I was just reviewing my notes from the Media Bistro conference I attended at the beginning of June and came across what Businessweek.com's John Byrne called "The Pieces of the Puzzle" for news media online.
1. Aggregation.
2. Community building through user generated content and crowdsourcing.
3. Databases.
4. Create 5-6 robust vertical brands.
I agree completely.
In his presentation, Byrne mentioned that there is very little evidence of the level of deep and meaningful engagement on mainstream media sites that exists on pure plays because for the most part, we're still trying to have a one-way conversation with users.
That's why I love what they are doing at Businessweek around UGC and crowdsourcing. 5Q4 and What's Your Story Idea are such simple ways to create user engagement. It shows how there can have community on a site without it threatening its credibility or the value of the brand.
They are also looking at new ways of measuring that engagement as time spent on site is not reliable. Instead, they measure the ratio between how many stories and posts they put out to their audience to what the audience gives back in the form of content.
The ratio was 16:1 when they first started measuring. Now it's 34:1. Their goal: 100:1.
Smart, smart, smart.
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