But fiction? Could Twitter become a place for great storytelling?

Twitter thinks so. And to prove that, they have just announced the Twitter Fiction Festival. That contest will kick off on November 28th and run for five days.

“Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment? The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival— but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour,” says Twitter in a blog post.

Twitter obviously has a pretty expansive view of what constitutes “fiction” as far this contest goes. Some people have already experimented with Twitter as a fiction medium. Take for instance author Jennifer Egan, who tweeted her story “Black Box” 140 characters at a time back in May.

Or what about The Guardian’s #140novel challenge, which saw authors take a stab at a 140-character story.

Follow @wordsbydan

Daniel Dalton
@wordsbydan

He is sad. So sad. She smiles. He smiles. They talk. Hold hands. They kiss. Sparks. Smoke. She explodes. Damn robots. He is sad. #140novel

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
5 days ago via Tweetbot for iOS · powered by @socialditto

It’s not just flash fiction that Twitter’s after. They even point to @MayorEmanuel, a parody account, as an example of Twitter fiction.

If you want to participate and you think you have a good idea, you can submit it here. Twitter will announce the participants of the festival on November 19th.

For a long time, the general thought was that newspapers were constantly going begging for material to fill space in their columns. All you had to do was give them a whiff of your brilliant business offer and some editor would send a reporter and photographer running to get the scoop on you, driving customers to your door.

Every form of media has its own procedures, challenges and quirks. (For the purposes of this article, we will talk about local newspapers as a classic medium. These rules apply, with only minor variations, to websites and blogs, magazines, television and radio, etc.) Every writer or editor has to weigh what comes across her desk to determine how it will fit in the context of the material her outlet usually publishes. But, more than anything else, these people are busy. If you want them to take a little time out of their day to give you free publicity – and that’s exactly what you are asking for – you have to make them want to.

One website we saw published a list of ten tips for press release writing. Some were handy; some were a bit fuzzy. But first let’s skip to the bottom of their list, to item number ten.

“Make it as easy as possible for media representatives to do their jobs.”

Friends, I am here to tell you that this is absolutely wrong. The fact that this item ended up at the bottom of the list is laughable. This is Item Number One. It should be the first thing you think about and your North Star throughout the entire process. Make it your desktop wallpaper. If you hope to do any regular release writing at all, print this on a banner and hang it in your office.

Make the Writer’s Job Easy

Every other tip you read, every brilliant turn of a phrase you concoct, every grand promoting scheme you hatch will be for naught if you make a writer work too hard to get that story done.

Writers and editors have a whirlwind of material around them at the click of a mouse. The trouble is, sometimes much of it is unusable. They develop a quick sense for sniffing out relevant material in a press release, knowing what would be useful and what is chaff. The more useful material you give them, the more of it they will likely use, unchanged. You want that.

Your unspoken goal should be to make a writer want to copy and paste your entire article as-is right into the publication, dust off her hands and smile as she moves along to the next order of business for the day. A good writer will not usually do that – though there is no such thing as “plagiarizing” a press release – because most releases don’t sound like real writing. And therein lies your first big clue. If you succeed in getting a story written as a result of your press release, you should score yourself based on how much of your original material and wording made it into the final article without sounding stilted and unnatural.

Notice that this is not the same thing as writing material that you wish the writer would say. We’ll talk about that more below. It is writing material that they would be happy to call their own. In order to achieve this Holy Grail of press release writing, there are certain things you can do, things you can avoid, and best practices for how you treat the writer from a distance. It is increasingly unlikely that you will develop a personal relationship with a writer nowadays, but you can certainly make them want to bookmark your site for regular perusal for material. That is a relationship. If you can do that, you score.

Newsworthiness

One of the first tips that traditional press release writing primers will give you is to make sure your information is “newsworthy”. Let’s be honest here. Your grand opening is not the same kind of news as a house fire, auto accident, election coverage or even celebrity “news”. But local papers will commonly run business and entertainment stories. If your kind of “news” usually runs there, go for it.

Just remember, make the writer’s job easy. Give them a story that they can run without having to worry about defending that choice to a reader or editor. Put a twist on it, a connection to something national, a human interest angle or other unique twist. Don’t appear to be “selling”. If selling is all you have to offer, do the right thing and call the ad department and pay for space like everyone else. But if you have something that will inform, amuse, titillate or enlighten readers, go ahead and let a writer know.

Grammer and speling.

