Losing serendipitous readers at the paywall

Losing serendipitous readers at the paywall

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NiemanLab had an interesting piece today on how the Times of London is attempting to attract people to stories despite the stories being stuck behind a paywall. A developer created an HTML template that an editor can use to send to the paper’s reporters and ask them to retweet the link to the story.

Got that? To increase generational reach — that is, how far an RT goes — we’re going to email our staff and tell them to retweet. And we’ve made it frictionless for them to do it.

Of course, anyone who clicks on the RT is going to run into … wait for it … the stupid paywall. What purpose does advertising a story serve if people can’t get to it?

It’s something I’ve never understood about the ‘everything is behind the paywall all the time’ concept. If you want to attract readers, give free samples.  Limit the number of free samples — 10 a month seems to be the magic number — and if people think you’re worth something, they’ll buy the full product.

Here’s The Times’ Ben Whitelaw:

Owning an story can be hard on social media when you operate a subscription model…We thought about how we could change this and realised that our best weapon was our journalists, each with their own network of followers and fans. But we were asking a lot to expect them to keep track of stories breaking on social media (especially when on deadline) so we knew we needed a way of making it easy for them…

[Developer Alex Muller] then created an HTML template to display a single tweet inside an email, and used Twitter’s Web Intents to add links to simplify the process for journalists and others to retweet — one click in the email, and then one confirmation click on twitter.com to complete the action…

The result of using ‘The retweeter’ is that our big stories reach more people. For example, The Sunday Times Insight team had a big story on lobbying in Westminster which was retweeted by 30 people, most of whom were Sunday Times staff. Twitter analytics showed us that this tweet had reach three times greater than our usual tweets.

There are two issues: 1. The problem is misidentified (word isn’t getting out vs. people aren’t able to access it). 2. How does 30 RTs count as a victory? And the number we don’t know is the important one: How many clicks did we see from non-subscribers who followed this path:

Viewed Tweet –> Hit paywall –> Paid for access

Journalists vs. bloggers – defining the undefinable

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The NSA records issue has brought forth some interesting characterizations — and they have nothing to do with the government’s behavior.

Jay Rosen points out that the New York Times referred to Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story, as “a blogger,” rather than as a columnist. Rosen’s hypothesis: The Times is perpetuating the “Bloggers are not equal to Established Journalists from Established Outlets” theory. In this case, it would appear not to be true.

And maybe, just maybe, we should be rethinking what a journalist is. It’s probably someone who practices journalism. And now we go down the rabbit hole of “What is journalism?” with its “I can’t explain it but I know it when I see it” corollary. For the sake of argument, let’s consider a journalist “Someone who does original research that has news value and then publishes it.” The size of the publication outlet shouldn’t define whether someone is a journalist in this day and age.

So it has to come down to original research — or original reporting.

When I ran a database company that provided address and contact data on folks to the media (based on aggregated public records), I had clients at most of the top-25 circulation newspapers and at least one station in every top-20 TV market. It was easy to determine that, say, KGO-TV in San Francisco or an NPR show was a journalistic outlet under that definition. The gray area came when opinion bloggers applied for access to the database.

There are more fact-finding bloggers out there now, more folks who do original reporting, than there were in 2008. At that time, many of the bloggers (and these are the ones the Times seems to think all bloggers are) regurgitated big-outlet media stories and commented on them.

In one month, I received applications from three of these type of bloggers: one from a publication that tracked the abuses in the Catholic Church, one from a newsletter that tracked Wall Street movements and one from a columnist from the Huffington Post.

Google searches didn’t reveal any kind of original reporting for any of the three. So I sent a kindly worded note asking for a resume and three examples of originally reported work. I never heard back from any of them.

And this happened over and over.

So I have some experience with opinion writers and aggregators trying to call themselves journalists — and some experience in calling BS on it.

Glenn Greenwald, at least in this case, practiced journalism. He did original reporting on a topic with news value (read: relevancy, timeliness, novelty, etc.)

