The Evolving Newsroom

Nice series of posts by Martin Belam looking at what happens to users who click on a ‘share this’ button at the bottom of a news story.

When I recently wrote a series of articles on how major publishers are using social media bookmarking tools to drive traffic, I mentioned that ‘share this‘ buttons had descended like a plague on web design in recent years. It seems that at the foot of every story, we are being urged to dig this, stumble upon that, and buzz up the other.

We very carefully control the user experience around sharing on our sites. We make choices about where to place the icons on the page, and whether to show all of them at once, or to hide them behind a universal ‘share this’ icon. A lot of news sites also provide contextual help around their share functionality, with links like the BBC’s “What are these?” pages.

However, one area where we don’t control the user experience is the welcome that users get from the third party site. I was particularly intrigued to see how these services treat users who hit a ‘share’ button when they are not logged in or registered for a service – the ‘share-curious’ user if you will.

Deeply impressed that Martin made the time to do this and document it so diligently.

Also glad he pointed to the annoying anomoly where you click on ‘share this’, get routed to a registration process that can be several screens long, and quite often get spat out the other end without being able to bookmark or share the page that started you on the journey in the first place.

However, something has been lost in translation during this process. I may be a fully-fledged and verified Digg member now, but somehow along the way I never actually got to register my Digg for The Telegraph’s Michael Jackson story, which is what started me on the journey in the first place.

In four posts, he looks at Digg, Stumbleupon, Yahoo, Delicious, Newsvine, Reddit, Facebook, Google Bookmark, Fark and Mixx.