It should go without saying that grammar, spelling and overall flow of the release must be impeccable. Unfortunately it can’t go without saying. Understand this: if a writer sees even one typo in your material, it will make her nervous. She will feel that she must fine-tooth-comb the whole thing just to be sure you won’t embarrass her.

Of course, writers always proofread everything before publishing. But part of making the writer’s job easy to to put her at ease. Don’t give her the added difficulty of cleaning up your copy. That will quickly become a factor in deciding whether to just skip your material, if not this time, then the next. The kiss of death.

Cautionary Tales

Here is a real press release, believe it or not. I apologize in advance that you have to see this. I’ve put obvious errors in bold.

Elite Pressure Washing and Painting is a full service residential and commercial property maintenance firm that is based out of The Woodlands, TX. Known for quality work, Elite Pressure Washing and Painting offers businesses and industries throughout The Woodlands, TX area the highest quality services.Through out the period of time both your interior and exterior windows need to be cleaned. We at Elite Pressure Washing & Painting, Inc offer Interior window cleaning services and exterior window cleaning services. As the Woodlands, TX premier window cleaning contractor, Elite Pressure Washing and Painting specializes in the interior window cleaning and exterior window cleaning trade. Elite Pressure Washing and Painting offers contract and maintenance services to fine residential homes and commercial properties in The Woodlands, TX. The professional staff of Elite Pressure Washing and Painting uses only the finest cleaning solutions available in todays market. We use all bio degradable eco frinedly cleaning detergants; this ensures that customers get the best quality work while being eco frinedly at competitive prices from the entire Elite Pressure Washing and Painting team. At Elite Pressure Washing and Painting, we stand behind our window cleaning services 100%. All interior window cleaning and exterior window cleaning jobs are supervised throughout the duration of the job and cleaned up upon leaving each working day.

Elite Pressure Washing and Painting has the window cleaning solution for any size commercial project in The Woodlands, TX, from a single story building to a large commercial complex or a high rise. window cleaning services on commercial buildings must serve two purposes: protect the glass from weathering and decay; and look great. Elite Pressure Washing and Painting specializes in the art of interior window cleaning services and exterior window cleaning services. We use silicone protective coatings that are extremely resistant to the elements and make routine window cleaning maintenance done easily, yet still provide a sharp look. Elite Pressure Washing and Painting has served the interior window cleaning and exterior window cleaning needs of numerous commercial customers in The Woodlands, Tx. We specialize in cleaning and applying various types of protective coatings, from interior perimeter windows, exterior perimeter windows, partitions, skylights and vestibles. You’ll find Elite Pressure Washing and Painting is a great contributing eco friendly window cleaning company when you need to create an environment that feels as good as it looks.

If your home exterior is looking depleted? A good window cleaning job is one way to sharpen up the image of your house from the inside and out. Elite Pressure Washing and Painting’s streak free window cleaning services will leave your windows looking refreshed. Our Window cleaning customers in The Woodlands, TX normally have their windows cleaned two or three times a year. When comparing our professional window cleaning services to those of other window cleaners, our commercial window cleaning services are often considered to be superior by our clients. Where other window cleaning companies in The Woodlands, TX fail to get it done, we at Elite Pressure Washing and Painting rise to the occasion to meet you window cleaning requirements. Give us a call today in order to get a free residential window cleaning and commercial window cleaning estimate where we will provide our window cleaning prices.

I wish I could say that a slew of writers had printed this thing out for dart practice. But what really happened was much sadder than that: they stopped reading by the third sentence and round-filed it, hit delete. And, why not? There’s nothing here but an ad with misspelled words, grammar that has to be fixed, repetitive claims of superiority.

Where’s the news, even a little bit of it? Are some people replacing windows because of pollutants etching the glass? That happens. Tell how that happens. Are you doing the windows on a local charity office for free? Tell about that. Did you just do your ten thousandth window? Shoot, that would be something. As it is, they are saying: “Hey, we do windows in The Woodlands, TX, and we’re better than anybody else.” And they took 536 words to say it!

Here’s another to chuckle along with. This is from 2010. Hold your nose.

Highly Touted Social News Site to Officially Launch on August 23rd

AllTopics.com, which has been touted as the next big social site by industry experts, has officially announced a launch date of August 23rd. AllTopics.com promises to deliver the very best articles, videos and images on any topic that you can think of, making it an industry leader in the online social news world.

With so many news’ [sic] sites currently in the market, you wouldn’t think there would be a need or even room for another one to come along. While the market may be saturated, there are still needs to be filled, and one site is promising to close that gap forever.

