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By admin, January 31, 2010 12:16 pm

Perhaps this first post should be titled “The Future of Professional Media” because we are not sure there is a real distinction between the challenges faced by traditional publishers and the broader category of traditional media.  If you are in broadcast or publishing you are probably looking to monetize content across channels and you are likely facing the same challenges.  Likewise, you probably enjoy similar, often hidden, advantages.  We hope we can help you build a winning strategy, demystify the technology and bring focus to your digital channel efforts.

At the end of the day – and there is a lot to talk about and consider in building your own digital channel strategy – it comes down to how well you curate great stories that inform or entertain – or both.  Traditional media companies have been experts at this in print and on-air for many decades.  This capability needs to be exploited in digital channels.   You probably already know that you can’t think about content the same way you think about it in print or on-air.  Unfortunately your strategies to respond are probably foiled by the panic that goes with eroding audiences, shifts in advertiser spending and technology that isn’t really helping.

At storycurator.com, we see the threats to traditional media posed by developments in the digital space – but we are pulling hard for traditional media.  We aren’t journalists or media producers, but we work closely with them.  We don’t have a product (yet), but we understand the technology they use now, and the technology they need to adopt to compete for audience and revenue on the web.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

We think media companies need to pay attention to a number of challenges posed by emerging technologies and the companies that wield them.  To boil it down, the challenges can be summarized as:

The Driving Forces We Can’t Change

• changes in patterns of media consumption,
• ease of entry for upstarts,
• dominance of web search engine(s)
• ubiquity of social media touchpoints

The first two challenges are going to be hard to fight.  The good news is that the technologies that are driving new consumption patterns and ease of entry for competitors can be leveraged to equal (or better) effect by traditional media.  More on that later.

Search engines (read: Google) and social media, on the other hand, need to be embraced in a different way.  Traditional media needs to find a way to draft in behind what the leading search engines and social media players are doing.   Web search and social media will remain the dominant entry points to the web.  Portals, in our opinion, are playing a declining role as a meaningful entry point but, like any professional publishing organization – they can recover.  Developments like hyper-local applications may emerge as significant new entry points, but they have a long way to go before they become a driving force that ought to affect your strategy.

A user’s entry point to the web is critical and media companies need to care about them.  In our experience, most don’t think much about the user’s end-to-end experience.  More on this in a later post.

The purpose of this blog – and storycurator.com in general – is to pass along all of the things we are learning about how traditional media needs to shift their perspective – and their tool sets – to compete in the digital world.

Discussions on the future of publishing and traditional media are certainly not new topics. They are well covered on many sites. We feel storycurator.com brings a unique perspective by boiling it down to the four driving forces of change, the hidden advantages enjoyed by traditional media organizations and the technologies and tools that will help exploit those advantages.

Media’s (Usually Hidden) Advantages

• your sales force
• your skills in story-telling and curating content for topic exploration

We believe that curating great stories across channels is at the core of any media company’s future success.  Google is an algorithm – they will never be good at story curation that drives engaging forms of topic exploration for their users.  While storycurator.com only has the means to produce content across one channel – the web – we will strive to be the best curators around this topic that we can be.  We hope you can help.  Please provide your thoughts and links to other related resources.

We hope that professional media organizations enjoy a prosperous future and that they can continue to bring credible lifestyle advice, thoughtful entertainment, and, most importantly, responsible, properly funded journalism through digital channels.

A final note: while we celebrate the power of the web to put publishing tools in the hands of all people, we worry about the effects of fragmenting audiences and its impact on the viability of news organizations.  We firmly believe that profitable and independent news organizations need to exist to organize, direct and fund the activities of professional journalists.  Democracy and freedom of informed choice depends on it.  While storycurator.com does not presume to comment on this fundamental concern – we believe it is a concern and we hope you do too.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 7:59 pm

We have all worked with web analytics tools at one time or another to understand how well the site is performing.  Google Analytics,  Omniture, WebTrends – all of them are great tools – but we are not convinced we use them as well as we could.

The media properties that we have been associated with tend to look at total site traffic in aggregate over long periods or, if they ever get into the details, they tend to look at the site section by section.  Often, they will even look at the performance of an individual article.  In fact, it is at the most granular level that analytics become the most helpful and drive the most insight.  Sadly, we have rarely seen much insight drawn from these numbers.

We propose that media companies need to turn web analytics on its ear.  They need to take a bit of a different cut on the data to make it really meaningful.  Also, no one tool can currently deliver the type of data that good curators will need to manage their portfolio of topics.  We haven’t seen a perfect combination of tools but, looking across sources, here is what we should measure:

• leading indicators of interest in a topic: even before the first article gets written, use data to help identify what we should be writing about.  Demand Media, arguably THE biggest media success story of the last few years, bases their business on this practice.
• story type and investment profile: patterns in data related to a story or topic can suggest a certain trajectory or story type; e.g. evergreen with growth potential vs explosive but short-lived types.  Different story types deserve different levels of investment in time and resources and, likely, create different monetization opportunities.
• performance of story elements and multi-variate tests: determine what story elements work the best; this will likely differ by the type of story.  Use A/B or multi-variate testing if you have access to the required tools.  This will tell you if you are assembling your stories in a compelling and usable way.
• depth of visit/engagement in the topic: at a glance, measure how many pages deep your users go in a specific story.  Sure, topics can be linked and the lines between stories can be blurred, but do your best as this is a critical measure.  While depth of visit on the overall site is an important traditional measure, engagement in a single story more directly correlates to the performance of contextual ad units – which will become  a critical measure in its own right.
• contextual ad unit performance: while not all ads can be measured this way, those with a clear call to action and a conversion objective ought to be measured within each individual story to see if the rich context of a well-curated story makes a difference.  This is a critical selling point of story curation.  For this to be meaningful, the story topic must have some contextual link to the ad itself, i.e. the ad should relate to the story.  We expect that some types of stories will perform better than others, but, overall, good curation should yield the kind of ad unit performance numbers that you will want to take to media buyers and advertisers.

These new categories of measurement, plus all of the other traditional analytics data, are crucial to effective curation.  In fact, it goes beyond just helping tune the story, it also helps prove the model.  Supportive data across these areas of measurement is ultimately critical to proving the benefits of story curation – including the monetization of properly curated content.

As far as publishing goes, gone are the days of post it, forget it, move on.

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By admin, January 31, 2010 2:11 pm

Curating for Topic Exploitation

Google and other search engines, including emerging semantic search, do topic exploitation very well.  You give the search engine a topic keyword or phrase, and it will do its best to show you relevant articles for that match the topic.  For curators, exploiting a topic according to a keyword is important, but Google will always do it better.  We think good curation considers exploitation, but techniques for enabling exploration are more important.

Curating for Topic Exploration

A great curator has a sense of how a topic ought to be explored.  That is the art in the science of publishing to the digital channel.  Google will never do this very well.  Exploration can branch in many directions, depending on the user, and providing useful paths for exploration is not easy but, if done well, your users won’t go back to Google right away and your all important engagement metrics will improve dramatically.  Advertisers and sponsors will learn to appreciate topic engagement because (and depending on the topic) it provides a great context for promoting brands, products and everything else that advertisers care about.  Ironically, the best example of curating for exploration is Wikipedia – a web property that can’t even be monetized.