October 02, 2005
Week 5: Audience
This week, we'll be looking at one of the most critical elements of running a successful news site: knowing your audience. Your assignment for this week is at the bottom of this post ...
Intro: Whom would you rather be speaking to?
or
Bob Benz, 43, resident of Knoxville, TN, who is interested in alternative country music, literature, dogs
1. Targeting your audience.
Whom does Speakeasy target? The Post? AthensI?
Think about the various audiences in and around OU ...
- Students
- Professors
- Athens residents
- Merchants
- Athletes
- Greeks
- Parents
- Prospective students
It's critical that your site home in on a specific audience. The more general you are, the tougher it is to provide a satisfactory experience to everyone.
Remember: Department store vs. boutique
Fragmentation
Now let's assume we've targeted the audience we're seeking. That's only the beginning of the job. One of the major advantages of the Internet is that it allows you to get very 1-to-1 with your audience. TV and newspapers have a very tough time doing that.
2. The basics: data you can easily glean from the web server
- Server logs
- Hits
- Page views
- IP address
- Referrer URL
- Entry pages, exit pages
- Country
- IP address
- Wikipedia entry on Web analytics
3. Getting personal: Ways to enhance user information
Audience management -- i.e. Tacoda
- Omniture data
- Registration
- Member center
user: bbenz62@yahoo.com
pass: ohiouniversity
Now let's see what it looks like when we start pulling various data points together ...
4. The End Game: What you do with the data
We'll discuss this, and other strategies, during next week's discussion on advertising.
5. Assignment: Pick one of the following:
And analyze the site from an audience perspective.
- Based on what you see, who is the site's intended audience?
- Is the site focused enough? Is it too focused?
- Would you implement registration? Why or why not?
- If you can, find out what analytics software/strategy the site is using and provide a few details about its users.
- Keep in mind that your final project should have an audience component. That's where you'll be discussing your site's audience and the arguments for (or against) partnering to extend or enhance your reach.
Post your answers in the comments to this post. As always, the key is what you say, not how much you say ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 02:49 PM | Comments (12)
September 18, 2005
Week 3 lecture: The competitive landscape
In today’s class, we’ll look at a few real world examples that will help you get your head around the issues you’ll address in your final project.
Case studies
The goal: To get media outlets throughout the metro area to work together to drive traffic and build something bigger than any individual outlet could drive.
Kansas City Star was at the center
Pulled in TV, Radio and other groups. But over time, the portal unraveled.
Compare
Notice the list of partners...
http://bostonworks.boston.com/
Common threat: Monster.com.
Seacoast Online (an Ottaway paper) promotes Boston Works on its jobs site
C. Knoxville News Sentinel and WBIR TV
PrepXtra-- News Sentinel
PrepXtra -- WBIR
GoVolsXtra -- Knoxville
GoVolsXtra -- Memphis
From Business Week article: "Started with $1 million each from Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and New York Times, New Century seemed an entrepreneurial dream.
The Internet had just opened to the world, creating vast new competition for readers--and for the advertisers that pump $40 billion into newspapers. But it also gave newspapers a chance to capture national accounts that favored the one-stop-shopping convenience of TV and national magazines."
E. TBO.com
F. Aggregators
So in summing up, here are key questions we should be asking in these situations:
- What is the goal of your partnership? What is the “win-win” for each side, and how will you define success?
- In entering the partnership, what are your risks? Could you end up giving a competitor an edge? Is there a danger of confusing your audience or diluting your marketing message?
- How will the partnership function? Who will give, who will take and how will that occur?
- What incentive does each partner have to remain in the partnership and ensure that it succeeds?
- What is your exist strategy? If the partnership doesn’t work out, how do you extract yourself from it with minimal impact on your existing business.
Click here for your lab assignment ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
Week 3 lab assignment
Here's your assignment for this week's lab. It will be a great time to start thinking about your final project. Make sure you review the sites we looked over in this week's lecture, and pay particular attention to the questions at the end of that post. They'll help you formulate your response here.
You are the new media director for the Deadtree Gazette, a 100k circulation newspaper in Deadtree, Okla., with a good website. It earns about $2.5m a year in revenue and is profitable. You have an average of 30k monthly unique users (about 30% of your print audience). A few key points and statistics:
- Overall, your site does a great job of catering to a newspaper audience.
- In recent months, you’re starting to stagnate. Audience and revenue growth – which had been growing at a 20-30% rate -- have leveled off.
- Your readers tend to be a bit older than the rest of your market (47-years-old vs. market average of 35)
- 70% of your online readers are regular newspaper readers, 20% are from outside the market, 10% live in market but don’t read the newspaper.
- You need to find ways to expand your audience to non-newspaper readers and to find a way to reach younger audience members.
- Your top three traffic areas on your site are obits, local news and classifieds. You have some breaking news, but in general, your site updates each night when the paper is finished and then updates 3-5 times during the day as major events happen.
- You own the domain Deadtree.com, but currently, it just points to your newspaper site: DeadtreeGazette.com.
- Your main online advertisers are auto dealers, real estate agents and employers (job postings).
As you survey the market, there are several potential media and non-media sites that you could try to partner with. Here are the candidates:
- WDED-TV, the No. 1 station in the market. It has a phenomenal weather operation, including Doppler radar. Tornadoes are a constant threat in your town, and weather is an important issue. The station often does an outstanding job with breaking news and often interrupts its programming to inform viewers about key stories. WDED has a website that isn’t profitable and doesn’t drive much traffic (fewer than 5k uniques per month). It’s really just a promotional vehicle for the station. Most of the ad avails are filled with promotions for FOX TV shows. They’re not putting much news up there and aren’t putting video online. Its newscast viewers tend to be an average age of 45, but it’s a Fox affiliate and its prime time program is much younger at an average age of 29. Your market research shows that 50% of people who watch the 10 p.m. news also subscribe to your paper.
- The Deadtree Metro. This is an alternative publication in the market that focuses heavily on entertainment. It’s a free distribution publication that circulates about 50k copies each week. Readership is young, with a 28-year-old average, and the publication is very popular at Deadtree University, which has about 20k students. It features great entertainment calendars and has a left-leaning political slant and lots of columnists. The website is relatively strong but its one dimensional. It gets about 25k unique visits per month, with the overwhelming majority of them going to an online events calendar that is deemed to be the most comprehensive in the market. You are told the site is profitable but don’t know how much money it’s making. Most of the ads on it are from bars and music venues.
- GoDeadtree.com. This is an upstart website that has gained popularity quickly. It was started by a pair of college students at Deadwood University and it’s trying to aggregate content from throughout Deadwood to be the definitive portal for the city. It features headlines from the Metro and the Gazette via RSS feed, several irreverent bloggers and it offers free classifieds. It’s profitable, but at this stage that means it's generating enough money to provide its founders with free beer. You don’t have demographic or traffic info on this site, but anecdotal evidence leads you to believe it’s starting to gain momentum. The ads on the site tend to be Google contextual ads.
Your assignment:
Tell us what you’d do to try to expand your revenue and audience at the Deadtree Gazette. Take time looking over the options. You are welcome to consider other alternatives that might not be listed above. Don’t be afraid to be creative. Post your proposal as a comment to this blog entry. The proposal should be short. Three paragraphs, tops. You don’t need to fill in all the details. Just float a proposal and quickly state why you believe this is what senior management should do. I want you to spend most of your time thinking about what you'd do, not drafting a detailed plan of how you would do it.
Posted by Bob Benz at 03:30 PM | Comments (15)
September 05, 2005
Week 1 lecture: Journalism in Crisis
Here's a link to the lecture for week 1, Journalism in Crisis.Posted by Bob Benz at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)