I’m surprised that the comments and voting seem largely negative. I’m not sure if that’s a response to the specific phase “newsjacking”, the general strategy of borrowing news, or Gleb’s particular application of that strategy. I hope there’s support for the general strategy- EA has a long history of news borrowing and my impression is that it has been by and large successful.
I’d find it helpful to move the discussion toward guidelines we can use to determine when “news borrowing” is a good idea. My sense is that a guiding factor should be how sympathetic the people in the news are. This would suggest that charity fraud/behavior that most people would find really distasteful (e.g. Wounded Warriors) is fair game, news about a heartwarming but ineffective charity or a large ineffective gift (e.g. Batkid or John Paulson giving $400mil to Harvard) is ok but should be approached delicately, and disaster relief should generally be left alone (especially in the immediate aftermath).
Another very important aspect of the news borrowing strategy (at least at scale) is Search Engine Optimization. Basically, the more we have high profile sites like Time linking to EA orgs, content from those orgs will show up higher in people’s search results. Disclaimer: I don’t know a ton about SEO, it’d be great if an expert could write up some best practices for the movement. But as far as I can tell, news borrowing is perfect for SEO since as Wikipedia puts it:
“Search engines often use the number of backlinks [inbound links] that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity and importance… The significance of Search Engine rankings is pretty high, and it is regarded as a crucial parameter in online business and the conversion rate of visitors to any website, particularly when it comes to online shopping… There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the web page granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable ‘editorial vote’ for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage.”
We have significant internal expertise within InIn on SEO. An aspect of the work of Intentional Insights is to improve the search engine rankings and Alexa rankings of EA charity websites.
More broadly, we’re working on an EA Marketing Resource Bank, in collaboration with the Local Effective Altruism Network, and will plan to write up such information as part of the EA MRB.
I’m also not sure about the reasons for the downvoting, especially substantive comments such as this one. Would be curious to understand what motivates people to do so.
I’m surprised that the comments and voting seem largely negative. I’m not sure if that’s a response to the specific phase “newsjacking”, the general strategy of borrowing news, or Gleb’s particular application of that strategy. I hope there’s support for the general strategy- EA has a long history of news borrowing and my impression is that it has been by and large successful.
I’d find it helpful to move the discussion toward guidelines we can use to determine when “news borrowing” is a good idea. My sense is that a guiding factor should be how sympathetic the people in the news are. This would suggest that charity fraud/behavior that most people would find really distasteful (e.g. Wounded Warriors) is fair game, news about a heartwarming but ineffective charity or a large ineffective gift (e.g. Batkid or John Paulson giving $400mil to Harvard) is ok but should be approached delicately, and disaster relief should generally be left alone (especially in the immediate aftermath).
Another very important aspect of the news borrowing strategy (at least at scale) is Search Engine Optimization. Basically, the more we have high profile sites like Time linking to EA orgs, content from those orgs will show up higher in people’s search results. Disclaimer: I don’t know a ton about SEO, it’d be great if an expert could write up some best practices for the movement. But as far as I can tell, news borrowing is perfect for SEO since as Wikipedia puts it:
“Search engines often use the number of backlinks [inbound links] that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website’s search engine ranking, popularity and importance… The significance of Search Engine rankings is pretty high, and it is regarded as a crucial parameter in online business and the conversion rate of visitors to any website, particularly when it comes to online shopping… There are several factors that determine the value of a backlink. Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the web page granted the backlink. A backlink represents a favorable ‘editorial vote’ for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage.”
We have significant internal expertise within InIn on SEO. An aspect of the work of Intentional Insights is to improve the search engine rankings and Alexa rankings of EA charity websites.
More broadly, we’re working on an EA Marketing Resource Bank, in collaboration with the Local Effective Altruism Network, and will plan to write up such information as part of the EA MRB.
I’m also not sure about the reasons for the downvoting, especially substantive comments such as this one. Would be curious to understand what motivates people to do so.