Hi, TOCA! If you use any of these tools, please share the results with me. I’d love to see them! I’m on Twitter at @itsren and am always available at ren@poynter.org.
Hello! Here are the resources from my sessions. Keep up on the latest tools on Poynter. Sign up for my newsletter if you’d like more tools. Here’s a PDF of my presentation (sorry the videos don’t work in a PDF). Questions? ren@poynter.org
Last year’s tools: poy.nu/toca2018
TOOLS TO MAKE YOUR WORK EASIER
- Otter.ai
- Automatically transcribe audio interviews
- 600 minutes/month free, $9.99/month for 6,000 minutes
- https://otter.ai
- Descript (we talked about this one last year)
- Edit audio by editing text
- http://descript.com
- ContactOut
- Find contact information using LinkedIn
- https://contactout.com/
- Station
- Keep all of your web apps in one place, easily accessible with shortcuts
- https://getstation.com/
- Sortd
- Organize your inbox with drag and drop columns
- https://www.sortd.com/
- Calendly (we touched on this one last year)
- Makes scheduling meetings a million times easier
- https://calendly.com/
- Toby
- A fantastic modern bookmark tool
- Chrome only
- https://www.gettoby.com/
- Start.me
- Another fantastic modern bookmark tool for those who don’t use Chrome
- https://start.me/start/us/startpage
- Canva (social media tool)
- Photoshop made easy! Offers social-optimized image sizes
- https://www.canva.com/
- Headliner (we looked at this last year but it’s been updated heavily)
- Make audio shareable and visual for social (super easy to use, no installation)
- https://www.headliner.app/
- Record your iPhone’s screen
- Open Settings
- Go to control center
- Customize controls
- Tap the plus button next to Screen Recording
- The button to record your screen appears on the “swipe up” menu
- To record your Android’s screen
- Try AZ Screen Recorder
EASY TOOLS TO WORK WITH DATA
- Infogram
- Off-the-beaten-path infographics
- https://infogram.com/app/#/library
- Datawrapper
- Easy-to-create infographics
- https://www.datawrapper.de/
- Google Dataset Search
- Easily find data about all sorts of topic
- https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch
- Data.world
- Vast collections of data, with help on how to analyze it
- (Bonus help and data if you’re an AP subscriber)
- https://data.world/
- Tabula
- Pull data from PDFs and turn it into spreadsheet files
- https://tabula.technology/
- CometDocs
- Convert file types back and forth
- https://www.cometdocs.com/
TOOLS TO SURVIVE THE MISINFONET
- TwitterAudit
- Are your Twitter followers bots? How many bots follow someone? Find out.
- https://www.twitteraudit.com
- Account Analysis
- Information about anyone’s Twitter account
- https://accountanalysis.lucahammer.com/
- RevEye
- Reverse image search plugin for your browser
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reveye-reverse-image-sear/keaaclcjhehbbapnphnmpiklalfhelgf?hl=en
- Google Image Search
- Reverse image search (Google only) for your browser. Built in to Chrome.
- InVid
- Plugin to add context to videos
- https://www.invid-project.eu/tools-and-services/invid-verification-plugin/
- Who.is
- See who is behind a website
- http://who.is
- Internet Archive
- See archived versions of sites or pages that are no longer online
- Tip: Install the plugin and it’ll pull up old pages automatically
- https://archive.org/web/
- Facebook Live Map
- Watch live videos from specific locations as they happen
- https://www.facebook.com/livemap
- Snap Map
- Watch live videos from specific locations as they happen
- https://map.snapchat.com/
TOOLS TO HELP YOU TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
- Nudge
- Make it harder to waste your day on social media, etc.
- Chrome only
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nudge/dmhgdnbkjkejeddddlklojinngaideac
- Boomerang, or Gmail’s new snooze feature
- Schedule emails to send later and resend emails to yourself at a different time
- http://www.boomerangoutlook.com/
- Inbox Pause
- Turn off your inbox for a period of time to focus. Part of Boomerang.
- http://inboxpause.com
- Just Not Sorry
- Find and remove self-defeating words and phrases from your email
- Chrome/Gmail only for now
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-not-sorry-the-gmail/fmegmibednnlgojepmidhlhpjbppmlci
- Privacy Badger (we touched on this last year)
- Blocks trackers from following you around the internet
- https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
- Digital Women Leaders
- Free mentorship for women in journalism
- https://digitalwomenleaders.com
- Plant Nanny
- A cute app that’ll remind you to go get some water
- http://plantnannyapp.com/
- LastPass (we touched on this last year)
- Store all of your passwords safe and sound
- https://lastpass.com/
COMING TRENDS IN PUBLISHING
- Reverse engineering audience interest
- You have to think like your audience would think.
- Try googling your topic to see what people are searching for, or using Google Trends to compare topics, or consider what you’d ask Siri or Alexa if you were searching for that topic.
- Meeting audiences where they are
- Home pages and search and social are the old ways.
- Newsletters and text and calendars are upcoming.
- Publishing as a service
- How are you helping your audience?
- Look for topics that are confusing, misunderstood or important.
