Hearst Corporation: Building bridges to the Social Web

SFGate.com and Chron.com, the online versions of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle respectively, are enjoying many benefits from their social media deployments. Popular stories on both sites regularly generate more than 1,000 comments and significantly increase page views. In fact, article comments account for 3.5% of SFGate's total page views. Since the introduction of their online communities, SFGate.com has seen unique visitors increase by over 1 million.

SFGate was among the first to recognize the business value of linking its own community to the larger Social Web. The paper makes it easy for its readers to broadcast their activities at SFGate.com to Facebook and Twitter, and to attract their friends there back to SFGate. The result of this investment has been a significant increase in unique visitors and page views. For example, SFGate.com experienced 1,597% year-over-year growth in page views coming from Facebook.

Hearst Newspapers' flagship publications have integrated social media into their core site experiences and successfully made the transition from print to digital. SFGate.com and Chron.com aim to create the best possible user experience through reader interaction.

At SFGate.com and Chron.com, article comments, recommendations, forums and photo submissions allow readers enhance site content. Communities dedicated to topics of common interest such as parenting, pets, gardening and local music – where readers can contribute blogs, photos and can interact with other community members – create anchors for reader engagement. For Hearst, this engagement has produced longer site visits and more frequent return visits. In addition, user-generated content provides Hearst’s editors with real-time access to readers’ opinions, concerns, and ideas, offering previously unavailable insights.

"Based on our review, no other social media platform can scale to support traffic volumes in the millions like Pluck. In addition, the integration of the platform across the many facets of social media, such as blogs, ratings, photos and comments, can help us ensure the experience for our visitors can be one of the best available on the Web."
-Alex Ballantyne, Managing Director Hearst Digital UK.