Seeking Broader Reach for Social Web Sites

Seeking Broader Reach for Social Web Sites

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/technology/internet/07social.html

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: October 7, 2008
As the Web becomes a more social place, media companies are trying to make it easier to share links with friends, add comments to articles and extend users’ online identities.
This week, CNN will begin connecting “The Forum,” a site for political expression, to Facebook, the country’s second-largest social network, enabling users to talk about the presidential debates and see what their friends are writing.

“It allows us to reach our audience in the places where they’re aggregating their friends together and sharing their thoughts,” KC Estenson, the general manager of CNN.com, said.
Last week Radio One, one of the nation’s largest radio broadcasting companies, started tying its news and lifestyle Web sites to BlackPlanet, the largest social networking site for African-Americans. The BlackPlanet name and photo of users now appear next to their comments on the news blog NewsOne and the female-oriented site HelloBeautiful and other sites.
“Although nobody has figured out the secret sauce,” said Tom Newman, the president of Interactive One, a new digital subsidiary of Radio One, “enabling members to interact with each other and interact with professionally generated content is the future.”

Combining content with a social network is a strategy pioneered by MySpace, the most popular social network in the United States, which has moved aggressively to add videos, news, games and other features. Last week, it added a “branded entertainment hub” from the celebrity-watching site TMZ.

Facebook has taken a different tack, seeking to aggregate a user’s online actions and encouraging users to share links. Both networks are making profiles portable, meaning that users can carry their social network identity to third-party sites, said Adam Ostrow, the editor of the social networking blog Mashable. The sites are “allowing users to bring their friends from the social networks they already use” he said.

While technical and legal hurdles remain, some forward-thinking media executives hope that the ability to connect actions on news sites to social networks will keep visitors on their sites longer and make them more appealing to advertisers. CNN executives emphasize that its experiment is in its early stages.

Other media companies are also making their Web sites more social. Last month, for example, The Wall Street Journal added discussion features as part of a site revamp, and The New York Times introduced a way to recommend articles to other users.