AllTopics.com has been planning for months on how to build the perfect news website, and their finished product is expected to take the online world by storm. Backed by a large advertising budget and a large staff of highly trained researchers, they are promising to deliver the very best stories, videos and images from all over the Internet on all of the topics that you can think of.

While that may not seem like a big deal, most sites do not even attempt to cover this many categories. Even the most popular of news sites only cover a small portion of the news, and they never bring you the very best of every single subject. It takes a large, dedicated team in order to pull something off like this. That is where AllTopics.com claims they can close the gap and create the best social news website around.

AllTopics.com is a hybrid of a news site and a social bookmarking site, meaning that users can submit their own stories, videos and images in addition to the ones added by the staff of AllTopics.com. This will help to insure [sic] the highest quality of news and information in one place, as the staff will be able to see exactly what interests the people and find information that will be of value to them.

So, will the industry experts be right in predicting that AllTopics.com is the next big thing, or will it be the next big flop? Only time will tell I guess, so go decide for yourself and check out AllTopics when they officially launch.

This is a classic example of writing a press release full of things one wishes a writer would say. It is insulting to a writer. Putting grandiose words in someone’s mouth is not the same thing as giving him material he is happy to claim as his own.

There are different variations on rules for press release writing for each media form (radio, television, newspaper, blog, etc.). You can find tons of tips for each online. But remember, above all else, don’t make the writer have to jump through hoops to get your story. It shouldn’t take a research grant and a team of proofreaders to find out what you are up to or if it is even worth talking about. Make it easy on the writer.

The fine folks at Copyblogger have cranked out this handy infographic so you can review more common mistakes. Have a look over jewels like these:

Literally – Do you say “I am literally burning up” when you are not on fire? “Literally” is not used to add weight to something. It means, “No, really. I’m burning!”

I’m going to interject another here that is not even found on this infographic.

Exponentially – This is so overused and misused that you probably think it doesn’t matter anymore. Only in cases of low numbers do most figures ever hit right on this. And, even if the writer/speaker accidentally gets it right, it shouldn’t be used unless they know why it’s right. You commonly hear that a company has “grown exponentially”. Or, “The cost of gasoline has risen exponentially.” If gas was $3 a gallon, the first “exponential” growth of that price would be to square it, thus $9 a gallon. Not likely, unless we’re talking Brazil. The next step would be $27 a gallon, then $81 a gallon.

Words mean things. Words like “exponentially” and “literally” only make you look smarter to people who don’t know better. Aim higher. Here’s help.

Last week, we saw where Narrative Science has a project in which its machines are creating readable stories from tweets. It showed off an example about Newt Gingrich getting attention with “hot-button topics”. It wasn’t a mind-blowing piece of writing, but it was certainly passable for human, and even better than some content I’ve seen from some humans. I can only assume the technology will get better at what it does.

Today, co-founder and CTO Kris Hammond took to his blog to discuss the obstacles of the Narrative Science approach to translation and creating content in different languages. Hammond wrote (assuming a robot isn’t ghostwriting for him):

Multi-lingual generation of content from data has always been on Narrative Science’s road map and has informed the modularization of the core platform. It is only after all of the analysis of the facts, evaluation of their importance, and the composition of the representation that the system generates language. Within this model, generating in Spanish, Japanese, German, etc. is no different than generating in English.

In general, we are not ready to do this, mostly because of the composition of our client base, but doing so is a matter [of] pulling in native speakers who know how to write in non-English languages to configure the platform for the new language.

So, what I take away from this is that while Narrative Science may not be ready to go multi-lingual just yet, it’s more than likely going to happen in the future. So the machines taking over writing won’t be limited to just English.

Startup Stats CEO Nick O’Neill wrote an interesting blog post discussing the importance of titling articles on the Internet in which he looks at an example of a New York Times story, which Forbes also covered with a different title, only to see more shares and traffic than the original piece.

The original title was: “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”

The Forbes title was: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did”

I don’t think the original was too bad, and apparently, it got a fair amount of traffic too, but the Forbes version is certainly more provocative.

I’m sure the traditional media outlets who call blogging about stories that already exist stealing will view this as an example of a publication “stealing” the work of others, and in this case, the Forbes article did borrow pretty liberally from the original source, though it did credit and link to thee NYT (Again, this is Forbes. Not just some blog.). However, there is a different point being made here, showing where the original sources can drop the ball.

I’ll say it again. Titles are incredibly important on the web. It depends on the goal you’re trying to reach with your writing, but titling can make all the difference.

