社交共享成新闻评价新指标

    试想一下，如果一项奥林匹克运动没有任何通用的量化指标，那将会是什么样子。成千上万名极具竞争力的运动员奋勇争先，但只能通过鸡尾酒会上的喋喋不休和同行的补充意见来计分。过去几个世纪的新闻界就是这样。欢迎光临。

    印刷时代，发行量充其量只能算是一个可疑的数字，任何人当然也没有办法来评判报刊上的某篇既定文章相对于其他文章的阅读量。

    从20世纪90年代开始，网站具备了改变这种状况的潜能，但除了极少数例外，它并没有做到这一点。虽然出版商可以使用Google Analytics或Omniture等工具跟踪统计每篇文章的浏览量或独立访问者数量，但其中大多数从不向公众发布这些数据，甚至也不向它们自己的作者公布。在评稿会上，新闻机构的高管们会说，他们不向员工提供这些统计数据，因为不希望记者们为提高浏览量而写稿。然而，鉴于出版商长期以来优化整个在线业务的目的正是为了提高浏览量，一位持怀疑态度的观察家可能很想知道，他们隐瞒这些数据是不是为了防止明星记者提出加薪要求，或者是害怕网站的惨淡流量被泄露出去。

    如果把新闻比作一场马拉松比赛，那么记录成绩的秒表已经被发明出来了。社交网络现在提供了可公开访问，能够评估一篇文章的通用指标，形式就是这篇文章在Twitter、Facebook、商务社交网站LinkedIn 和谷歌社交平台Google+上的分享次数——我们姑且称之为“社交共享”。

    创建社交网络的本意并不是为了提供这类数据，它只不过是社交网络在尝试着将其分享组件置于每个网页的过程中所产生的一个副产品。这个概念是由Digg公司首先推广的，这家网络公司鼓励出版社将Digg按钮置于文章页面。Digg的流行程度逐渐减退之后，Facebook的“喜欢”按钮和Twitter的tweet组件占据了中心舞台。它现在已成为社交网站的一个标准功能。

    虽然只有一部分出版社选择在自己的网页上显示社会共享数据，但通过一个简单的API调用，任何人都可以免费获得网站任何页面的共享数据。我们很难低估这种技术在多大程度上改变了在线内容的游戏规则。出版商再也没有办法继续控制一些最重要的分析数据。作者们可以在第一时间获悉自己作品的实时表现。出版商可以分析竞争对手的出版物上哪些文章备受欢迎或无人问津。我的上一篇专栏文章已经谈到，公关经理们可以衡量一篇报道对客户的影响。甚至政府也无需援引《外国情报监视法》（FISA）就能监控一篇揭露丑闻的报道所产生的反响。

    任何新的衡量指标势必将引发一场关于其健全程度的激烈争辩——浏览量的价值就被激烈争论了逾10年之久。“社交共享”自有其优点和缺点。我将在下篇专栏文章中对此进行分析。在此期间，写手们最好准备一下，以迎接“社交共享”的评判，因为它是目前唯一一个通用的文章评价指标。（财富中文网）

    本文作者格里高利•加兰特是面向记者和新闻行业的社交网络Muck Rack的首席执行官。他也是短文奖的共同创始人，该奖项颁发给社交媒体的最佳作者。加兰特为数家创业公司提供过咨询服务，并在TechStars创业加速器担任导师。

    译者：任文科

    Imagine an Olympic sport without any universal quantitative metrics. Thousands of hyper-competitive athletes competing furiously with each other, but only able to keep score by chatter at cocktail parties and complements from their colleagues. Welcome to the world of journalism for the past several centuries.

    In the age of print, circulation numbers were dubious at best and there was of course no way for anyone to tell how much a given article in a newspaper or magazine was read relative to another.

    The web had the potential to change that starting in the 90s, but with rare exceptions it didn't. While publishers could track stats like pageviews or unique visitors for every article using tools like Google (GOOG) Analytics or Omniture (ADBE), most never released granular data to the public or even their own writers. On a panel, news executives will say they don't make stats available to staff because they don't want their journalists writing for pageviews, but given that publishers have long been optimizing their entire online businesses for pageviews a skeptical observer might wonder if they withhold the data to keep stars from demanding raises or leaks of dismal traffic from occurring.

    If journalism is a marathon, the stopwatch has just been invented. The social web now provides universal, publicly accessible, metrics on which to judge an article in the form of Twitter, Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD) and Google+ shares -- let's call them social shares.

    Social networks didn't set out to provide this data, it's a byproduct of their bids to get their share widgets (which feature the share count) on every webpage. The concept was popularized by Digg which encouraged publishers to put Digg buttons on article pages. As Digg faded from popularity, Facebook's like button and Twitter's tweet widget took center stage. It's now became a standard social feature.

    While only some publishers choose to display the social share data on their web pages, the data is available for any page on the web to anyone for free through a simple API call. It's hard to understate how much this is changing the game of online content. Publishers no longer control some of the most important analytic data. Writers know how well their work is performing in realtime. Competitors can analyze which articles are successful or duds in rival publications. As I wrote in a prior column, public relations executives can gauge the impact of a story about their clients. Even governments can monitor (without a FISA request) the resonance a muckraking story has.

    Any new metric invites a vigorous debate on how healthy it is -- the value of the pageview has been hotly debated for over a decade -- and the social share has its pros and cons. I'll leave that analysis for another column. In the meantime, writers better prepare to be judged by the social share since it's the only universal metric for articles in town.

    Gregory Galant's the CEO of Muck Rack, the social network for journalists and companies in the news. He's also the cocreator of the Shorty Awards which honors the best of social media. Galant advises several startups and is a mentor in the TechStars startup accelerator. Follow him on Twitter.