How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational

By: Steve Outing "News is a conversation."

That phrase -- I'm not absolutely certain who coined it, but I'm pretty sure it originated with Jeff Jarvis a few years ago -- drives much of media thinking these days. It's certainly a mantra for me.

What it means, of course, is that the news story when completed no longer ends with publication. When a journalist's work lands on a webpage, it's often (or at least should be) the start of an ongoing conversation -- between journalist and readers, and between readers themselves. The Internet enables the conversation, and 21st-Century news consumers are becoming used to the idea that their voices now can be spread far and wide -- just like the voices of professional journalists.

"News is a conversation" also applies to what many of us call "citizen journalism" or "participatory media." That is, non-journalists -- the public -- can easily get their own thoughts and reporting published, often by the old-media brands that now are inviting anyone to join the public conversation under their brand names.

So, let's assume, for the sake of this column, that you want to truly live the "news is a conversation" ethic. You want your news organization's online operations to be more participatory, and for your audience to engage in the conversation much more than they do now.

In this column, we'll examine techniques for getting your audience to speak up more, to contribute more of their thoughts and knowledge to the public conversation, and to enter the mindset that the media they consume is not just about absorbing what's published for their benefit, but also for being the venue for news, information and opinion that people produce themselves.

Step 1: Encourage more and better comments

Let's start with the most obvious step: Encouraging readers of staff-produced news articles and columns to post their thoughts as comments that become attached to the professional content.

(A good many news websites haven't even got this right yet. Indeed, even the website that publishes this column doesn't yet support reader comments to this column. But today's online news consumers are used to talking back and asking questions, so let them. It's well overdue if you're not letting people comment freely on what you publish.)

I don't know about you, but for my own writing I love to get reader comments. If I write something that gets no reaction in the user comments section, I feel as though I've probably not done a good job. If I write a piece that gets 10 comments -- and nine of them are critical of what I've said -- that still feels like success. I'd rather be criticized than ignored. I've gotten people thinking and a conversation going. Yeah!

Here are a few techniques that can increase the amount of reader feedback you get:

Specifically ask for user comments in the story. Get your writers in the habit of posing questions at the end of a story, or asking readers to share their experiences or knowledge about the topic. This can be interjected in the middle of an article or column, too, with a reference and/or link to the Comments feature at the bottom of the text. "Conversational media" expert Amy Gahran says that when she posts a question that directly solicits feedback, her work gets more comments. "I guess people need that nudge," she says.

Ask for feedback in the print edition, too. Don't restrict the conversational encouragement to the website. Encourage your writers to include calls for comments and feedback in their print-edition stories (assuming you have a print edition). Tell the dead-tree readers that they can voice their opinions on the news website -- and give them a specific URL (website address) that takes them straight to a comment form or forum page.

Allow anonymous comments, but encourage people to register first; screen anonymous comments. This recommendation no doubt will be controversial, but I think that requirements to register in order to leave an article comment discourage the conversation. (Here's a case study from Topix.net that explains why I think that.) If you require readers of an article to register before leaving a comment, you'll lose a significant amount of reader feedback. I suggest that you urge people to register, but don't prevent them from posting a comment if they don't want to. Let comments from registered users go to the webpage automatically, but screen anonymous comments before they're published. This will prevent the crazy forum free-for-all that has been seen with news sites that allow anonymous comments.

Create a "subscribe" feature for each story. This technique involves allowing readers to receive e-mail alerts whenever someone adds a comment to a story. If the story really is meant as a conversation and doesn't end with publication, then readers who are truly interested in the topic will want to know what others have to say. This allows them to subscribe to the follow-up "conversation."

Auto-subscribe readers who leave comments to follow-up comments. If a reader leaves a comment on a story, then they should be alerted whenever someone else comes along and leaves another comment (which can include the original author responding). I suggest setting up a system where the default when leaving a comment is to receive follow-up e-mail notifications of later comment submissions. If the commenter doesn't want that, he/she can turn off this feature.

Enhance your comment feature to allow photos, video. Most "Leave a Comment" features on websites restrict the reader feedback to text. But go beyond that. Allow commenters to attach photos or even videos. Depending on the topic, this can be a powerful incentive for people to leave comments. Say your garden writer has done a story about patio gardening; the writer can urge readers to not only comment on the article but also include a photo of their patio gardens.

Add photos of registered readers to comments, and link to their profile pages. Another nice technique is to make the person who leaves a comment less anonymous. Assuming that a registered user is leaving a comment on an article, attach a thumbnail image of the person pulled from his/her user profile. And, of course, link back to that person's profile page, which can include not only whatever personal information the reader chooses to disclose publicly, but also include links to other comments or submissions made to your website previously.

The power of user profiles

This gets us into the territory of media websites getting into the social networking space. What I mean is that a website invites its users to create profiles (when they register with the site) and enter information about themselves -- including a photo or photos. The registered users should be able to control the content of their profiles, making visible only that information that they're willing to share publicly.

With a personal profile attached to a registered website user's account, when that person leaves a comment on an article (or submits some original content to be published on the site), the user-profile information can be seen by others who read the person's comments. And the profile should have a record of all of the person's submissions to the website, whether comments about articles or other content, or original content submissions.

Such a system supports the notion of a website's users interacting with each other. Through user comments, for example, website users may discover other people who share their interests. Just as young people make connections on sites like MySpace and Facebook, user profiles and social networking can facilitate conversation between a media site's users.