Are you trying to gain traffic from search engines? You better think about what people are searching for, or what they would be searching for to get to your article. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is actually really good at helping you determine this.

Or maybe it’s the social traffic you’re after. You want people to share your content. There’s always the sensationalistic approach. The controversial titles. The titles that promise to give you a reason (or 10 reasons) why whatever this article is about will “absolutely change your life”. These things may seem cheesy sometimes, but people do gravitate towards these kinds of headlines, and share them.

This line by O’Neill pretty much sums it up: “The reality is that in the world of newsfeeds and streams, titles matter more than ever before. The best content in the world will fall flat without a great title.”

Consider all of the ways people are consuming content online these days. It’s not like when you just bought a newspaper and read the stories that were printed because they were the ones that were there. People are getting stories through Email, Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, Google Reader, Google Google News, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many, many more social services, aggregators, etc.

SEO is still a factor, but it’s not the only factor. In fact, social is a factor of that factor.

The main thing to remember is that the right title can mean the difference between a little bit of traffic and your site getting slashdotted.

Keywords matter, but they’re not the only thing that matter.

Since then, we conducted a Q&A with Lansdale about the e-reading trend, and what it means to authors.

Lansdale says he’s never done anything directly to e-book in the past, though much of his back list has moved to e-book.

He says he’s not sure of the advantages of going e-book only, but plans to try it and see.

“I think that some people are reading only e-books, and if you want to be discovered by new readers, and stay in the game, e-books have to be a serious consideration,” Lansdale tells WebProNews. “I prefer hard copies, and hope everything of mine will eventually be contained that way, but I do want to experiment and see if there’s a different market out there.”

“I’ve stayed in the game by not only trying to write as well as possible, but trying to keep up with the changes in the industry,” he continues. “The pulps aren’t coming back, and soon paperbacks will be gone, and they won’t, in any way that matters, come back either.”

“At least not the lower level paperbacks,” he adds. “I think the larger style paperback, like VINTAGE books uses will be around for awhile.”

Given his lack of experience in going e-book only, he says he can’t speak to how well they help authors reach new audiences. “But it looks to me that they can be an aid, and for some writers, a career,” he says. “Some writers seem to speak to that medium more than others. I’m not sure why that is. It’s like some writers did well in hardback, not paper, or in limited editions, and some it was just the opposite. It’s like certain actors who can command great attention on TV, but get lost in film.”

When asked if he reads e-books, Lansdale tells us he’s read three (he uses a Nook rather than a Kindle).

“I don’t prefer it, but I’m sure I’ll read others in time,” he says of e-books. “My wife has read a few e-books. It seems nice for trips. I think the advantage to these kind of devices is to the casual reader who doesn’t keep books, or who doesn’t have room to store books.”

“I think books are going to be around,” he says. “Too many people like them, and there will be new readers who like them as well. But its slice of the market will become smaller. In some ways, I think more people are reading because of e-books, and that’s a good thing. These are people who don’t go to bookstores, but love to look through listings on their computer and load up without having to leave their house.”

People like to share good books with their friends. When asked about this thoughts on this in relation to the e-book format, he says, “The problem with sharing an e-book is that it may be too easy to copy. Where someone could loan a book around, this way they can really loan a book, cutting into a writer’s sales. This will change writing, how it’s done, and what writers get paid. Which for many isn’t that much to begin with. It has its negatives.”

In a recent Facebook update, Lansdale said, “I think there will always be real books, but they are going to be a smaller, and probably more collector type of market. Some publishers are even considering moving that way more and more, so this could be good for small presses, as far as real books go.”

When asked more about this, Lansdale tells WebProNews, “I just think the market will shrink, but it will become more valuable to small presses who will now have a market for those who want this kind of book, especially if the main houses limit their number of paper books.”

“I also think it’s obvious that small presses don’t have to make the large amounts of money big publishers do to survive,” he continues. “I think in fact this situation will cause their markets to grow. What led to the e-book isn’t just technology, its greed. Book companies didn’t just want to make a profit anymore, they wanted to make vast fortunes. They wanted fewer writers and more best sellers. They turned books from common entertainment to luxury entertainment.”

“The same has been done with movies and comics,” he says. “Too high a price for people to afford. This opened the door for cheaper books. I don’t think there has ever been enough readers to sustain the kinds of sales these companies needed, but what’s odd, is, as I said earlier, I think readership is growing because of accessibility. It’s like the paperback revolution which changed everything in the last century.”

So how long will it be until e-book reading is more common than print book reading?

