Archive - April, 2011

NetworkedBlogs – Leaving Me Flat as a Reader

April 14, 2011 in Digital with 2 Comments

Image representing NetworkedBlogs as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

Recently, I noticed a number of my friends publishing their blogs to Facebook using NetworkedBlogs.  I like trying out as many new technologies as I can, and I have just started writing this blog, so thought I’d give it a try.  So far, it has been somewhat disappointing.  It does automate the process of posting my blog to Facebook for me which is a welcome tool, but it does not seem to bring me new readers.  As a user, it also has not really helped me to discover new blogs I might like.

NetworkedBlogs is one of two applications developed by a company called Ninua,  one of Dave McClure‘s 500 Startups companies.  They appear to have a team of five, made up of four engineers and a designer.  As a young company who are not yet heavily funded by Venture Capital, they are enjoying phenomenal success and have added value in connection Bloggers and FB.  Most new businesses only dream of having over 1.7m active monthly users in an early phase of their development and before making big outlays on marketing.

Attaining the same scale would not be easy for a competitor, but I would like to see the small team working on the NetworkedBlogs application focus on making it a great experience for users to lock in their advantage.  I can see a number of points where they intend to do something, but just haven’t gotten to it:  their website, addition of twitter functionality on their syndication options, making their discovery algorithm work well.  Last week saw the launch of an Android reader application which draws from the more than 700k blogs already syndicating via the NetworkedBlogs platform.  Clearly their focus is to become a must for all bloggers to syndicate content.

If end users find something that works better for them on the discovery side, NetworkedBlogs could be relegated to another line in the checklist for a blogger.

Here’s what I think NetworkedBlogs should do about it:

  1. Worry about the consumer perspective first.  If you get that right, bloggers will use and love the platform anyway.
  2. Make discovery easy.  The allure of being able to see my favourite blog posts within Facebook is to consume great content without having to visit additional sites.  This is VERY hard.  It’s fundamentally the same as the once promised allure of My Yahoo!, iGoogle, and many others.  I want to know what’s out there, but I don’t want to have to work for it.  Time is money as the old adage goes.
  3. Improve discovery by using more than quantity to prioritise the users’ blog feed.  Consider how much weight to assign to a single vote for content, perhaps scaled by number of posts seen. (1/1 post for the week should indicate a higher preference for content than 1/100 posts for the week.  I voted once for a high frequency blog and no longer see content from other publishers on my first page of NetworkedBlogs in FB).
  4. Improve discovery by suggesting something fresh that the user may not have otherwise discovered. Base this on their reading, clicking and voting habits.
  5. Improve discovery by inserting messaging into the users news feed to remind them of the NetworkedBlogs page so the application is used regularly.
  6. Focus all of your resources on solving #1 by addressing #2.  Don’t get distracted by anything else.

I love the concept of NetworkedBlogs.  I would love to make NetworkedBlogs work for me beyond a distribution platform for my existing Facebook friends and fans.  By addressing how NetworkedBlogs works for consumers, many of the existing traffic scams will fall away, the SEO benefits for bloggers will come, and success from making another form of content easily available within Facebook will be found.

Good luck!

Could Decreased Visits be a Good Result for NYTimes.com?

April 13, 2011 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

The New York Times building in New York, NY ac...

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve seen several tweets today promoting the Hitwise blog highlighting the post-paywall traffic drop for the New York Times.  Clearly so many media watchers, particularly publishers evaluating similar strategies, are eagerly awaiting any news from the latest high-profile paywall.  I read the news of a 15% decline with a little feeling of “wow, great news for New York Times”.  There are immediately a few questions to interpret this (good!) result:

1. How well monetised is the remaining traffic?

2. Have consumers had time to figure out what is the best option for them?

3.  What were the expectations?  Surely some decline was expected.

First, a quick analysis suggests that NYTimes.com would need to convert less than 1% of its 48m monthly unique visitors to a subscription to offset advertising revenues attributable to a 15% decline in visits.  This assumes subscribers continue paying for less than 4 weeks after the 99c promo expires.  It is safe to say that a small proportion of subscribers will never cancel and many will pay for longer than the first month.  This suggests to me that there is likely to be a net positive result from raising the paywall.

