January 30th, 2009 by Michelle Moore

wondering why ben huh says “lole-cats” – in the south it’s “lahl cats” – http://tinyurl.com/bbyspo

January 30th, 2009 by Michelle Moore

I ran across a strange anomaly this morning while reading RSS feeds in iGoogle. I saw two different headlines about the same story.

MSNBC Business reported this: Exxon Mobil Posts Record $45.2 billion profit
New York Times reported this: Exxon Profit Down 33% as Prices Fall

So yeah, I was a little confused. Here’s what’s going on. Take notes.

There are two things at work here. One has to do with simple competition. It’s a good idea to tweak your RSS feeds anyway, because they are usually “capsules” of information. In this case, someone at NYT completely changed the headline. When you visit the NYT article, you see the real headline, which reads, “Exxon Posts Record 2008 Profit Despite Slip in 4th Quarter.”

The articles are based on the same sources but NYT is using the the RSS feed to its advantage in both posting something that appears to conflict with other news sources (driving the reader to click and see what accounts for the discrepancy) and at the same time, is taking advantage of the psychological effect of hinting that the US’ largest oil conglomerate is backsliding. Coming during a week where readers saw hordes of layoffs announced, this has probably proven to be a very effective headline. Additionally, coming on the tail some of the most drastically high gasoline prices I know I have ever paid, some folks might get a little secret thrill over an oil company “losing” anything, even if it’s only losing profits…

It’s the same news but it’s presented with a different spin and pulls in a different sort of reader. For all we know, some astute observer at NYT saw the MSNBC headline and made a conscious decision to tweak the RSS feed to be contrary. Conflict draws attention, after all. This is just one small example of how the same digital media can be tweaked and fudged to pull traffic in different ways.

Bloggers do this all the time. Another example in today’s mailbag has to do with HubSpot releasing a study where they announced as their headline “Survey Shows Inbound Marketing Sales Leads Are Cheaper Than Outbound.” Someone else read the same report and put a different twist on it, digging through the HubSpot research and finding a needle in the haystack they could use to their advantage and put out this headline and story based on exactly the same data: “Study: Company Blogs Lead Social Media Options,” which is an article that focuses on one subset of the data indicating that small to medium business blogs are considered as credible sources of information about the company.

A lot of our interaction as human beings is based on different viewpoints. Heck, there are channels on cable TV that wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for this simple fact. So if you are hung up and don’t know what to write about for your personal or company blog, take another look through the headlines you follow and find something you have a slightly different take on and spin that out to attract a different sort of attention.