The power of a map with words

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Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish published a map originally published in the most recent issue of Psychology Today. They dubbed it “America’s Saddest Map.” It showed the results of a scholarly serious-minded and smart cartoonist’s analysis of the Craigslist “missed connections” sections.

Among other things the original analysis highlighted were the states where the most men seeking women ads were and vice versa. The map had each state’s highest-occurring keyword in it. The Dish chose to focus on this:

“Now look at the South – more people spy love at Wal-Mart than anywhere else, from Florida all the way to New Mexico. And that thread runs all the way through deep red America. Only Oklahoma cites the state fair as a mixer. The rest see each other under the merciless lighting of the giant super-store. This is how we fall in love or lust, where we flirt and look back: when we’re shopping. The big cities – like NYC and DC – showcase the random human interaction on the subway or metro. The Northwest has it all going on on buses.”

Yes, it’s another example of the coastal “Let’s crap on the Walmart belt” attitude. But there’s more interesting stuff here. Let’s take a look at those Walmart numbers.

If you look at the median income of all 50 states (the most recent three-year averages), you’ll see the first Walmart/Craigslist state doesn’t show up until all the way down at 32 — Texas, with a median income of $49, 195. In fact, 12 of the bottom 24 states in median income had Walmart as their highest-occurring missed connections word.

What does that say? It says there’s a concentration in the South, where wages are lower, of course. But Ohio’s in there and so are Idaho and Montana. Are there depressed wages there? Certainly in Ohio, where good paying manufacturing jobs have been lost and in Idaho and Montana, as well, where there is no base for good paying manufacturing jobs.

But it says something else. If you look at the states, you’ll see that with a couple  of exceptions — Ohio, Texas, Florida, Missouri — those 12 states are places with one significant metropolitan area and widely dispersed populations. Even looking at exceptions, you’ll see deeply rural states. Missouri has two major metro areas, but has a fairly dispersed population outside those areas; Texas has 2 1/2 major metros (Austin being the half) and a widely dispersed population, and it’s very similar to Florida and Ohio.

Ever been to a rural Walmart on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon? It’s the gathering place, a central place for the community. It’s the gossip center and a point of social concentration. In areas with dispersed populations, the  Walmart is placed in a regional commerce center of a few thousand — the biggest area around. And it draws for miles.

So when we get past the snark, the missed connection word study gives us a pretty good view of how people gather. Just like the highest occurring words in New York and D.C. and Washington and Oregon (all of which are dominated by single metropolitan areas with comprehensive public transportation systems) are about modes of transit.

Usability lessons from spring breaking

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The good folks at web-usage tracker Crazy Egg asked five conversion experts to critique a PPC ad and the Universal Orlando landing page it led to. It was a massacre. There were comments about bait-and-switch techniques, bad colors, questionable layout choices.

All of them were true. But what Brian Massey at the Custom Creation Equation wrote resonates far deeper than just this page when it comes to web design and frequently made mistakes:

Test showing, not saying. This is an “EXCLUSIVE!” offer, but it doesn’t say to whom it is exclusive. Is it exclusive to previous visitors? Is it exclusive to people who have computers?

Try, “For our previous guests ONLY: A chance to come back and get your 4th night free.” If you can fly on a broom, show me. Don’t tell me.

Let’s get a copywriter in here. Is JK Rowling available? For example, what is the best thing about “Breakfast at the Three Broomsticks™”? It’s “one per person.” That’s as persuasive as lawyers get.

Get Voldemort in to do the layout. He doesn’t beat around the bush. Drop the navigation, the side bar, the trip planning video, and at least one of the three logo treatments on the page.

Get your call to action right. Is it “Book Your Trip?” or “Search?”

How would Hermoine translate “Need Assistance?” She would read it as “Are you lame?” Try “Call one of our knowledgeable Guest Consultants.”

Overall, this page is like Professor Snape: You can’t prove he’s bad, but you just can’t trust him.”

Setting aside the Harry Potter theme (the landing page was for a Harry Potter special), there are some excellent points here:

“Test showing, not saying” is brilliant and is a natural extension of the old editor saying “Show, don’t tell.”  Just saying something is “exclusive” or “low-fat” isn’t as effective a strategy as saying “for Harry Potter fans only” or “has 1/3 the calories of regular ranch dressing.”

