Posts tagged engagement
Talking Engagement
- FJP: Hearst Magazines recently hired Troy Young as its President of Digital Media. Below is a segment from an Ad Age Q&A with him on audience engagement. The full interview is here: http://goo.gl/pmhk7
- Ad Age: You mentioned that part of your job is changing the way Hearst builds relationships with consumers online. In that case, what does your hiring mean for readers?
- Troy Young: We'll be very analytical about what they're reacting to and what's engaging them. Like everyone else in the industry, we'll be looking for new measurements of engagement that go beyond uniques and pageviews. If you're looking for a measurement of relationship quality, a unique and a pageview doesn't describe that quality of the reader. That will be a big focus: recalibrating what success means.
- Ad Age: What do you think this new measure of success looks like?
- Troy Young: It's going to be a constant measure: return visits, time on page, interactions, social interactions, commenting, sharing. I believe that the signals that readers are participating in the content are hugely important. The model of "I write, you read" is evolving to write, read, inspire, connect.
TEDx Poynter Livestream
The Poynter Institute is running a TEDx event today with a livestream available online. We missed the morning events but this afternoon’s run as follows:
Session 2: Curation
- 1:05 p.m. “In Praise of the Humble, Misunderstood Hashtag” — Sree Sreenivasan
- 1:30 p.m. “The Challenging Transition from Journalism to Entrepreneurship” — Burt Herman
- 1:55 p.m. “Real-time Curation in Storytelling” — Michelle Royal
Session 3: Engagement
- 2:30 p.m. “@TampaBayTraffic: Connecting a Community Around a Shared Complaint” — Meredyth Censullo
- 2:55 p.m. “Do I Really Need to Learn How to Program?” — Lisa Williams
- 3:20 p.m. “Addicted to the Like: Ratings and Readership are the Old Metrics” — Elissa Nauful
The livestream is here. If following on Twitter, use the #tedxpoynter hash tag.
The Newsonomics of Gamification —and Civilization
Game dynamics isn’t about time-wasting. Au contraire: it’s about a seductive, powerful drawing-in of human habit. It’s about changing those habits, leading us to do new things (over and over again). This being America, those habits increasingly have a lot to do with selling stuff, with commerce. On the Internet, they increasingly help companies chase greater engagement with customers, be they buyers, readers, or both.
- Ken Doctor on combining journalism and game dynamics via Nieman Lab
No Prime Time for the Smart Phone
In a study of global smart phone use, Zokem, an analytics firm, discovers that User engagement patterns remain relatively consistent throughout the day with a brief afternoon spike when calls are being made.
However, before 8am and after 6pm, Users tend to to get more playful, spending more time with Web browsing, social networking and entertainment apps, and less time with voice and messaging apps.
The Lifespan of Online Content is Nasty, Brutish and Short
In my other life I pushed this out today.
Words by me, video interview by my brother Peter.
There isn’t just a gender disparity in the tech industry, there’s tremendous disparity in who reads tech publications as well. Analytics company Royal Pingdom examined top technology blogs and found that their readership skews way male.
Via ReadWriteWeb:
Of the popular blogs that Royal Pingdom examined, only Mashable comes anywhere close to a 50-50 split between male and female visitors. Sites like Techmeme and Slashdot have closer to 90% male visitors. About 72% of ReadWriteWeb’s visitors, according to Royal Pingdom’s stats, are male.
Journo Grants and Awards
Via J-Lab:
The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism reward news and information ideas that significantly enhance opportunities for digital engagement. The awards honor novel efforts that actively involve people in public issues, supply entry points that invite their participation, sit their imagination, and meet their information needs in creative ways. Deadline: June 6, 2011.
The awards run from $6,000 to $10,000 and focus community and engagement.
How often do media companies post on Facebook?
We have the Economist at almost 16 times a day. Fox News is down at about one.
Via Social Bakers, How Often Should You Post on Your Facebook Page.
What's Your Like Worth?
The New Yorker has an idea. It wants to increase its Facebook fandom. Here’s their strategy: become a fan and they’ll give you access Jonathan Franzen‘s “Farther Away,” which currently sites behind a paywall.
“Our goal with this isn’t just to increase our fans,” says Alexa Cassanos, a spokeswoman for The New Yorker tells Mashable. “We want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level.”
We want a tote bag. Then again, we’re easy that way.
Managing Social Communities
One of the enviable things about working for Google is the 20% policy the company gives its engineers. It basically says they should devote part of each week to work on what they’re most passionate about.
