Washington Post's Peep Show

For media web sites, slideshows are a great way to get your audience to spend more time on the site and give you more pageviews. When I was leading InfoWorld.com they were an important strategy in our successful efforts to build engagement. Like many relatively simple solutions, slideshows have been around awhile but the concept continues to evolve.

On Sunday WashingtonPost.com had a great feature that combines the power of the slideshow with user-generated content: Peeps Show. Getting away from its staid image (another must to succeed at online media), the Post invited its audience to create dioramas based on the chemically candy treats/pop culture icons known as Peeps (more on the Peep phenomenon in the Wikipedia). Timed for Easter, the peak Peep season, the Post selected finalists from over 800 submissions, then presented them in a slideshow.

Augmenting the slides were a text article about the contest, an online voting form allowing the audience to select a favorite, and an interactive live chat with Dan Zak, the Post reporter who managed the contest. Today the slideshow is ranked as the most popular show on the Post site and over 4,000 people have voted on favorites. The Peeps content is a nice win for the Post and a great example of how to leverage content in ways that are optimized for online media.

Ready for Its Closeup: Study Checks State of Media in 2008

There’s been some buzz this week about the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new State of the News Media 2008 report, which records the Norma-Desmond-like dilemma of traditional media faced with a growing disconnect from leading-edge trends and popular taste. “The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising,” the massive (180,000+ words) study frets.

Time for a wake-up call! In the media business advertising follows audience. Making that happen is the function of marketing and sales. The audience is attracted by content. The business formula isn’t very complicated. What’s changed is that online, not all content needs to be created by professionals, and distribution opportunities are vastly larger than with traditional media.

As its sponsor’s name suggests, this report was assembled from the perspective of self-identified “professional media,” some of whom are having trouble accepting that they’re no longer indispensible for setting the national—indeed, global—thought agenda. Some sections read like a portrait of a massive industry in eclipse. The study rather hopefully observes that “even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce.” True enough, but a rising tide floats all ships. Online, audience growth alone isn’t enough to ensure commensurate increases in revenue and profits.

Details in the study begin to pinpoint a big problem: high-cost professional content mills that too often are out of touch with audiences’ information needs and consumption habits:

• “The media and the public often disagreed about which stories were important in 2007”
  
• “Most Americans believe the news media are politically biased, that their stories are often inaccurate and that journalists do not care about the people they report on”
  
• “News people are uncertain how the core values of accuracy and verification will hold up”

Some media companies may also have lost sight of their fundamental business, delivering audiences to advertisers. “Advertisers no longer have to depend on paid media to distribute their messages,” the report hypothesizes, citing alternatives including starting their own web sites, posting to YouTube, or guerilla campaigns. But each of these options has a cost and as the study rightly notes, savvy marketers are more attuned than ever to ROI. The challenge for media businesses is to deploy resources to deliver superior ROIs, acting as specialized marketing channels for the advertising community. That’s always been true in media and the advent of the internet hasn’t changed it.

Most acutely, the new report raises the question of the future of branded media “in an age when so much information is so readily available that it is viewed as a commodity.” Bottom line, brands exist as a strategy for capturing higher margins. In the online media business, where the competition is only a click away, it’s only worth incurring the cost of creating branded content to the extent that it monetizes better than commodity content created by partners or the audience itself—for example, by attracting a demographic advertisers pay a premium for.

To fully close the loop, sales teams and advertisers need to buy into a site’s content strategy. The study observes that may not yet be the case. “The business side has begun to be identified as the problem area, the place where people are having the most difficulty changing,” it comments. And, “Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.” The report finds the “ability to get much more granular data and the pressure felt by chief marketing officers to justify their ad dollars have made ad spending accountability the No. 1 priority among marketers today.”

The study closes with a prediction: “2008 looks to be the year the mainstream press tries to lure citizens toward creating the content within their own outlets.” Once they attract the user-generated content, it will be interesting to see what they do with it—how it’s monetized and whether it’s fully integrated into the site or cordoned off in a UGC ghetto.

A Misfire in the Dark: How Not to Do Online Media

There's been some hype lately for wowowow.com, a founder-funded web site for "accomplished women over 40" that launched last weekend (press release here). Last week it was featured by the New York Times, PaidContent.org, and Mashable, among others; it was on Good Morning America today. Notably, the founders are all women in media. But unfortunately for the many people who think wowowow is a promising concept and would like to see it succeed, the founders are all from traditional media, and the old-fashioned business assumptions they bring from that environment result in a "me-too" web site that misses many opportunities for thought leadership and innovation.

Wowowow is what happens when traditional media thinking intersects the online medium without much thought to the dramatically different business environments the two platforms present. And by the way, I don't mean to pick on wowowow specifically. It's typical of many middling web businesses these days, and for that reason presents a good object lesson in how not to build a media web site in 2008.

In traditional media, because of high unit costs for production and distribution, it makes sense to start with a narrowly targeted, high-value concept--such as serving the information needs of affluent older women. Your brand identity is tightly connected with a restrictive definition of audience. You don't want to waste resources creating products consumed by people your advertisers don't want to reach. With traditional media, the advertising opportunity is the starting point for the business concept.

Online is the opposite; it's all about scale. While the low barrier to entry online makes it easy to create niche sites such as wowowow, the greatest rewards are reserved for those who tap into the web's extraordinary scale opportunities. So online media is about inclusivity and the starting point is the audience. The key to delivering value is the ability to segment that audience for advertisers who want to reach niches--self-segmentation through content affinity, inferred segmentation through behavioral targeting, demographic segmentation based on profile data...whatever.