Massey’s point about the graphic treatment on the page — it’s buried in a Voldemort reference — is dead-on. The page is busy and ugly and … overwhelming. It reeks of design-by-committee and a visit from the Good Idea Fairy.

The bottom line on this page is that there is too much there in there. And  it makes it harder for the consumer to make a sales decision than it should be .

Full article is here.

Exploiting the gray areas in a narrative

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‘And so it is written.’

It’s a fairly common sentiment, especially when we talk about the Internet Age. If it’s written down now, it can be found.

But what about if it hasn’t been written yet? What about, as so often happens, we have an intermediate ending and a vague notion of the beginning?  There’s that moment where the middle of the story hasn’t yet been written, and that may be the best place to influence the story’s path.

Think of the first 24 hours of reporting of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20, 2010. We have a vague beginning (explosion) and an intermediate end (11 missing workers) which gives us a well-defined narrative arc.

But the middle part of the story was unwritten. There was nothing substantive about inspections, nothing about potential BP failings. There was not even any official acknowledgement  that there was an oil spill until April 24 and the first aerial photos of a significant slick aren’t taken until April 25.

Without lasting damages like an oil spill, this is a time where a company can use a gray area to bolster its own image.

What could BP have done?

— Told anyone who would listen that they would make good on any damages.
— Told anyone who would listen that the families of those 11 lost in the explosion and the 15 who were injured would never have to work again and that college for all their children was paid for.
— Loudly proclaimed that they were putting the best oil-rig firefighters in the world on retainer.

Some of this flies in the face of a traditional crisis communication approach in which you never take responsibility for an act until it’s either proven or painfully obvious that you’re responsible. But this is precisely the moment that you can take sincere actions that take advantage of the lack of information in the middle of the arc. That’s what lets you control the newscycle just a little bit longer and begin developing mitigating factors with the public.

Taxonomy: Big words, big results

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You have a pot of information in front of you. A dataset, maybe. Or, more likely, a lot of data, not really in sets. You have to make sense out of it in order to make something out of it.

This isn’t just about data for databases (in fact, if you have a database, you already have basic groupings, by association). It can be in crisis management when you have multiple inputs of data coming in and have to organize them to be able to see the field. It might be quantitative. It might be qualitative. No matter what, you have to figure out how to organize it.

Which brings us to the most awesome thing about data: taxonomies. Strictly speaking, it’s how data is associated (red shirts vs. blue shirts, or shirts vs. pants; in a crisis management context, it might be “what I know as fact vs. what’s in Internet rumors,” or “medical reports vs. police reports”). When you give a group of datums — thus, data — a taxonomy, you give it a common home.

One of the problems of creating taxonomies, though, is creating rules. A database is only as good as its data structure and its contents. Lots of attention is paid to data quality within the cells of a database, but less is paid to the total organization of the dataset. If the structure isn’t well-defined and the rules aren’t thought out, then the data gets messy and it’s hard to get a consistent input.

Here’s an example of rules done right. It comes from Fringe Focus, a Chicago graphic artist who managed to sell 3,400 posters of all the ACME products from the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons in a Kickstarter campaign. In a post to his backers, he discussed his rules:

Second: Product choices

  • Any object that officially said ACME on it. Obviously.

  • Any product whose box, wrapping, or label said ACME on it.

  • Any product that appeared on an invoice, shipping manifest, slip of paper etc. that said ACME on it.

  • Labeled products that clearly arrived with other ACME orders. It can be assumed these were from ACME as well, even if their box did not read ACME in the name.

  • Any product with a named title on its box or label. Coyote ordered 100% of his items from ACME, so if it had an official name or box I just included it as an ACME item.

  • All books. The books accompanied or preceded ACME purchases, thus are assumed to be published by ACME as well.

Fringe Focus — real name, Rob Loutoka — does a fabulous job here of explaining what the parameters were. With clearly defined rules, input is simplified, streamlined and stands a much better chance of being clean.

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