Sep 21, 2010

Who’s pimping who?

An unattributed quote floated around the Twitterverse two weeks ago that went something like this: Those who don’t pay to read the news are not consumers. They’re the product being sold.

ZING! It hurt like hell, but it was the truth. When news audiences receive free content, they no longer count as customers. They’re not dropping coin to keep the lights on or the servers running. They don’t pay for writers’ salaries. And even if they contribute “emotional” value to a news outlet through reader comments, that value doesn’t do jack for a business if it doesn’t translate into dollars and cents.

In my previous attempt at hyperlocal news, I placed the audience’s satisfaction ahead of business development. It was a colossal mistake. Readers loved my frank restaurant reviews as much as restaurant owners hated them, and that meant an enormous loss of potential advertising revenue from the neighborhood’s largest industry.

This time, I hope to develop my audience and customer base simultaneously without jeopardizing the quality of my publication’s content. Here’s how:

Extend services unrelated to my publication to residents and the business community. One of the revenue streams I plan to pursue is group-discount brokering (the Groupon model). To make it work, I need a mailing list of prospective shoppers (an audience) and business customers willing to offer these shoppers a discount. To build this mailing list, I plan to attend local meet-ups to learn what residents want or need from their community, and to gently introduce the idea of group discounts. Call it market research.

That information becomes leverage when approaching business customers for group discounts. It also brings together an otherwise non-paying audience with paying customers, without selling out a news outlet’s integrity.

Build my publication’s audience slooooooowly. Since setting up a beta site earlier this month, I’ve posted only two stories. But I’ve used Twitter to publicize my organization as a news source, mostly by retweeting neighborhood-specific stories from larger news outlets and by posting photos. So far, I have 13 followers, and that’s fine with me.

This modest following allows me to test different things, from writing style and voice, to website design. The publication’s slow, deliberate development also gives me the opportunity to educate customers (in this case, advertisers) on how my business operates, not as a quick hustle but as the next evolutionary step in advertising.

Those are my first two steps in building the business, though I should keep a few spare ideas in my pocket should neither of these approaches work.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user chillhiro.

Sep 2, 2010

Color, coverage and confirmation

Just the other day, I told a friend via Twitter not to believe what “they” say, that one really can go home again. By that I meant a return to my native New York City after four years of working the hyperlocal scene in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. I never expected a guy named Lee and his gun-toting, bomb-planting, hostage-taking antics at Discovery Communications would send me back to Silver Spring, if only digitally.

Wednesday afternoon was one long tweet: conversations with friends and former neighbors who work in and around the Discovery building, and retweets of news updates from boots on the ground. Emails and Facebook messages came from larger news organizations, asking for any information I may have had on the suspect or Discovery’s past dealings with him. And I bitched a lot about theories and comments from unnamed sources being passed off as fact (more on that below).

Hindsight being twenty-twenty, and this being the digital age, accolades and criticism of the event’s news coverage surfaced immediately or in real time. Regional news startup TBD.com got well-deserved props for its streaming video and online coverage, with help from its television affiliate WJLA. (Both organizations live under the Allbritton corporate umbrella.) But some of the news coverage (not necessarily that of TBD or WJLA) got gruff from the Asian-American Journalists Association (AAJA), Slate magazine and me:

Was the suspect’s ethnicity relevant? As Wednesday’s events unfolded, the AAJA offered this advice via Twitter: Ethnicity should be reported only when relevant and when that relevance can be explained to the news consumer’s satisfaction. The organization later explained on its website that it objected to “Asian” being the only modifier used to describe the suspected gunman. “It’s doubtful that news organizations would say ‘Black man (or white man) takes hostages.’ This reminder is in that same vein,” the website stated.

I agree, though personally I didn’t see any headlines or tweets describing him only as an Asian gunman. But there was relevance on the hyperlocal level to identifying the suspect as Asian. A lot of Silver Spring residents knew Lee as the village idiot (arguably one of many) who two years ago staged a one-man protest against Discovery Communications and then paid homeless men and women to join his picket line. That same week, he started a near-stampede along the neighborhood’s main shopping strip as he tossed cash in the air to evade his paid-to-picket employees.

Describing the suspect as Asian was germane to the story and a big wink-wink, nudge-nudge to Silver Spring residents. Neighbors knew exactly who took hostages that day — there aren’t too many Asian men with an anti-Discovery agenda running around town — without anyone even saying the dude’s name, and without confirmation from the police (more on that below). Read the rest of this entry »

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.