#Podcast – Google+ at one: Lessons from Time.com and FT.com

It is one year since Google+ was launched, with news outlets and brands being given the ability to create pages in November.

In this podcast we hear how Time.com and FT.com have each achieved more than one million followers on the platform in just seven months.

Journalism.co.uk technology editor Sarah Marshall speaks to:

• Cathy Sharick, managing editor of Time.com
• Bede McCarthy, executive editor of FT.com
• Sunny Hundal, founder of Rippla, which measures the social media ‘ripples’ of news stories

Sharick and McCarthy share their lessons, tips and future plans for Time magazine and the Financial Times Google+ pages and Hundal explains research he has carried out into the number of stories being shared on Google+.

Podcast: Download

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You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

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Tool of the week for journalists – Rippla, for tracking the social ‘ripples’ of news stories

Tool of the week: Rippla

What is it? A tool that allows you to monitor the social media “ripples” of a news story

How is it of use to journalists? Rippla was launched last month as a tool that tracks how news and information reaches into people’s conversations on social media.

It may be interesting to find out that the story with the most “ripples” is currently the Mail Online’s Hilarious video shows cat stroking crying baby and sending him to sleep, followed by George Monbiot’s Guardian comment This bastardised libertarianism makes ‘freedom’ an instrument of oppression, But what is particularly helpful for journalists is the ripples tracker.

Ripples tracker allows you to enter the URL or a news story and see how many times it has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks and find out how many bit.ly click-throughs the post has received.

Rippla also offers news sites a widget than can be added (as embedded below), which displays the most socially shared news stories.

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Rippla, a site to monitor the social media ‘ripples’ of news stories, launches

Rippla has today launched as a site to track how news stories are shared via social media.

Take a look at the home screen and you will see stories generating the most shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and bit.ly.

The site has been created by journalist and political blogger Sunny Hundal who told Journalism.co.uk Rippla “scrapes news feeds from the UK’s 10 biggest news sites and then ranks them by popularity across social networks. It measures how many ‘ripples’ they’ve created.

The second great feature of this site is the widget, which allows you to enter the URL of a news story from your site and see the social media “ripples” it has created.

Hundal said he created the site for two reasons:

First, I want to track how well media organisations do on social media. The site updates and collects the data every hour.

Second, the longer term aim is to provide people an opportunity to consume content based on what their peers are sharing / reading, rather than simply based on what the newspaper front-page offers. As you know, patterns of media consumption are changing and we think this is the way its all heading.

The site will be in beta for some time while bugs are fixed and functionality is added.

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