There are a number of ways for people to continue reading NYTimes.com without paying, with search and shared links being the biggest two extensions of the 20 pages per month.  No doubt there are plenty of staff monitoring this and considering where there are loopholes which need closing versus ones that are effective sampling opportunities.  It is impossible to tell how well monetised these users will become, just as it is as yet unknown whether NYTimes itself will change its Twitter or Facebook strategies to more finely target and convert incoming casual traffic.

Second, there are so many complexities the the subscription model itself that many people will be trying to figure out what is the best option for them.  Most of us have no idea how much we use any particular utility within our daily lives.  Pages viewed on a particular website will be no exception.  A reasonable number will elect to subscribe to the print paper and take their digital content as part of that.  Regular readers may not yet have all the gadgets that those of us in media and technology consider essential.  I’ve used the ‘what would my mom do’ test on this one – not a New Yorker, she’s become a Sunday home delivery subscriber for $3.75 per week which includes full digital access on all platforms.  She is a devoted Times reader online and will continue to be a large source of recommendation for me, with or without a subscription.  More insight to people’s choices will become clear as their 99c/week promotional offer expires, as people determine whether they get enough from their 20 pages plus links sent to them from other sources, and once there is a few months of data to really understand.

Third, and finally, I really suspect a 15% decline in visits must be within expectations.  Despite commenting that they did not expect to usage to decline much given the import of their heavy users who were expected to take up a digital subscription, there would certainly be a provision within the business model for this initiative that allows for a decline.  The critical question is what’s happening below the surface and how is it impacting advertisers?  If NYTimes.com can still fulfil their advertising demand and maintain strong yields, the first 12 days of traffic performance could exceed the business plan.  The subscribers taking up home delivery subscriptions still accomplishes the same goal – readers are paying for content – and probably looks like upside in the overall plan to substitute growing digital subscription revenues for shrinking yields on ad revenues (separate post on that later).  In the long run, I see NYT with a sustainable digital journalism business whose revenue streams begin to reflect historical print papers – subscription/newsstand plus advertising/classifieds.

No matter what your hopes are for the success of the New York Times’ paywall, this result should have produced a little flutter of excitement.  I, for one, strongly support paid content and rewarding those who invest in quality journalism and protect our access to information and freedom of speech. I’ve lived abroad for a long time, but those first amendment rights stay with me forever.

My Epiphany on Work Life Balance

April 10, 2011 in Media, Women with 6 Comments

This year’s National Conference on Media Reform happened last weekend in Boston, MA.  So I awoke Sunday morning in Melbourne just in time to follow the twitter stream of many of the keynote speakers.  I was excited to hear about preservation of freedom of speech and free press; ensuring innovation and modernization to protect quality, fact based journalism; and the way technology is changing access to information.  Some of the points about the changing role of a journalist made me really think about this change in a wider context, and how it applies to my life.

Here are a couple of the tweets that triggered my thoughts:

I’ve recently made a significant change in lifestyle in order to do two things:

1.  fulfill a personal ambition to start a company and

2.  spend more time with my three young children and be a bigger part of their daily life.

I’ve read countless posts about the commitment an entrepreneur makes to getting their business going.  Late nights, early mornings, living and breathing the business.  I know what people say about passion driving you and the business not feeling like work.  I know all of that is true, because I am already feeling it deeply.  But, I also realise that many people would dismiss my two goals as mutually exclusive.  So I’m going to share why I think they are not, and why these three tweets I saw this weekend reinforced that for me.

First, I agree with @esills (quoting @jackiehai) – I don’t think I’ve ever had a 9-5 job.  I certainly don’t have one right now.  But I also don’t believe that the future is about the 9-5 job – for journalists nor for anyone in the media industry.  I am assuming that is what @micahuetricht was suggesting when asking the question.  Everywhere that people are awake, news is being made and entertainment is happening.  All of us in the media business know that key events can happen at any time of day or night.

