Media09 Wrap Up p2 - Engagement, Discovery through search, Disseminate

Understand your clients

Caroline Little of Guardian News & Media themed her talk around global trends and tips on keeping your audience. In 2009:

• Knowing that the web can transform your business is not enough
• Expectations of readers go beyond just the content: it’s about context, employing different ways to engage and reach different audiences. It’s also about enabling readers to analyse and understand ramifications of the story for their own purposes

To succeed the focus points should be:

• Looking at the best ways to tell a story, which will vary depending on your audience
• Database journalism (highly relevant!!): allowing readers to unlock rich info through searchability and organization (eg by topic)
• Reader engagement: Participation in the conversation and enabling readers to distribute (or curate!) your content elsewhere

This quote stuck in my mind: Fear of failure is debilertating. Getting it right the first time is probably wishful thinking, taking the attitude of refining your engagement model after it’s rolled out is key to winning and retaining readers.

Invest in online to grow your core product: iPlayer

To reinventing the old with the new – Nic Newman’s presentation was a sign of great speakers to come. He spoke about how BBC’s core product of news on paper was overturned in 2008 when this was surpassed by online as a news source – knowing their services was at risk, BBC developed iPlayer which provides free-to-air TV online, to capitalize on this trend. This is a smart strategy – BBC is cutting out the middleman and bring the news direct to the consumer (this is where our Australian model doesn’t agree). The results speak for themselves, between Jan and Nov 08, there were 300M videos downloaded to date, 3% of which was completed via iPhone, hinting that the new application has exceeded company expectations. With Nic viewing 2008 to be internet centric, dominated by multimedia that’s global, personal, tailored for the medium, and hence (my plug) pervasive, what tips did he have to offer?Content needs to be distinctive, or native to the medium – this compliments Caroline’s point on tailoring content to the audience:

• Embrace social community
• Make content sharable/embeddable (curation theme), reach out to audiences
  Keep it simple (it’s easy to say, but hard to do!)
• Future of TV lies with IPTV. iPlayer is a step towards this. This particular point hurts as Australia is somewhat heavily regulated with the type of content that can be accessed through this delivery type

All these learnings are directly transferable to any business. Critical to this is the ability for users to consume richer, more varied media on the Net and companies need to be in a position to identify and capture this diversity of content into their service mix.