Pub Talk
By Rob Yoegel
About Rob
Rob Yoegel takes an active role in North American Publishing Company's online efforts including content, sales, marketing, usability, functionality and vendor relations as Vice President, e-Media. Rob works directly with publishers and editors in developing a consistent strategy from print to online.
A former journalist, Rob has been involved in Internet strategies since 1996 serving as an associate editor of Target Marketing magazine, where he regularly contributed articles related to the Internet, including e-commerce, Web site design/development, e-mail, fulfillment, customer service and marketing integration. He also spent one year as publisher of PhillyTech Magazine, a regional technology magazine published by Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. E-mail him at ryoegel@napco.com or call (215) 238-5344.
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Examples of Online Publishing Gone Wild
For the longest time big sites like Adobe.com didn’t work without the three Ws in front of the actual Web address. A simple tweak by an IT person or Internet provider and thankfully this issue doesn’t exist any more. With the more recent introduction of canonical domains to reduce duplicate content, Web sites that don’t use 301 re-directs to point all traffic to yoursite.com with or without dub-dub-dub in front of it are missing a basic SEO tactic.
Using permanent URLs for your content is another SEO-related problem that still crops up, but much less now since good CMS are everywhere. Up until about a year ago, our own CMS didn’t produce static URLs, and now we are playing catch-up to get as many of our pages indexed again with GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).
In the case of e-newsletters, there’s the notorious subject line mishaps. I’ve seen my share of e-newsletters with “Test” in the subject line and other honest mistakes, like the one from the adotas interactive marketing e-newsletter that came to me with the subject line: adotas.com/newsletter2.
Regardless of who makes these errors in judgment, keystroke or timing, are folks more tolerant of errors online than in print? After all, when I read Noelle Skodzinksi’s Pub Talk post about a subscriber who canceled a print subscription because of a spelling error, I felt the urge to call the disgruntled subscriber to ask if she was serious. But just this week I received a lengthy e-mail from one of our e-newsletter subscribers who asked me to forward a re-written paragraph of a news story with better grammar to the author. Huh?
In response to arguments that print is dead, my motto has become “Put something good on papyrus, and I will read it.” I’m not going to change it to “Put something good on papyrus, use proper grammar and spelling, and I will read it.” With everyone enthralled with social media and “citizen journalists,” it’s probably only going to get worse.
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Right on, Tom! Link-baiting galore... I get tired of the same "isn't this company great" stuff I read in trade magazines -- of course, not in any of ours! And then people wonder why no one writes comments. No one will, except the guy's wife or mother.
Rob,
RE: Grammar Slammer
Publishers "could" put out two versions of each article.
One version for the grammar police that have lots of time on their hands, and may be looking for an editing job, AND another version for the rest of us "inferior heathens" more concerned about the substance of a piece...
I say throw in a bunch of typos and watch the flaming begin.
The comments, typos and the "buzz" would all be good for site traffic too ;)
Regards,
Tom Lynch
Director of Search Engine Marketing
ePublishing.com