US headquartered Pluck, a social media platform provider, will announce today that it will provide the Sun-Times Media Group with social media and networking tools, across the newspaper groups suite of Web sites.

The Sun-Times group is in good hands with Pluck, as the company is headed by Richard Rosenblatt, the individual who was responsible for selling MySpace to NewsCorp. Nonetheless, through the Pluck relationship, Sun-Times online readers will be able to take part in discussion forums, comment on blogs, and share content, along with a plethora of other community tools

“By adding new capabilities to our site, such as reader comments, photos and blogs, we are significantly expanding interactivity with our readers,” said Catherine Lanucha, director of content for the Sun-Times News Group.

Other publishers using the Pluck platform in some fashion are Belo, Cox Newspapers, Hearst, Gannett, and the obvious NewsCorp, and this is just a sampling of their very impressive client list.

written by Beverly Crandon

The Newspaper Consortium has announced that it is appointing Michael A. Silver to the Executive Director position. The role of ED is a newly thought up one, but apparently one that the Consortium felt was needed to handle their many joint ventures.

The Newspaper Consortium consists of 30 major US newspaper companies, who up until this time have been largely known for their relationship with Yahoo! and the formation of quadrantOne.

Given the high visibility that the Consortium has garnered for itself since 2006, Silver’s role of “adding value” will be watched closely. He will have a direct reporting line into the Newspaper Consortium Board of Directors and Executive Committee and will have a strict directive to not only grow the Consortiums relationship with Yahoo!, but to develop new strategic opportunities for the group by way of digital media.

“Mike is widely respected across the broad media landscape because of his success developing and executing a wide range of innovative digital media initiatives,” said George Irish, president of Hearst Newspapers and chair of the Newspaper Consortium Board of Directors. “Mike’s energy and passion for media innovation round out his credentials to make him the perfect fit to lead the Newspaper Consortium.”

written by Beverly Crandon

The New York Times has steeped their toe in the pool of social bookmarking and I say - good for them. NYT is calling their new social application ‘Times People’ and although still in its beta stages, what you see is enough to impress.

The Times People application is posed as a Firefox add on. Once downloaded, users are able to bookmark and share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, comments on articles, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels. Navigating through the functionality is, for the most part, user-friendly and I will excuse the systems timeout during my user sesson and attribute it to some sort of ‘maintenance’ – after all, the application is still in beta mode.

The New York Times CTO, Marc Frons, describes Times People “as an example of opening up our site as a place for our engaged community of readers to convene”.  I however, see it as opening leverage doors for the publishing giant: user data analytics galore and of course ad revenue opportunities.

In addition to this release of Times People, NYT has released/embraced other forms of new media: The New York Times Polling Project to something as simple as Link Journalism.

written by Beverly Crandon

Those publishers and service managers looking for efficient ways of setting up their phone centers, while still providing premium customer service, will be interested in this report released by research firm, Ipsos for Habeas, Inc.. The firm surveyed several consumers and asked them about their preferred way of communicating with businesses. An overwhelming amount said they prefer email over any other form of communication - traditional or web.2.0.

As I say to center managers all the time, your eTeam will not only prove to be very profitable (lower cost per interaction/sale), but it will also answer the communication needs of your customers.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Communications, eCommunications, eTeam, Preferred Methods of Communications

According to the Magazine Publishers of America, consumer magazine Web sites have grown by more than three times the rate of growth of the overall U.S. Internet audience. The detail in this MPA report shows that consumer magazine sites averaged 70.7 million unique monthly visitors during the first quarter of 2008 and this represented an 11.9% increase over last year.

“Magazine brands online are getting ‘stickier’ with web audiences, as the latest data shows,” said Nina Link, President and Chief Executive Officer, Magazine Publishers of America (MPA). “Publishers are increasingly employing the latest digital innovations to broaden their reach and appeal to an audience that has a clear hunger for magazine online content and communities.”

The study also pointed out that:

• The average first quarter monthly reach for magazine Web sites in 2008 grew to 43.4%, versus 40.2% in 2007
• Magazine Web site users accounted for an average of more than 497.3 million sessions per month, during Q1′ 2008 - a 16.3% improvement over the same period last year
• Visitors to magazine Web sites spent an average of 2.3 billion minutes per month during the first quarter, resulting in a 16.7% increase versus the same period in 2007.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Magazine Web Sites, Magazine Publishers of America, Magazines, Magazines UMV, MPA

A study from Brodeur and Marketwire discusses a reporters view on social media and the results show that journalists are warming up to the idea of social media and its impact, but are still cautious to admit to the high quality of blogs and user interactive news sites.

The report surveyed journalists covering various verticals; politics, health, lifestyle, travel and technology. Journalists were asked about the influence of social media and whether the impact to news coverage was positive or negative. They were also questioned about their usage of social media and whether they visit some of the most popular sites

Some of the results:

• Over half of all reporters said social media and blogs are having a positive influence on the editorial direction of reporting
• Nearly half (47%) of all technology reporters and over one-third (38%) of political reporters said they blogged as part of their reporting
• Reporters were also overwhelmingly positive on the influence of social media and blogs on the diversity of reporting, with approximately 4 in 5 indicating a positive influence
• Social media’s impact on the quality and accuracy of reporting were two areas that journalists overall view less favorably.

