Free tools for embedding, sharing news online

It’s a free plugin that takes a few minutes and a couple of clicks to install, but once it’s live, any sentence in any story can be shared by readers.

You can test it here by highlighting a sentence in the text and then sharing it on Twitter, Facebook or via email. Just highlight the words and you should see a small share bar pop up above the phrase you have selected.

Ivy is just one component in a suite of tools put together by Filament; some are free of charge and there are also premium tools which cost.

Cards and content going viral

Ivy is one of a rapidly growing collection of tools enabling content producers to release interactive assets as part of their viral social media dissemination strategy.

The embedded ‘card’ above is just one component of that strategy; instead of just providing a link, as I would have done in the past, I have also added an asset using the free embed.ly plugin. Click the little grey arrow to the top right of the embedded asset and you will see the share options.

Embed.ly enables the audience to take assets away and use them as they wish, either sharing on social media or embedding in their blog and building an item around that asset.

The challenge for content producers is to keep track of this, watch the conversations that they have stimulated as they develop, and then absorb that engagement back into their output – where appropriate – as part of their social media news gathering.

As soon as I installed Filament Ivy, I added it to my Social Media Kitbag for Journalists which I am curating on Scoop.it.

It’s a collection of all the free tools I come across which I think could help journalists in their work. [Here you can see the] embed of that scoop. Of course this embed can also be embedded elsewhere by others and shared. Again part of that dissemination strategy. It just goes on and on.

And the free version of Scoop.it allows you to share any scoop you find with five social media accounts, so this addition went out on my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google + accounts with one click.

Experimenting with free tools

I am happy to play around with the free version of Filament Ivy because it delivers exactly what I want as I experiment with ways of enabling the reader to deconstruct stories and share the parts they find interesting.

I found out about it after seeing what The Guardian has done with its site in terms of highlighting and sharing text. Below is an embed from a Guardian story where you can see this working. (Not sure why they have limited the share option to Twitter and email rather than include Facebook as well).

Pick and choose and share what you want

This is all part of the strategy of allowing the audience to pick and choose what they find interesting and to take that away with them to wherever they want to consume that content.

It’s a bit like going to the market and picking the products you want which you know you can use to produce the meals you want. That is an important change in audience behavior, enabled by advances in technology and the development of tools that allow people to share any asset.

Media organizations that ignore this are failing to adapt to audience demand, and that could be costly. If users come to your site and find there is nothing to share other than the stories, they might not come back because they will probably be looking for interactive assets to take away with them.

This story first appeared on the site of IJNet’s partner, Media Helping Media (MHM), a training information site that provides free media resources for journalists working in transition states, post-conflict countries and areas where freedom of expression and media freedom is under threat. 

Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via Niklas Wikström.