left only 28 characters for me. And they didn’t even attempt to include the story title (which was the funny bit).

http://nctimes.com/articles/2009/04/02/news/coastal/vista/za544b0194247642e8825758c0065b28d.txt (via @addthis)

SDNN works for me as well, shortens the URL and includes the title. Unfortunately their tweet ran over by 10 characters.

San Diego News Network: Environment: Renew, Recycle, Conserve Study projects warming, rising San Diego waters http://tinyurl.com/darurm via @ShareThis

Tags: nctimes, newspapers, SDNN, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Internet, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Kevin Hall

Wow, that was fast... thanks for the feedback. We missed the embedded media thing in testing and can't seem to replicate the behavior of not submitting the Tweat. We will find it if it is there.

We've deployed a temporary fix that will make share this usable with embedded media. While using "pop up" works (can you say ugly) its our preference to go back to IFRAME as soon as possible.

Having share this on a Conversation With San Diego is going to be in place when we deploy 2.93 next week. I'll have to save this story for a time when we can share a beer over WordPress war stories :-) -K