An Engaging Proposal

By: Gretchen A. Peck

Audience engagement is a term frequently bantered about in publishing-industry circles—so much so that perhaps it has become a bit diluted. Its definition comprises short-term measurements, like grabbing new eyeball attention with a website or keeping visitors on that site for an extended period of time during a single visit. It can reflect long-span goals, such as how to convert casual readers to life-long fans of the news brand.

Audience engagement has always been a goal for publishers, even during the print-centric centuries; however, the introduction of digital media and the ability to learn from behavioral data has been profound. Data presents news opportunities and new challenges.

At The Morris Publishing Group (MPG), corporate vice president of consumer revenue Jeffrey L. Hartley noted how quickly the publishing landscape changed with the advent of data—the measurement of performance and behaviors. “Newspapers, including ours, are wrapping our arms around all of the data that’s available, and learning how that data can help us make better decisions.”

With several key reports, MPG is able to monitor some key behaviors and metrics regarding digital subscriptions, including the unique stop rate and the paid stop conversion rate, according to Hartley, who wrote on the topic in an article titled, “Engagement: It’s Everyone’s Business.” And he means that: audience development should be seen from every perspective in the publishing organization.

While departments and disciplines may have once been more fragmented, operating as islands of information at times, today, there’s the need for a much more integrated organizational structure and greater cooperation.

“In the past, as a circulation director, my responsibility was to take the product, market it, sell it, to grow the customer base and to grow revenue. That was my main mission,” Hartley said. “That has totally changed. Now, everyone is a stakeholder in audience development.”

In the raw, audience-engagement data may not present an instantly compelling offering. First, publishers have to know what data is available, what can be measured, and design the systems and methodology for capturing that data. Once it’s collected, it then needs to be parsed, compared, analyzed and reported on. Then, someone has to write the story about what the data reveals with a marketing tone. And, finally, that value proposition has to be evangelized and sold.

The data publishers sought early on may have provided some general insight into how digital content was performing and how readers interacted with it. Today, there’s so much more data (beyond page views) at publishers’ disposal—richer data, too. Caroline O’Donovan, staff writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab, wrote in a column how social-share giant Upworthy was now measuring “attention minutes;” how YouTube is keenly concerned with “time watched,” and analytics software developer Chartbeat suggests looking closely at “average engaged time.”

“Data is certainly the buzz, no doubt about it,” said Honolulu Star-Advertiser vice president of circulation David Williams. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the opportunity to have so much data—so quickly and so directly. I think we’re still trying to come to terms with it.”

 

Digital Roadblocks: Why Design and Navigation Matter

Digital media has allowed for more of a dialog between publishers and readers. The importance of that, from an audience-development perspective, is noteworthy.

To truly engage audiences in digital spaces, publishers need to create an environment that’s conducive to conversation, Williams suggested. “You have to make it efficient for them to respond to content, to comment on stories, to send in photos, to help with reporting on stories, and to take videos and share them with us. Digital media has taken it to a whole new level of how our audiences interact with us.”

Williams added that the newspaper’s mobile app has been particularly popular; its audience is growing exponentially, he reported. The mobile app not only appeals to a younger reader profile, but to anyone who wants to be “in the know.” The app has been optimized for a mobile experience, and includes live weather and traffic updates, breaking news, photo galleries, a QR scanner, and a wildly popular poll question called “The Big Q.”

Williams said it’s rewarding to see people checking out the app, and recalled a recent visit to a local restaurant when the sushi chef noticed he was wearing a shirt with the newspaper’s logo: “He said, ‘I love your mobile site. When I have a break, I check it out.’ And that’s exactly what he did. When he had a break, he whipped out his phone and started thumbing through the news.”

Done right—with real-time updates, practical tools, great graphics, a simple interface and an inexpensive price point—mobile apps can become quite popular brand extensions, even beyond the newspaper’s geographic and targeted circulation reach.

“Fortunately, the cavalry has arrived in the form of mobile devices. … The effect has already been extraordinary, with many publishers showing far bigger levels of reach and intensity than on (the desktop) or print,” said Jim Chisholm, a UK-based news consultant.

“Navigation has always been the big barrier to engagement—digitally and experientially. The challenge is to replicate the serendipitous pleasure derived from a product that is basically a formatted set of surprises from which the brain subconsciously navigates a page before selecting and prioritizing. (If the) screen is limiting, you have to usually dig to find comments, leaders or op-eds, rather than just come upon them. One solution—which I now realize has been obvious for years—is to have an infinitely long home page, basically all of the content or at least the headlines in one experiential track. In fact,” Chisholm added, “many of the most engaged news media already do this. But this is only half the solution; there is still the challenge of providing the mind with an instinctive way to navigate into the depths that exist on all news sites.”