While we don’t see the “failure” produced during that time, we do know that successes such as Gmail, Google News and AdSense were developed with it.
Does this translate to the newsroom?
While not quite the same, Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of Norway’s VG Multimedia, told those at this weekend’s International Symposium on Online Journalism that he expects his journalists to spend 10 percent of their time engaging readers.
The move is smart. Instead of relying on a dedicated community manager or a few self-motivaters to engage across social networks, VG bakes the activity into its overall culture. While not solely responsible for the results, the fact remains that 87% of Norwegians visited the site in February.
These readers also help improve the paper’s quality.
VG has tools that let readers have at typos. In 2010, 17,000 were corrected.
No news on what the site’s copyeditors had to say about that.
Hi there,
Thanks so much for your feedback. It’s very much appreciated.
In the conversation I created using quotes from Robert Niles’ and Kevin Anderson’s articles they were more or less referring to building great conversations around the content journalists are producing. In particular, they were focussing on comment sections.
For example, if your style is take no prisoners, firebomb opinion writing, your comments are going to devolve into flamewares. Similarly, if you don’t occasionally prod commenters with an encouragement stick, conversations will go astray. Simply, conversations need some coordination and leadership.
Unfortunately, while many publications now employ “community managers,” the role is often passive moderation of inappropriate content. Less often do the journalists themselves participate extensively in the conversations. The reasons are many, chief among them is that they have other work to do like reporting their next story.
While this is the particulars of what they wrote about, I think it extends to other places conversations take place, eg., Twitter and Facebook.
While I don’t think organizations — as a generality — are doing that great of a job engaging across those networks, I do think a lot of individual journalists are doing a wonderful job, the most prominent among them probably being Nicholas Kristof and the communities he’s developed on Facebook, Twitter and his blog.
I spoke with GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram recently. He also does a great job engaging his audience and does so primarily — though not exclusively — through Twitter. When I asked why there, his answer was rather simple: that’s where the conversation is actually taking place.
Hope these thoughts somewhat answer your question. We look forward to hearing from you and others again. — Michael
Neuroscience and The News
How do we interact and engage with news and information that’s shared with us over social networks?
Carl Marci, CEO of the media research firm Innerscope discusses a study he conducted with CNN with Facebook shares and likes.
Run Time: 3:19.
This interview was conducted by ScribeMedia.org at last week’s Advertising Research Foundation re:Think conference in New York City.
Journalists Must Lead Their Online Communities
- Robert: [W]riting in any interactive environment is an act of leadership. Your words, your tone and your style not only inform your audience, they provide a model - an example - for those in the community who will write for that community, as well. And your silence creates a vacuum of leadership that others may fill.
- Kevin: It’s really interesting the different responses I hear when talking about some high profile engagement-based comment sites. People in the media laud them as visionary, ground-breaking and industry leading. When I speak to members of the public, they call the same sites toxic, offensive and aggressive. I often joke that a lot of publishers engagement strategy is really an enragement strategy. Find the hot button issues of the day and push those buttons until they bleed.
- Robert: Expecting readers to know how to react in an a new online forum is like expecting students to pass a final exam on the first day of classes, or a group of new hires to run a factory after clocking in on their first shift. And readers know that. Most of them, in my experience, look for some clues from the people already active in a community before jumping into their conversation.
- Kevin: If you’ve ever been to a good party of dinner, the host brings people into the discussion. The host introduces new topics, and he or she makes sure that a number of voices and points of view are heard. Whenever I’m out at such a dinner, I come away feeling invigorated and better informed. Without journalists playing this role in our news communities, we’re not only abdicating responsibilities for the conversation on our sites, we’re missing a huge opportunity.
- Robert: And that skill is as important within journalism in the 21st century as reporting, writing and editing have been in the past.
- FJP: What is this? Robert Niles wrote an article at the Online Journalism Review about how journalists musts become online community leaders at their publications (http://bit.ly/gyaY3K). Kevin Anderson replied at Strange Attractor and added anecdotes of his own (http://bit.ly/iavP0k). We mashed it together as a conversation.
Via The Next Web:
…Nearly half of all Twitter users rarely (if ever) check the material that is posted from others. While the first blush of these numbers would lead us to believe that we’re dealing with a rash of spammers, it’s likely that a fair bit of this percentage is also due to people who have accounts that are combined with Twitter via other services.
Recommendation for publishers: remember to engage & doubly remember that there’s a while Internet outside of Twitter.
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