Why we built a “puppy news” bot

So it’s official, the animals have won. Bunnies rule the land, cats have revolutionized advertising, and as we recently learned from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight puppies are here to conquer publishing. Readers are more interested in “puppy dogs” than Iraq, and the reader is always right, says Tribune owner Sam Zell (he also says f*ck you to his staff, nice).

I’m a startup founder at Socius working on new tools for publishers to grow and engage their audiences. We feel the journalists’ pain, but rather than simply offer our heartfelt sympathy we locked our engineers in a room for the weekend and gave them this brief: Puppies AKA Viral content is here to stay and will continue to make up a healthy chunk of readers’ daily interest, let’s automate it!

This is what we came up with…

Introducing: Puppy Aggregation Widget Script

P.A.W.S. is a bot that searches the social web (Twitter, Instagram, all that good stuff) for puppy related content, anytime, anywhere, and collects the highlights into one tear-inducing widget you can embed anywhere on your site. It’s sure to keep readers dosed up so high that you can concentrate on the stuff that matters; Iraq, climate change, or the circus otherwise known as the presidential elections.

We launched P.A.W.S. on Product Hunt and it made it on the front page, now it’s available for you to download for free at PuppyNewsBot.com. Just copy the snippet and give it a whirl! Heck you can even throw it into your site’s footer to break hearts on every page.

For the busy ones here’s the snippet:

<div data-socius=”true” data-customer=”paws” data-tile-size=”S” data-rows=”2"></div><script async src=”//widgets.sociuslive.com/v1/socius.embed.min.js” charset=”utf-8"></script>

If you liked this be sure to hit the like button. Thanks for reading!

Wait… there’s more!

If you’re a blogger, journalist or publisher we’re also offering early access to our full product — Socius Explorer which works similar to P.A.W.S. but for any #topic (as if you could be craving anything more than puppies right!?).

Explorer identifies contextually relevant high quality content from the social web to enrich any page and encourage discovery on your properties. Think of it like a social Outbrain but without inducing vomit. Just awesome social content to entertain readers of your site, build trust and loyalty, and maybe even some incremental revenue if that floats your boat. More details over on our campaign site.

If you just wanna say hi drop me a comment, or reach me/us at daniel@sociuslive.com and Twitta @dnlbtlr @sociuslive