The economics of online favor scale and online technology facilitates segmentation. Therefore the web also favors diversity, a larger pool from which to segment. Demographically monotonous sites such as wowowow come up short.

Interactivity also differentiates the online medium from its traditional ancestor. People who prefer to receive content in a passive way gravitate toward the one-way, top-down mode of traditional presentation. Those who consume content online see themselves as co-creators of the site experience and expect a conversation. While wowowow allows comments on the articles it presents, it doesn't give the audience a full seat at the table when it comes to generating content and connecting with one another. Related, the web is about democracy. You create content, I create content; we share opinions and debate basically as equals. Instead of any of this wowowow has an old-school, nose-against-the-glass feel as the audience mainly observes the antics of the celebrity founders and their pals.

Traditional media is also segmented by medium: video is on TV, audio is on radio, print is in newspapers and magazines, and the various media rarely intersect. Wowowow honors this tradition by being text-centric, rather like a web site from the last century. But fast-forward to 2008 and you'll notice that the best sites are all polyphonic, telling their stories with a mix of audio, video, text, slides, interactive graphics, and more. Check out CNN's forward-thinking design, for example, where content on a variety of platforms, by both paid staff and citizen journalists, coexists on the home page. The goal is to tell the story through the medium the audience will find most appropriate and compelling for that message.

Finally, the web is also about technology. This manifests itself in many ways, from the how the site functions to content about the tech-driven gadgets we all use. Wowowow seems almost devoid of technology; I looked in vain for a bit of AJAX and couldn't even find an RSS feed. Paradoxically, the founders seem to believe their online audience are stuck in the age of rotary phones, film cameras, 45 rpm records, and ViewMasters. You have to believe, if your audience is online, that they have some interest in technology and appreciate good web design. Show them some respect with a technically competent site that invokes the wow factor.

The web is all about innovation, and innovation is all about overcoming fear of failure and embracing risk. Sites like wowowow seem a bit timid to let go of business ideas that succeeded back in the day of traditional media. Concepts about demographic targeting or content subject matter alone aren't sufficient to drive online innovation. You have to insert these into a bigger picture vision of the medium and its future.

A Growing Role for Social Media

A recent blog post by Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang on his report “Online Community Best Practices” has generated an interesting comment thread that not only contains the sorts of tips teased in the title, but also highlights current thinking about communities as platforms for both media and marketing.

The post is primarily an ad for the full report, which is only available to Forrester clients (I haven’t read it). That document is based on interviews with 17 community leaders and aims to uncover commonalities in successful online communities. However, Owyang shares a few high-level tips for free. “Above all,” he advises, “remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.” The most successful communities were created by people who “acted more like a host, rather than a policeman,” Owyang observes.

Once they launch a community many companies face hurdles making it grow, he continues. Owyang recommends thinking of a community as a product in development. To build and grow it you need to define the objective, create a roadmap, assemble the right team, and be prepared to adjust plans as needed. To maximize the chances of success launch the community with backing from its most enthusiastic members and stay engaged as it grows, he advises.

The blog also shares a slide from the full report that correlates various stages in the community’s lifecycle to different growth rates. In the early strategy and research phases growth is slow. Member activity ramps up steeply beginning with launch and proceeding through kick-start, growth, and ongoing management—what Owyang calls the community’s “adolescence.” After a time, following the classic “S-curve” of product adoption, the community reaches “maturity,” when increases in activity are only incremental. At this point the sponsor’s role shifts to ongoing management and continual improvements, Owyang says.

As enlightening as Owyang’s brief summary of the report are some of the comments it generated. Among the highlights:

• Unrealistic expectations can doom a community project. It’s important to get everyone on board with achievable expectations early in the process
  
• Focus on engaging, useful content instead of pushing your brand objectives too hard
  
• Get management on board with a community by demonstrating ROI
  
• Communities are about people first; the underlying products or services aren’t really important
  
• Successful communities don’t succeed on their own, they require planning, management and marketing commitment
  
• Community growth may not always be a smooth curve; often there are big spikes that correlate with, for example, new product releases or marketing initiatives. It’s important to anticipate spikes and be prepared to deal with the issues they create, such as site performance, moderation and support needs, and spam.

Both Owyang and his readers also share insights into the future direction and value of the social media movement. Owyang foresees it becoming a core business function, almost like email. At some point, he says, “online social communities will just normalize, and everyone will say ‘duh’ this is no-brainer, improving communication with customers is a core function of every company.” A commenter agrees, “online communities are simply the next iteration of customer communications,” one that empowers members to interact directly to one another, in addition to dialogue with the community host. Another reader ventures that communities are “the future of marketing for many companies.”

Having both started and managed online communities I agree with these insights and am glad to see more high-level thought and discussion around community dynamics. Above all, anyone contemplating using a community for marketing or content generation needs to do so not reactively--because it’s a fad or because a competitor has one—but as a thoughtful and purposeful attempt to solve specific business problems, such as the cost or content or brand engagement. Communities both large and small are rapidly rising features in the online landscape; social networking is joining ecommerce and media as a true wealth-making “killer app” of the digital age. For those of us making it happen it’s exciting to join the discussion about the big picture and help frame the vision of how best to channel this powerful force for change.