During the February 5th US Elections (aka "Super Tuesday"), I noticed on Twitter that people were participating in the New York Times' "Polling Place Photo Project" website, a place to share photos and experiences of voting in the US on election day.
This New York Times website serves two interesting thought pieces on Social Media and Newspapers:
- Changes: Business and Website Strategy
- Search Engine Optimization: Linkbait Opportunity
Changing Business, Changing Website Strategy
At the surface, the introduction of bloggers and websites like New York Times' "Polling Place Photo Project" seem just as a value add to bring additional awareness to the newspapers. However, this appears part of general trend where newspapers are becoming news-focused websites that happen to have a printed paper-edition.
Indeed, New York Times and Wall Street Journal continue to new content - add bloggers (Freakonomics), exclusive online content, video essays, and website spinoffs (OpinionJournal.com for WSJ and Blogrunner.com for NY Times) - that are changing the very meaning of what a newspaper is.
Remember what NY Times was back in the 1990s? Merely a literal online version of the newspaper:
Polling Photos Project as Linkabit and Missed SEO Opportunity
The NY Times "Polling Place Photo Project" website also represents genuinely interesting content, beyond the "forward to a friend video" viral approach, with a fairly scalable user-generated structure.
The website has attracted over 2,000 links to the New York Times domain and has fairly descent positioning for keywords like "San Francisco Polling Place". The website has not be search engine optimized, yet by its inherent relevancy and strength of the link popularity has attained fairly descent rankings (usually within the top 20-30). With a proper SEO campaign and increased emphasis as a resource for polling places in the US, New York Times could have a very strong website in time for the November 2008 elections. And really, why not?
Anyone from NY Times wanna give me a call? :)
Link to original post