Jun 13, 2011

Random acts of audience engagement

Free hugsLast month, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism hosted an awesome presentation on how new journalism outlets can generate revenue beyond traditional advertising. It was bootstrapping 101, a lesson in being scrappy and resourceful without looking cheap, and it re-energized my thoughts on how to fund my future hyperlocal project. And I can’t emphasize this enough: it was awesome.

Future blog posts will explore the presentation’s seven fists of revenue fury: expertise, events, membership, subscriptions, product sales, donations and advertising re-imagined. Jeremy Caplan, director of the J-school’s center for entrepreneurial journalism and that evening’s presenter, carefully framed these revenue streams with startup businesses in mind, though even experienced hyperlocalists will find them worth a second look.

No discussion of revenue can start without an examination of audience engagement and its importance to the survival of any small business. I’ve yapped previously about a news outlet’s “emotional” value, how the interaction between reporter and reader through a website’s comments section can influence offline, real-life decisions. Advertisers appreciate that influence and recognize how it can work to their advantage. (They can also fear and loathe that influence — Yelp, anyone?) Unfortunately, emotional value as I’ve described it can’t be easily quantified.

Enter Facebook, Twitter and every other form of social media available. One way or another, they all display the number of users who follow a news organization’s account, and engagement is evident through wall posts and retweets. Emotional value finally has a number that advertisers can understand. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg!

The best part: it doesn’t matter if a news organization’s social-media activity detracts from its website’s page views, declared Miral Sattar, founder of the niche site Weddings.Divanee.com. The organization’s influence will continue to have value as long as it engages its audience, whether on its own site or elsewhere, she said during the CUNY J-school presentation.

For example, Sattar’s wedding-oriented site recently asked its audience to choose the best-looking engagement ring from a series of photos posted on its Facebook page, with votes recorded as “likes” for individual images. The activity did nothing to drive participants to the main website (ie, it did not increase the number of page views), yet it demonstrated to potential advertisers the website’s engagement and influence with its audience.

A note on social-networking numbers: bigger isn’t always better. If an organization has to follow 20,000 Twitter users just to get 15,000 to reciprocate, then that’s not value. That’s volume, the same game played by Patch and other large-scale hyperlocal operations. And it’s a game that small, independent hyperlocal sites won’t win.

Even emailed newsletters demonstrate engagement and influence to potential advertisers, Sattar and Caplan described. A long list of subscribers shows readers’ interest in the news outlet (or at least a reluctance to mark the newsletter as spam).

Furthermore, email is still considered a more personal, private form of communication, the speakers suggested. To advertisers, it means an organization has more than its foot in the reader’s door — it’s sitting in that reader’s living room, playing with the family dog, eating chips on the sofa and watching “Glee.” That influence and intimacy counts more to neighborhood advertisers than page views and search-engine optimization.

Feb 24, 2011

Where hyperlocal news meets the “like” button

On Tuesday evening, I received a message via Facebook from Cynthia Cotte Griffiths, a friend and fellow hyperlocalist from Maryland. It was the kind of message that made me wince, smile and then slap my knee at her ingenuity.

First, the wince. Cotte Griffiths announced that she and her business partner, Brad Rourke, were pulling the plug on their Rockville (Md) Central news website. After three and a half years in publication, both had grown tired of juggling content creation and advertising sales, she told me. Furthermore, competition from Patch, another indie website, the local print publication and the municipal government’s site made their reporting redundant, Rourke blogged.

Then came the smile. Rockville Central would live on as a news source through its Facebook page, where their fans were already gabbing about current events. With a combination of news aggregation and original reporting, “we can create a true community hub,” Cotte Griffiths wrote.

And then the knee slap. Even though Cotte Griffiths and Rourke won’t generate advertising revenue from their Facebook page, they can establish themselves as social-media experts with tabs on the local vibe. That can translate into serious revenue from social-media consulting, building an online presence for small businesses, nonprofit groups and even government agencies.

Then another knee slap. Facebook is already a mobile-friendly service, whether one uses its mobile website or a native (platform-specific) app. That gives the Rockville Central fan page greater reach without having to “mobilize” its own website or develop an expensive app. The technical witchcraft has already been done for them.

And still another knee slap. Cotte Griffiths and Rourke can take their social-media savvy onto Twitter, where they can generate revenue from sponsored tweets. Also, they can use the multimedia-heavy publishing platform Tumblr to build a portfolio of marketable stock photos or to publish original audio or video content, though Tumblr’s community of users is still small relative to Facebook and Twitter.

By the time I reached the closing salutations of Cotte Griffiths’ message, my knee was swollen from the slapping and I was swearing up a storm. (“Fucking genius!” came up a lot.) Sure, they’d have to stay ahead of the social-media curve in case some future service turns Facebook into MySpace. In the meantime, they can provide hyperlocal information, foster dialog among neighbors, and make bank as consultants.