“I have no idea how long it will be,” Lansdale admits. “Some of it is fad, and it will ebb and flow, and then it’ll find its balance. It is happening fast, though.”

Meanwhile, Lansdale appears to be embracing the e-book market more than ever, offering his previous writings in the format, including all of the “Hap and Leonard” books, which he said in a Facebook update today are available from Vintage Books, a division of Random House.

He also has several titles available in the Kindle Lending Library, which can be read for free by Amazon Prime members. One of them is The Nightrunners – my first experience with Lansdale’s writing, and the one that got me hooked on his work.

Visit Joe’s site here.

This was the advice given by Jordan Cooper, who was speaking during the Blogging with Humor Workshop at the Blogworld Expo. WebProNews’ Chris Crum sat in on the session and was able to pull out some interesting nuggets of information that could help your site get more shares, which ultimately lead to more return visitors.

Cooper, who teaches comedy classes at the Louisville Improv in Louisville Kentucky, stated “Everyone can be funny… you don’t have to be hilarious. Just fucking do it”. By this he means, you shouldn’t have to worry if anyone will be offended by you adding a little humor to your site. He goes on to say that probably 98% of people will retweet it and you’ll get new readers that you wouldn’t have necessarily seen your content. But, if you have to be “appropriate” the key is just be staying relevant to your audience, and it doesn’t have to be offensive.

Cooper went on to say, “Don’t think you have to write vibrator jokes to get retweets.” If your’re writing jokes for PHP programmers you can’t be concerned if non-programmers get it, as long as your audience finds it funny.

Practice is something that was stressed while discussing adding humor to your site, Cooper said, “Keep writing funny articles over and over and over again. You don’t have to publish all of them, but you’ll get better if you keep practicing it. Just keep thinking of all the ideas in your industry that you could do”.

Below is a video where Jordan talks about his session, how to be humorous, and how you can apply that to your site:

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

They also launched a major redesign last month, that came with a feedback feature for users to let the company know whether or not any given article was useful. They’ve been making partnerships with celebrities who are generally considered authorities in their industries, as well as a partnership with Getty Images, to get quality images on content.

A job opening from eHow Money, posted on PublishersMarketplace.com is further evidence that they’re doing more to attract quality authors. The gig pays $17-20 per article (up from $10-15) and has strict qualifications requiring a degree in business, finance, or law, and “extensive experience in business writing.”

eHow Money is a channel of the eHow site, and includes sub-categories like “Saving & Spending,” “Real Estate,” “Career,” and “Your Business”. The “Your Business” category is broken down into “Starting a Business,” “Managing Employees,” and “Running a Business”. These categories are broken down even further, and so forth.

We reported that Demand Media was looking for more business content writers last month, when they tweeted as much, and noted that any expansion in content here is significant, because there’s a good chance people looking to start a business or improve their existing business will be seeing articles from this section a lot, as they search Google for advice on various aspects of business life.

Granted, that was before the most recent round of the Panda update, where eHow took a significant hint in Google search visibility, based on various data sets from different firms. Still, there are plenty of search queries where eHow is in fact still ranking very well. Currently, for example, for a Google search on “how to evaluate employee performance,” I’m seeing an eHow article rank at the very top.

It’s good to know that Demand Media is requiring the above qualifications and paying a bit more, as this should (in theory) attract a higher caliber of writing.

The Panda update didn’t do anything to help Demand’s stock, and the company can downplay the significance of Google traffic to its success all it wants, but losing a large amount of Google traffic isn’t good for any site, particularly one running Google AdSense.

The more quality content users happen across on eHow, the less likely they’ll be to immediately seek a different search result (Google’s looking at this). Also the less likely they’ll be to block the domain from future searches (Google’s looking at this too). Users might even click the +1 button to send a signal to Google that the articles are in fact high quality, and worthy of top ranking. Maybe.

Regardless of how eHow continues to perform in search, quality content is also the kind of content that people like to share with others in their social networks. Less dependence on Google for traffic is always a good thing too. Of course if the article is doing well (in terms of shares) on social networks, Google will likely see that and consider it in its rankings too.

For some, it is. Another way to go would be to cover as much ground as you possibly can. Throw a wide net out there and see what you catch. Once you see what you’ve caught, maybe you can catch more in the same area. The thinking is that the more ground you cover, the more people you are potentially exposing your work to. It’s going horizontal, rather than vertical.

Do you think you could find greater success by keeping it narrow or broad? Share your thoughts.

