http://twitter.com/DelMarRacing/statuses/18711376758

Your line of work does veer towards what is strictly cerebral, but do try to use at least one word in a h/l that conveys a sense of motion, immediacy, impact!

You find your work interesting. Make it AS attractive to others – right off the bat.

For instance, above – instead of “key,” why not, instead, “vital”?

Thank you for responding to my criticism in a good-natured spirit.

*****

Jessica, if I may:

Your impression of the Paulick Report being “an insider” venue, I believe, is somewhat – but not by much – off the mark.

The reason why is that – with the rare exception of articulate/insightful owners/breeders such as Barry Irwin & Cot Campbell – the majority of people who are “engaged” with the PR are the paying fans, most of whom but not all are also referred to as “the bettors.”

As it has often been accurately noted, one could pay admission to a racetrack every single day of one or more meets for 40 consecutive years & yet have virtually no influence upon the decisions made by the sport’s executives (on- & off-track) & owners.

The bettors also receive virtually no meaningful recognition from representatives of these two groups. “Insiders” would normally be accorded this courtesy.

The final third segment of the actual racing insiders – the trainers & jockeys – also almost never directly contribute to the feedback option that the Paulick Report has so wisely made as part of the “load-bearing integrity” of their site.

Whatever the trainers have to say are usually the rehearsed responses to questions in pre- & post-race interviews, later flap-jacked into articles (wherein you can also find the business-as-usual, equally trite remarks of the owners).

This can be amusing. One summer, I asked a trainer up in Saratoga about a quite remarkable experience he had had, earlier in the year. To my utter amazement (& dismay), he virtually repeated – almost verbatim – what he had originally said in the post-event interview published in the Blood Horse.

But I’ll agree with you in that the language of racing as it is found in racing web sites & magazines, as well as at the track itself, is infested with “slang” that is virtually incomprehensible to the non-racing public – & which immediately turns that non-racing public off, permanently.

It is horrible.

Once in a while, someone will wake up, realize what’s going on, &, for example, eliminate the ridiculously archaic word, “distaff,” from ad campaigns, etc. (as did the Breeders’ Cup executives).

But this is a once-a-year commendable shooting star, compared to the galaxies of nonsensical words & phrases that audibly orbit around the racetracks & which also land comfortably into stale racing writing that repels readers who are new to the sport.

The PR took stale & threw it overboard. Thank goodness.

I like the format.

Ray likes to influence the news sometimes but then again so do I. wink wink

I agree. Talking horses make for good engagement :)

Dan,

I mentioned the BH in the piece. Yes the BH does a good job as I alluded to in the second last paragraph.

The main reason I looked at DRF and Equibase is that they are a little less inside baseball. As well, BH revamped their web presence while Paulick was here (if I am not mistaken). A response to him, perhaps? I dont know. I thought about making my thesis about how a little guy can compete with the big guys showing the BH and Paulick graphs, but my conclusions generally would be the same as with this thesis. As well, because both Ray and BH have a history, I did not want to turn the post into that, even slightly. (but now I have :))

In addition, Ray does not news feed or RSS tons of stories a day like news sites. His proprietary stories are not of that frequency, which in my opinion, strengthens his case. When he writes something, it gets filtered around the social web. It makes me wonder what score he could glean with a full staff like other pubs in our sport.

Jess,

We do not have access to google analytics data for any of these sites, so it is impossible to say for sure about engaging non-racing fans. The engagement score is a measure that we can use, though.

From post rank: “Engagement events are social activities centered around people sharing your content online with other people. But just as all the social interactions people perform do not have the same level of effort, meaning, or importance, not all engagement events represent the same level of effort, importance or “weight”. ”

continuing: “An engagement score is the total number of engagement points earned by all the sources of engagement events for a single piece of content, like a blog post. So the number of points for each trackback, comment, tweet, Delicious bookmark, Reddit vote, etc. are added up ”

If this was simply “comments left on blogs” drf’s score would be much higher, as we know their traffic and how many comments will be left on an Illman piece etc. It is more: FB, RSS, raceday 360 and so on.

By definition postrank measures reach. The higher the number, the better the reach, so therein was my conclusion (based on this web metric). I use postrank in my real job often, so I am fairly sold on their numbers and have faith in them.

Everyone is looking for reach to expand their core market – a two man shop has arguably done that better than anyone in our sport. I found that a very compelling characteristic, and worthy of my thesis for this little article.

Im glad that it spurred some discussion here regardless.

Dean

It was there for others…… but he grabbed it.

The headline is in regard to a white paper written about branding that I read recently. It discussed nine key metrics to watch for to see if you are branding properly via the web.

I am sorry it is not up to your standard.

Regardless, I agree that many websites, like Ray Paulicks and Seth’s write headlines quite well. I will certainly never have a career in journalism or as an aggregator as they do!

Thanks for your feedback.

Dean
PS: The title is not as you wrote it. The title is “Engagement is a Key Metric for Brand Success”

Possibly. But writing stilted, stuffy, wooden headlines is not.

The Paulick Report is written with verve.

Sadly, it is not contagious.

I’m only 21 so I completely understand the appeal of a star like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. While I don’t like their overall image or some of the content in their songs there is no denying that they know how to excite the music world and be the “banner act”. They record songs with beats and tempos that make you feel great and make music videos so bizarre to go along that they create the “must see/hear” buzz.

I have noticed one interesting thing that happens when I get my friends or family to watch races (usually on Youtube) of horses like Zenyatta, Rachel Alexandra or Curlin. They will usually only get excited when they can hear the crowd as the horses enter the stretch. If it’s just the announcer and the cheers of the fans have been sifted out of the recording it takes most of the excitement away for them. Speaking from experience here: It’s a whole lot more fun to scream/cheer when you aren’t the only one. (: