I also dug up a glossary from that class that might be of interest.

Tracking Wilma: On The Road With Bill Ward

Tampa Tribune reporter Bill Ward is traveling the Tamiami Trail and the eclectic beach communities of Florida's southwest coast. In this exclusive TBO.com report, follow Ward's journey as he captures the sights and sounds through his online journal, photographs, 360-degree panoramas and video postcards.

My employer is in town for the Communication Career Connection tomorrow at OU and I had lunch with him today. Like any lunch with Tim, he was bursting with Google news - he's headed out Tuesday to California for the Google Zeigeist conference and in the meantime has been beta testing a very exciting new feature from Adsense.

Read more technical info at Google.

This has incredible potential for sites like Athensi and Speakeasy. Major localization of advertising on both fronts - Adwords and Adsense. Can't wait to see this feature rolled out.

Here are a few lighlights:

• On the main page, notice how they're keeping prominent how far away the storm is and when it's expected to hit. Also, you'll notice a little image of Wilma Flintstone in the URL window of your browser if you're using Firefox.
• Submit your photos of funny hurricane signs. Nice way to let the community contribute and lighten things up a bit.
• Video galleries. Notice how high the production value is on these videos. Very professional.
• Look around the site yourself. If you find something cool (on the Naples site or any of the sites covering Wilma), post it in the comments so we can all take a look.

Please post links to your second multimedia assignment in the comments below. Remember: The first assignment was to be personal or first person. This one should be more of a "traditional" news story, though in a multimedia format.

Also, a note about this week. I hope Jay Small's lecture last week was enlightening. This week, Rich Lacy, our director of online marketing, will be talking about Guerrilla Marketing Tactics. This is a great chance for you to pick Rich's mind about how to market your websites.

Sorry I've been scarce lately. It's budget season for us and I'm spending a lot of time on the road. I was on the West Coast last week and am in Texas all this week. But I'm still checking e-mail, so if you need something or have questions, just give a shout.

http://smallinitiatives.com/present/j415.html

Looking forward to our discussion!

On the syllabus, the scheduled subject for discussion is Guerrilla Marketing, and we'll definitely hit on that. But I also want to touch on other product development and marketing concepts that may help you: identifying target audience segments, setting your content "filters" right, why less-and-lighter trump more-and-heavier.

Nuggets to get you thinking on these concepts:

The 10 Faces of Innovation

Less as a competitive advantage

Saving Newspapers I: Focus on customer experience

QuickMBA.com: Market Segmentation

(Logistics for Tuesday: When it's time to start, you all can call me at my office number, 865-560-3546. Looking forward to it!)

1. Go to Google AdWords and AdSense and read how these two programs work.

2. After reading, go to Google and search for one of the following terms:

Athens Ohio
Ohio University
OU Bobcats
Athens Ohio Apartments

Who has the top sponsored links in the results of the term you chose? Based on what you’re seeing, do you see an opportunity to buy a campaign that might drive traffic? What kind of site would use this campaign?

3. Bonus points: Set up an AdWord campaign for keywords for your publication. (You can do this for as little as $6. Go ahead and give it a try. It’s a great way to see how this works.)

4. Bonus points II: Set up an AdSense program for your site.

5. Post your answers to No. 2 to the blog. If you do either of the bonus items, post to the blog and let us know how it goes and what you learn.

207.203.254.110

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

Long tail phenomenon

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 ...

• August traffic: high level
• Audience snapshot: 2005
• Monthly user info

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:

• AthensI
• The Post
• Speakeasy

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 ...

An excerpt: "Want to put multimedia content on the Web? You’ll quickly find out that the free Flash player and the Flash authoring application top the list of solutions at most online news organizations."