This Just In: Social Media!

Being someone who works in the horse racing industry, it’s not hard for a site that covers the game to be appealing to me, but there is one site that I always look to first and that is www.drf.com.

Since taking a #Kean University marketing course that focuses on social media, I have learned a new appreciation for the way www.drf.com is run.

You may be asking, what is www.drf.com? It is the web site for the Daily Racing Form, a daily publication that covers horse racing around the clock.

The Daily Racing Form’s web site is the place to go to find out all of the latest updates and breaking news stories about the racing industry. It holds especially true for this week with the Breeders’ Cup World Championships less than four days away.

To find out what the Breeders’ Cup is, see www.breederscup.com.

This Daily Racing Form web site does a terrific job of following the rules for digital writing, as it keeps a consistent image and puts the most important topics above the scroll. This is very important to me because I can find out the latest news as soon as the page loads without having to scroll down.

It also keeps a format that can be recognized by frequent visitors because it follows the similar pattern.

The web site also provides a search engine in case you would like to search a certain subject that has happened.

The headlines that are provided for each of the topics covered may not be the most creative, but they do their job and that job is to get the attention of the reader. Here is an example of a headline found from their web site: Temple City will skip Breeders’ Cup Marathon.

The headline may not be considered to be very creative, but what it does is grab the attention of the reader. I clicked on the headline as soon as I saw it to find out why this horse will not be racing this weekend.

That leads me to another thing this web site does well and that is enable their headlines to link to the story.It is quite convenient to be able to click on the headline and get entire story.

The Daily Racing Form also has their own bloggers and those blogs can be found on this web site. Their blogs usually offer great insight, but do not often follow the same format as our class does.

To see what I’m talking about, here’s a link to a recent blog posted on the Daily Racing Form web site, http://drf.com/news/zenyatta-must-earn-title-track.

I do not have any issues with the way this web site is run, but I do have a big issue with the way another site is set up. That web site is www.paulickreport.com. It’s another web site that covers the latest news in horse racing, but all of their links and headlines are scattered all over the place.

It is difficult to find the latest news on that site because the links are not in a particular order.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Thomas Cassidy