One day after our Facebook exchange, the news of Rockville Central’s transition had made its way through Twitter. And by Wednesday evening, members of the Online News Association were talking about it at a mixer inside the offices of The New York Times. Some were intrigued, others were disappointed that local news would take this route.

I’m hitting the “like” button on this one.

Illustration courtesy of Flickr user Christopher S. Penn.

Jul 7, 2010

Getting mom and pop to go digital

Last spring, an advertiser with my now-defunct news site asked whether his restaurant should have a Facebook fan page. I told him yes, but my eyes burned an angry “hell yes,” and my foot ached to make contact with his ass for not already having a presence on the social-networking site. I also encouraged him to get his business on Twitter.

That’s when his eyes glazed over. “What’s Twitter?” he asked.

I tried my best to explain it: 140-character squirts of information broadcast to followers, who then might rebroadcast (or retweet) that information to their followers, and so on. My advertiser didn’t see its value; admittedly, I didn’t do a good job illustrating it to him. It just seemed like a lot of work that he didn’t really need.

He was right. Digital marketing can be a full-time job, or at least a labor-intensive one for a small, neighborhood business. Mom and Pop Shopkeeper can’t spare their first-born child to tweet daily specials or post notes on a Facebook wall. That kid needs to be at the register or on a bicycle making deliveries.

The Tribune Company stepped into this tough sell earlier this week and Gannett started in late May. But they’re onto something: Digital-marketing services are certainly a revenue stream that allows online hyperlocalists to leverage social-networking skills they already have (or at least should have).

Making this work means first educating small business owners on the value of Facebook and Twitter (I’ll toss in Foursquare while I’m at it). That can be done one-on-one during a sales call, or in a free presentation to the chamber of commerce or other local business groups. The goal is to introduce business owners to the concepts of social networking and not to instruct them on exactly how to use it. They won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free.

Next, it might mean scaling a digital-marketing campaign to fit a business’s needs and budget. A restaurant might have plenty of information to post on its Twitter and Facebook feeds, and such a business can use (and afford) the help of an online hyperlocalist to set up those accounts or create content.

Conversely, a corner convenience store might not have much to say, but one inexpensive “sponsored” tweet on a hyperlocalist’s Twitter feed can extend its services to an online audience.

I’ve had some success offering digital-marketing services to small businesses: I ghost-tweeted text and photos for a local crafts fair using that business’s Twitter account, and transmitted teaser tweets through my news site’s feed. I also convinced the restaurateur mentioned above to purchase tweet time on my feed, though as part of a larger display-ad package.

In the interest of transparency, each tweet appearing on my feed was labeled “sponsored.” Likewise, any mention of the crafts fair or that restaurant in the website’s content included some mention of them as sponsors or advertisers.

Digital marketing is a professional service and revenue stream that online hyperlocalists should consider, especially since Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are well adapted to mobile devices. It’s an easy way to break into mobile monetization with existing technology.

Photos courtesy of Flickr user Jeremy Keith and Tommaso Sorchiotti.

Mar 23, 2010

When social media becomes free marketing

Yesterday, I bitched about businesses that were always on the lookout for free advertising from the local media. Now I’m telling fellow hyperlocalists this: When an opportunity comes up to promote your news outlet for free or cheap, jump all over it. Just remember that nothing’s ever really free.

One of the best ways for online hyperlocal organizations to market their stuff on the cheap is via social networking. (I don’t know if print-only outlets find it as useful.) However, an online analyst wrote last week that the type of information consumed depends on the social network being used. Facebookers tend to link to broadcast media for whatever reason, while Tweeters link to other social networks and photo- and video-sharing sites.

Either way, these social networks should be used as more than just RSS feeds. Instead, they should be extensions of a media outlet’s brand. And that’s where the “free isn’t really free” comes into play. Successful marketing via social media requires lots of work, but it can also pay off in a big way.

For example, the Twitter feed to my former hyperlocal news site offered followers more than just links to newly minted articles. I linked to other outlets’ stories, forwarded funny photos from the neighborhood, and most importantly, gave readers a peek into how my publication’s articles were researched and written.

Admittedly, some tweets were mundane. But some really shared the stupid, lonely and fun hyperlocalist experience, and I credit this personal interaction for a 40-percent jump in readership in 2009:

“Citizens advisory board is voting on whether or not to vote.”

“Going for coffee. Who wants?”

“Researching new donut shop on Fenton Street.”

Likewise, the outlet’s Facebook fan page and Tumblr page offered readers previously unpublished photos and videos, entertaining stories from other local publications, and announcements to special events. I don’t think Facebook did much to boost readership, but it did offer some demographic information on who my readers were. The Tumblr page did even less, but the project was a fun extension of my website’s brand.

Personally, I don’t pay any mind to Facebook’s “contextual” ads, and more power to Twitter if it can tap into that revenue stream. Their power as marketing tools are worth a quick glimpse at an advertisement — even a small fee for business users — and the sweat off my brow.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user zyphichore.