An example of this approach applied to a newspaper website is Bakersfield.com, the website of the Bakersfield Californian. Dan Pacheco, senior manager for digital products, and his online team have experimented with user profiles and social networking for the year or so on Bakotopia, a youth-oriented online community and free-classifieds website serving Bakersfield. In the last week, the technology to support this was moved over to Bakersfield.com, which is the main news website published by the Californian.

The idea, Pacheco says, is to create a more interactive online community, where members are participating in a two-way conversation more so than in the past. Users create their own persona (which may be their own name, or a nickname/screen name) and interact on the website with the paper's journalists and other online users. Users also are being encouraged to create their own blogs which are hosted on Bakersfield.com.

Pacheco expects that over time, people will begin to realize that to stand out in this online community, they need to get a personal profile on the site -- and thus truly become an active part of the community.

Encouraging citizen media

The other major element in embracing the "news is a conversation" way of publishing is so-called "citizen journalism" or "citJ." Many news publishers, of course, are inviting members of their communities to use their websites to publish community news and blogs, and express opinions -- all under the news company's brand.

This treads on an area I've covered in the past, so I'll first refer you to an extensive article I wrote for the website of the Poynter Institute last year, when I worked there: "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism." Many of the ideas I floated in that article still apply.

Beyond the ideas mentioned in that Poynter essay, what else can news operations do to encourage more submissions under the name of "citizen journalism"? Here are just a few:

Hit the streets (and the auditoriums). Some citJ practitioners think that the key to drumming up consumer-generated news is to simply get out in the community and educate people about citJ. That's the approach being taken by Backfence.com, an independent, venture capital-backed network of citJ websites serving communities surrounding metro areas.

Mark Loundy, who was hired recently to head up Backfence's San Francisco Bay Area websites (first serving Palo Alto, then expanding to other Bay Area communities), says that the principal means of encouraging people to submit their micro-local news is direct, in-person outreach by the staff to community groups. A new community marketing manager will be spending lots of time giving presentations -- to chambers of commerce, parent-teacher organizations, etc. -- explaining what Backfence is about and why it's a good thing for people to use the company's sites to share news and information that's not covered by conventional local news media.

"We're doing this the old-fashioned way," Loundy says, "with shoe leather."

Offer enticements. That in-person approach may work when you have a small geographic area to work with, but it's unrealistic if your citizen-media initiative is topic-focused. Then you're looking at primarily an online and print campaign to encourage user-generated content.

An idea I'm fond of is offering incentives and prizes. One approach is simply to pay for submissions. It's as though your citizen contributors are freelancers, and you're paying them. Mind, you don't have to pay much. A fee for a report submitted by a citizen user might be only, say, $5. But some citJ-oriented sites have discovered that even a small fee can be a powerful psychological incentive for non-journalists to contribute stories and photographs. Korea's Ohmynews.com is the classic example of this phenomenon.

Obviously, for such an approach, there needs to be some editing involved. Citizen submissions that earn the small fee must be vetted by editors; you must make it clear that you pay only for competent contributions.

With my own company, which is developing a network of citizen media-based websites covering various adventure and participant sports (like mountain biking, our first), we're running best-content contests to try to encourage not only more submissions, but also quality submissions from users. If someone wants to win a prize, then obviously they need to submit for consideration a good article, photo or video. Ergo, content on the site is of decent quality (in theory).

The jury's still out on our experiment, but early signs are positive. Obviously, the notion of contests doesn't fit every topic. While it works for something like biking, as in my case, contests are probably less appropriate if a site is, say, trying to encourage citizen submissions of opinion essays about a ballot issue. But for sports and other less "serious" topics, I see nothing wrong with using contests to promote citizen-generated content.

Don't fret over technology

One last point to consider in encouraging citizen news submissions is not to get hung up on technology. Bakersfield.com's Pacheco, who has built some sophisticated technology to promote online community interaction and collecting citizen content (and his company is now selling it to other publishers), says that for a news company just starting to change its culture and encourage citizen participation, simple techniques can be used before sophisticated technology needs to be put in place.

Just start experimenting in simple ways, advises Pacheco. "Start to build a culture" around encouraging citizen content and participation, and focus on the human side of getting your staff to break out of the old we-publish-and-you-read box. That can mean something as simple as having reporters in their own writing begin to encourage and solicit citizen submissions, but accepting the user-generated content via e-mail instead of a more sophisticated system.

"The human side of this is way more difficult than the technology side," he says.

And while that will get you started in the right direction when it comes to citizen content, when you are ready to focus on the technology, do make it easy for people to share content with you in multiple ways. E-mail submissions are fine. So are simple-to-use Web forms. But mobile devices and phones also are becoming more sophisticated, and more and more people are becoming comfortable with using them for more than voice calls. So for the future, figure out how to make it easy for them to share their news and information with your news organization via their phones.

Convinced yet?

Are you still not convinced that your news organization should make a big fuss and try to attract user content? I'll close by pointing out that increasingly, citizen content is proving to be as valuable at times as that produced by professional journalists. Obviously that was the case in last year's London subway terrorist bombings, with photos and videos coming from people who experienced the blasts and aftermath underground. You should be encouraging this more and more.

But also, we increasingly see on the Web stories by professional journalists that attract extensive comment threads after publication. At times, these active comment threads extend and expand the original story. With the user commentary and additional information, the original story would be less complete and less compelling. Dont' discount citizen power.