Although the quality of social media is still being questioned by the majority of reporters, the results of this survey show that traditional reporters have either included social media and blogging as a part of their day to day or at least see the positive effect this source of media is having on the direction of their editorial content.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: journalists and blogs, Journalists on Social Media

Take a look at how New York Magazine incorporates mobile (content and advertising) into their product set. It’s a great idea and one that can be adopted by publishers of newspapers or niche magazines, servicing larger cities.

http://nymag.com/mobile/

New York magazine has a readership of 1.6 million per issue and it is published by New York Media Holdings, LLC.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Mobile Advertising, New York Magazine

Question-and-answer Websites have seen their audience and usage numbers more than double, when compared to the previous year.

Yahoo! Answers sticks out as the clear winner with 74% of the Q&A market share, but there are new players who are quickly growing in size: WikiAnswers, Answerbag and Askville (a beta Amazon site). Q&A sites probably wouldn’t have been as popular four years ago, but with the rising UGC participation online, people are using Q&A sites as legitimate resource tools and sources of authoritative information. I for one was impressed by the caliber of answer I received when I first tried Yahoo! Answers, just after their official launch date.

“As we see user-generated content proliferating in different flavors, this is yet another way people are interacting with social media,” said Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise.

The success of Q&A sites speaks to something we have been saying to publishers all along – create an “ask the expert” section to service your niche categories – automotive, real estate and recruitment. And unlike business models such as Yahoo! Answers or WikiAnswers, you rely on a rotation of your larger advertisers in each vertical to own the Q&A. In doing this you not only avoid the staffing costs associated with managing the product, but you also cover a few crucial areas:

Win an advertiser for life: flattery will get you everywhere. Through asking one of your advertisers to own a portion of your site for three months shows that, you not only value them as a customer, but you think they are experts in their field.

Provide more tools and resources for your readers: an Internet user’s biggest pet peeve is not being able to find or access the information when they want it. This is why navigation and site audits are so important. By providing the “ask the expert” section you give users another way – period!

Comply with information gathering and online consumer trends: if it can work for generalist Q&A sites like Yahoo! then it will definitely work for niche categories.

According to comScore, Yahoo! Answers, had monthly traffic of 25.3 million in February (up from 17.4 million in 2006) and an average time spent online per user of nine minutes per session, according to Hitwise.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: Answerbag, ask the expert sections, Askville, WikiAnswers, Yahoo! Answers

LightPole Inc, a new mobile software and services company, has finally come out of beta with their flagship product cleverly called LightPole. What makes LightPole of special interest to us is their partnerships with Yahoo! Local and Yelp.

The way LightPole works, is that mobile users can download the LightPole software to their phones and by doing so, no matter where they are in their city, they can quickly access information about restaurants, shops, Wi-Fi hotspots and pretty much any type of business in the LightPole database, aggregated from their partners.

The LightPole model is an ad supported one – so while users are sourcing information they are seeing relevant ads segmented and in alignment with what they were searching for. For the most part, the only credible partners on LightPole are Yahoo! and Yelp, but with Yahoo! working on strengthening their newspaper consortium with product offerings and services, you may soon find that some of your retail advertisers are being accessed via LightPole. A play I am sure Yahoo! has already discussed because of the revenue share model in place with LightPole.

If anything, this release tells us is that mobile advertising is coming closer and closer to a natural point of integration for publishers.

With its first public release after a year in quiet beta, LightPole’s free application looks promising. While not swimming in features, LightPole is fairly easy to use on any Java-enabled phone.

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: LightPole, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Directories, Mobile Technology, Yahoo! Local, Yelp

A white paper released by ABIresearch confirms that viewer expectations for online video is much different than what they would expect from television. Confirmed from the quality of UGV content that makes it to the top of sites such as Vidmeter, ABIresearch concludes that online video is perceived as ”free, low-resolution, snackable content,”.

This report was very worthy of blogging in this forum, because it speaks volumes for folks in the publishing business. As you will see below, the most popular video content types viewed online, either already relate to newspapers (news clips) or have the ability to easily be adapted to a publishers online business model (UGV). Moreover, the fact that the average Internet users expectation for online video content doesn’t marry that of professional film or television quality, makes entering into this realm far more affordable for newspapers - both the dailies and community weeklies alike.

Interesting Online Video Stats from ABIresearch

• 86% of those surveyed are viewing online video content
• The most popular type of content viewed online is news clips
• User Generated Video and Movie Trailers tied for second place!
• Only 5% of those surveyed said they currently pay to watch video content online
• 20% of respondents said they would be willing to watch advertisements in exchange for viewing content for free

written by Beverly Crandon \\ tags: ABIresearch, Online Video, UGV, User Generated Video