Digital publishing—to the Web or to mobile devices—isn’t exactly a mature space already. There’s a lot of trial and error with regard to how best to present information, and newspapers have made some mistakes with cluttered design, poor attention paid to navigation, annoying ad presentations, and sites and apps that simply haven’t been well-designed with the nuances of platform in mind.

“We need to make sure that the user experience and perspective is really enjoyable,” Hartley said. “And when I say user experience, I’m referring to site optimization, too. How long are pages taking to load?...You have to be able to move from page-to-page very quickly, or—based on what accepted data tells us—we’re going to bounce out a lot of people. That’s an important technology issue that enhances the reader’s experience with our content. For example, a print subscriber expects great content and great service, and if we don’t get the user experience right—like delivery of their newspaper to the requested delivery point—we risk losing a customer. The point I’m making is the user experience has to be great regardless of platform.”

 

Social Media: Necessary Evil or Deep Well of Opportunity?

Like with the newly accessible glut of data available, there’s no shortage of publishers that don’t quite yet know what to do with social-media properties. They know they need to maintain those presences and they’re studiously testing what kinds of content work best there. But the missing links in the social-media sphere are how to convert that audience to paying customers and how to calculate social-media ROI.

“We’re making progress in testing social-media-based subscription offers as part of the overall social strategy for our publications,” Hartley said. “We’ve varied the design and pricing, and continue to refine the process to maximize our opportunities for acquisition within this channel.”

Social media may often seem like a necessary evil, just more channels added to the output of information. There’s also the pesky truth that it’s difficult to work out the ROI of social media, though there are costs to staff it, the cost of technology to feed it.

Still, social media as a platform offers some compelling benefits, not the least of which is access to new audiences.

“We’re pretty fortunate in that people from all over the world are interested in Hawaii. They like to travel to Hawaii and read about it. And the locals do, as well,” Williams said. “We have 320,000 likes on our Facebook page. We were just in a meeting today talking about that audience, of which we were able to identify 30,000 who were subscribers. We think it’s definitely something that we should leverage a little bit more.”

 

Diversification: Rekindling Relationships

According to a HubSpot.com article written by Jessica Puente, audience development manager at the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise, there are three ways to attract readers to news sites: contests, polls and partnerships.

Partnerships might manifest in a number of different ways. Content could be shared; co-marketing campaigns could be win-wins. Publishers would still serve advertisers in the ways in which they always have, but those relationships, too, could be elevated to something far more collaborative in nature, like producing native advertising campaigns or live, in-person events that bring together publisher, reader, and advertiser.

While native advertising remains a controversial dilemma because lines long-ago drawn between publishing “church” and “state” are being erased, the same idea applied to production of a live event perhaps isn’t quite so distasteful.

Hosting or sponsoring live events may engage new audiences. From a marketing perspective, it’s always smart to remind people of the brand as often as possible, to be present and important to their lives. Events allow publishers to do more than merely serve the community with information, but to be a member of it in a more personal way.

Plus, publishers are perfectly positioned to be matchmakers of sorts, creating a convergence of readers, potential readers, advertisers and potential advertisers.

To do events right, they have to be relevant and smart, fun and informative—and reflect well on the newspaper’s and sponsors’ brands.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser has some experience with events—fun, lifestyle events like couponing seminars and a readers’ poll awards ceremony (The Honolulu PULSE Awards), which attracted 500 attendees in September.

Hosting or sponsoring events isn’t as much a new idea as it is a revisited idea. “A lot of this stuff isn’t new, but some of it was abandoned as we had to make some quick changes in our industry,” Williams said. “Now that we’re starting to settle down without have to make knee-jerk decisions, we can start to pursue these ideas again.”

“The bottom line is this: As we continue to diversify and look for other revenue sources, many newspaper companies are seeing events as a big player,” Hartley said. “Events can be revenue generators and audience-engagement opportunities, as well.”

And don’t count print out just yet, he added. Print subscribers are obviously a very important part of our audience.

“At MPG, we’ve created new products and enhanced current ones for both our paid and non-paid print audiences, to continue to build engagement and offer our advertisers valuable solutions to grow their business at the same time,” Hartley said. “Digital audiences are tremendously important and are a large part of every newspaper’s focus, but we need to keep that same focus, growing audience and engagement, regardless of the platform.