Here is a comprehensive white paper on improving the user experience for online media sites from Sarah Meyer at Attivio. It offers this quote near the beginning:
“2009 PREDICTION(S): Five out of every 10 magazines and newspapers will go out of business, scale down their frequency or move entirely to the Web. This will not just be survival of the fittest, rather survival of the most willing and able to adapt to the changing media paradigm, and throw all of the old rules out the window.” - Andy Cohn, VP and group publisher, Fader Media
I have seen the same predictions for a number of sources so be warned that if you are a media company you need to get your web site in order to survive. This paper offers some excellent suggestions. Some apply to blogs, as well. In this era of user involvement, they rightly point out that you need both compelling content and an engaging user experience. They break their suggestions into three categories: focus on readers’ goals in the way you present content, address advertisers’ expectations, and optimize operations around innovation and cost control.
First, the readers view is covered. Sarah writes that most media company sites have a static design of site, low relevancy of search results, few services for building online communities, and limited access to historical content. As someone who frequently goes to media sites to track down stories I would agree with all these points.
Sarah then writes that advertisers are looking for significant page views to expose their ads, detailed reporting, ability to deliver ads to their specifically targeted audiences, and finally proof that you can offer something more compelling than the many alternative channels they have.
Operations need to be able to meet the needs of readers and advertisers in a cost effective and rapid manner. The paper goes on to offer suggestions for how to do this. These include adding opportunities for readers to contribute and explore (e.g., interactive charts that allow readers to change factors and see how those changes might deliver different results). Other suggestions include (in Sarah’s words):
“Aggregating content dynamically to meet reader and community interests.
Allowing more user-generated content that’s easier to read and interact with than a long list of user comments that are appended to a story.
Incorporating all relevant information in the content, opening up information resources – including all historical content – for content producers and readers. This will also provide incentive for syndication of your content.
Automatically generating links to relevant articles as new content is added to your site.
Replacing the simple search box with a more contextual exploration interface that iteratively helps readers find what they want, suggesting matches as they type. This ensures faster results and avoids the lost feeling users get when they have wandered through a series of pages without getting what they want.“
There is much more as the paper gets into specifics on how you can use technology to support these goals. However, Sarah also points out that is not simply technology. In addition to changes to your website, you need to look for enhancements to the way your staff works. This type of web site requires greater engagement by staff, as well as readers. Not all of the interactivity can be handled by software. This certainly applies to all the monitoring, analysis, adjustments, and responses. Excited engagement needs to occur on both sides of the site. It can be contagious. Getting the internal troops engaged can sometimes be the harder part for company sites, as well as company blogs.
I have written about Attivio before and they can provide the technology side to this equation (see Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access). Be sure to also create a set of policies, practices, and governance for the people side. I recommend taking a look at the paper. It goes beyond simply pushing Attivio to offer general and useful suggestions.
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