Mike McDonald of WebProNews had an interesting discussion about horizontal content sites with Lawrence Coburn, president of RateItAll. As its name suggests, RateItAll covers a variety of topics by offering reviews (along with some social elements) for each vertical. They cover a lot of ground: pets, movies, music, television, beauty, travel, gadgets, video games, sports, Internet, auto, politics, celebrities, books, companies, camera/video, fashion, food, drink, health, and baby.

Demand Media, as Coburn says, is kind of the poster-boy site for horizontal content. They have an algorithm that helps them determine the content to produce. It has now been revealed that AOL is going down a very similar path.

The more resources you have, the better off you will be, of course. That is why big companies with deep pockets find the horizontal content angle so attractive. They can afford to pay to have a lot of people create content. In paid search, they can afford to bid on keywords across the board.

But just because it’s easier for a big company to go horizontal, that doesn’t mean a small business or a blogger/writer can’t keep the same principle in mind. Small businesses can find success in e-commerce, despite the fact that Amazon and Walmart are only a click away. The same goes for horizontal content sites.

If you’re going to go the route of trying to cover as much ground a possible, it doesn’t mean that quality should be sacrificed. It’s not about quantity over quality. Search engines like quality, and more importantly, so do users (who also like to share quality content via social networks). Search engines like Google want to deliver the highest quality results possible to the user, and they’re getting better and better at doing this as time progresses.

You may not be an expert in everything. Who is? There are different ways to construct quality content in areas you are less familiar with. For one, obviously, you can get experts to write content for you in any given niche. You can also perform thorough research before tackling a specific topic. The more you learn along the way, the more knowledgeable you will be anyway, and what is an expert if not someone that has a thorough understanding of a subject?

If you can cover more ground, you can attract a wider audience, which means more traffic, which means more eyeballs, which means more advertising dollars. AOL knows this, and is planning on making it a very significant part of its business. But even if you don’t have the resources of a company like AOL, it is still a model that can potentially earn you a living.

Do you think horizontal content sites are the way to go? Comment here.

Related Articles:

> AOL to Get Horizontal with Algorithm-Based Content

> FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

> Gap Widens Between Transactional and Content Site Visits

In the three-media-dimensional old world, headlines on the radio were generally useless; headlines are a visual art, though the late Paul Harvey certainly had a concise, rhythmic poetic aesthetic to his broadcasts very nearly bordering on the visual—as visual as the spoken word gets. It’s mainly textual, though television, specializing in teaser-and-let-down headlining, often adds sound and graphics to widen the fall between oh-that-sounds-interesting and oh-that-wasn’t-very-interesting-at-all-actually-I’ve-been-tricked.

Magazines follow a similar format but without the benefit of motion and sound they use tantalizing photographs and lots of exclamation points to grab the readers attention before sorely disappointing them.

Newspaper headlines, then, are the nearest old-world example to what one wants in a Web headline or title. Newspaper headlines are at once sensational, compact, and informative. They’re built to accommodate the scanner, who has the option of getting details below, but can move forward quickly with the general gist. A newspaper doesn’t care if you read the article or use it for anything other than puppy training; a newspaper only cares if you buy the newspaper, which is what the headlines are designed to convince you to do.  

While similar, the Internet is more complicated. Sure, RSS feeds and aggregators have required headlines to be more traditionally newsy-sounding, often with a twinge of sensationalism, but most importantly they must push on that nerve in a reader compelling them to click (the same nerve that says “buy the paper”). But a key difference is that Web headlines do not have to have static, eternal forms like published ink on paper headlines do. They can be changed to suit audiences, media, and changing needs; Web headlines operate on a time release.

And that’s good because unless you’re very, very good at writing a headline great for all digital media—for the reader, for the search engines, for Twitter, for Digg, etc.—you may need to write one for each target. So without further ado, here are some digital headline tips:

1. Can you scan it and understand what should follow? (Information scent)
2. People ignore what they don’t understand.
3. Is it concise? Will it fit easily in an email subject line, a Twitter post?
4. Would you click it? Is it catchy? Spreadable? If you saw the headline at random in Google Reader/Digg/Reddit, etc., would it get your attention and compel you to click?
5. If possible, load the important keywords at the front. This is good for search engines and human reader/scanners.
6. Is it honest? People don’t like being tricked and won’t trust you again if what follows doesn’t match what was promised.
7. If too difficult to incorporate all elements at once, define immediate and long term goals. Tailor the title for viral, buzzworthiness first so you can grab the social media/click happy crowd. Rework the title later, after everything as settled, so that it’s search engine friendly for future reference and findability.