In his tweet, @taylordobbs articulates the change which points to my answer.  The structures, traditions and ways of doing things that I was brought up with (I’m a Gen X-er) are simply not within the expectations of the generations who follow.  Today’s young adults have had technology in their lives as part of their status quo.  They trade off time online with time in front of the television and in most cases simply do both together.

Some things are still the same across generations.  We continue as individuals to fulfill multiple roles in life:  student, professional, parent, partner, child, sibling, friend, volunteer.  We are still physiologically wired to require downtime, sleep, nutrition, and exercise in addition to mental stimulation.  And we require the same emotional connections and support to make life complete.

What has all this taught me about achieving a work-life balance?

The challenge might not actually be strictly about balancing work and the rest of life.  The challenge is actually about doing all the things that you want to do.  Young people make different trade-offs because they are completely open to different ways of doing things.  In many cases they are experiencing each part of life for the first time so they go with what makes sense to them rather than what someone has said is ‘supposed’ to happen.  When I re-frame the problem, I find the youthful creativity to find a solution.  Up until very recently, I had professional goals which required me to follow the traditional paradigm of working from morning until evening and fitting all the other elements of my life around this schedule.  This really was a result of a priority I, myself, placed on those professional goals.

In my current situation, I take primary responsibility for the care of my children.  I have started this blog.  I am building a business.  I have some responsibilities to my family overseas, to a charity for which I’m a Trustee, and to myself.  None of these things would I want to give up.  What I have learned, though, is that I can intertwine these obligations in a way that maximises my effective use of time.  I now have a very flexible day that makes equivalent demands on the multitasking part of my brain as my corporate leadership role did.  I get vastly more done than I ever did in the rigidity of a corporate environment, but also spend nearly 5 hours a day with my three kids.

How?

  • I consume my media on the go. My smartphone is my constant companion so I rarely have email hanging over my head and I’m generally up to date with major news that I care about.
  • When I sit down to ‘work’ I get enough done to enable me to think through the next step while doing other things. As I’m making snack, dinner, prepping the school bags, I’m thinking about what I have to do next and more importantly, turning over those big questions of strategy and how to attack the market which don’t happen confined to a desk chair in front of a computer monitor anyway.
  • I accept that my balance is going to mean work at odd times, but that also means the discipline to put it away and focus with my full attention on other things regularly. It means never skipping the workouts that provide time for rejuvenation and the reading or television which provide moments of complete relaxation.

I’ve found my mojo in a way I would not have believed possible. I learned a lot of this from the complete commitment to doing it all – fun, study, work – that I see in my many Gen Y cousins. I also remembered a lot from my Uni days where I believed everything could easily get done if there was a will.  I could survive on less sleep then and benefitted from having fewer people depending on me. But those tactics that I used then out of necessity and instinct are coming in handy.

As I’ve changed my goals, I’ve learned something about productivity that should apply even to people working the 9-5 paradigm.

Because I have very specific targets for myself to keep me on track as a sole proprietor (who is very eager to get to the point of having partners and employees), I am crystal clear on my metrics for success.  Any successful business, large or small, also has very clear measures of success.  It must be possible to do away with all of the rules in a corporate handbook and simply ask staff to achieve the outcomes with which they are tasked.  As the head of a large department, I was required to provide plenty of on the ground leadership which can’t be effectively accomplished remotely.  However, I certainly could have accomplished more in my past several roles by being given the flexibility to focus on staff meeting success criteria rather than meeting the many guidelines handed down in corporate rule books.  All organizations will need to become more target focused so that they can give thier employees clear objectives, but leave them with the freedom to achieve in the most effective way possible.

Let’s place our hope with the visionary leaders out there who are willing to push the boundaries a bit to help their people realize their optimal productivity.  It didn’t come from dressing them in a suit in the 80s.  It didn’t come from chaining them to a desk in the 00s.

What are your techniques for achieving balance for yourself or your team in this fast paced globalised world?