- Or just ones with lots of reader interest.
- Taking on misinformation and disinformation
- There is an online war for truth.
- As experts in your fields, it’s your duty to set the record straight.
- Entertaining AND informing AND serving your mission
- There’s a war for attention online. If you’re not being as clear, as informative and as interesting as possible, you’re not putting up a good fight.
- Platform publishing promiscuity or, more politely, format-agnostic publishing
- You have to use text. Images. Video. Interactives. Audio. Social media. Things they haven’t even thought of yet.
- Technology is fairly easy to learn. Storytelling skills, ethics, etc. are not.
STORIES FOR INSPIRATION
Turning analytics into action
Why bother?
- Analytics offers information about the stories you publish
- It’s a measure of effectiveness for your work
- It’s a tool to set a bar and try to beat it
- It shows me what my audience cares about
- It helps me analyze the things I’m testing
- It tells me what I’m wasting time on
Something big to keep in mind:
- Analytics provide an overwhelming amount of information. You can ignore most of it.
Another something big to keep in mind:
- The metrics you should care about depend on your overall goal.
- But loyalty is the ultimate goal.
2 Types of Analytics Information
- Amount of visitors to your site/article
- What types of content are doing well
- Where visitors are coming from
- How many times the page has been viewed in a specific time period
- An industry standard but imprecise way to judge the performance of an article
- How many different people have viewed a page in a specific time period
- A slightly better but still imprecise way to judge an article’s performance
- Try this: Compare uniques to pageviews and see what you can glean
- If pageviews and unique visitors are close in number:
- You might want to find ways to increase the number of articles a visitor views. How’s your bounce rate?
- Did you have an overperforming story? Don’t chase viral “clicks”
- If pageviews and unique visitors are distant in number:
- It might be a good time to brainstorm ways to attract new audiences. What else can you offer that you aren’t?
- How many different people are on your site and various pages right now
- Great for judging “trending” articles and for judging your day-to-day performance
- Try this: Look for things that are spiking and promote the heck out of them
- Try this: Look for things that are underperforming and look for ways to boost them.
- Referrals (where did they come from)
- What websites sent traffic to your site, ranked by highest source
- Great individually, but try to turn these into ongoing traffic streams
- Try this: Identify your biggest champions and start building relationships with them
- You can also measure social referrals/referrers
- Who is visiting your site
- Why they are visiting your site
- How they behave on your site
- How they react to your content
- How long users are spending on a specific article or page
- This is the trendy metric. Try to find ways to increase this.
- Try this: Find ways to make articles more engaging. Use storytelling tools or “gold nuggets” to encourage completion.
- The percentage of people who left your site after entering from this page (note that this is different from exit rate).
- Bounce rates often correlate closely with referrers.
- Great for identifying articles/pages where you should be pitching readers more
- Try this: Watch for pages with high engagement and high bounce rates and look for opportunities to add internal links
- Completion actions defined by your team, such as newsletter signups or purchases
- These can be tricky to set up but are invaluable measurement tools
- Demographic/browser/device info
- Age, gender, technology/device, location and more data about who’s actually visiting
- You can literally see who, exactly, your audience is and how they’re looking at your site
- Try this: Adjust coverage to cater to big audiences, or pursue niche ones with impact
- Try this: Use this information to think and behave like your audience
- And then there’s newsletters
- Open rate
- Clickthrough rate
- Click-to-open rate
- Delivery rate
- Opt-out rate
- Unique click-throughs
- Email clients
- Unique opens vs opens
- How do I know which analytics to pay attention to?
- People often ask: “How do I know if I’m doing well? What’s a good number?”
- It’s up to you! Set a bar and try to beat it. There is no good “industry standard.”
- The metrics that you choose as important are your KPI’s, or key performance indicators
- If you don’t already have any big team goals, just pick one and try to improve it
- A few other analytics tools to try
- Facebook Insights
- Twitter Analytics
- Crowdtangle
- A few easy actions to juice your numbers right now
- Share articles at different times of the day
- How often do you post to social? Why do you post at those times and days? Spread it out or try new times.
- In general, weekdays between 8:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. is the best time to share new content on Facebook and Twitter.
- Don’t share the same link more than 1x per week on Facebook, but post often (and differently) on Twitter.
- If you don’t currently schedule posts, TweetDeck and Buffer are low-key ways to get started.
- Schedule posts for nights and weekends
- It won’t bring in as much traffic on average, but you’ll be surprised at what takes off. It’s a good time to experiment.
- Resurface and reshare archival content that previously did well
- Keep a list of evergreen content. Maybe an intern can make it.
- Find clever ways to include links to other articles in your posts
- We call them “speedbumps”
- A good SEO-friendly headline contains:
- Keywords
- Proper nouns
- Full names
- Unique words and phrases
- And don’t forget all of the places across the internet where your headline will appear
- Pick an underserved demographic and brainstorm ways to appeal to them (if they fit your mission)
- Tell stories with interactives, videos or other gold coins
- Set up alerts for spiking articles and share them wildly when one hits
- Try to hit five-minute read times with newsletters and inject some voice