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Understanding Your Live Audience

A Guide to Real-Time Competitor Analytics
By Scott Anderson

Understanding Your Live Audience

A Guide to Real-Time Competitor Analytics

For the older newspaperman or woman, breaking news had once been an integral part of the competitive landscape. Until, that is, the crosstown paper folded or merged with their own, victims to that other disruptive media technology television. For newspapers, the landscape was now different. As they had done with radio decades earlier, they adapted to a world that included TV competition. Content evolved to differentiate, and, over time, as newspaper competition declined and television took its share of advertising (towns and cities that once supported multiple titles now often boasted a single paper), the need for multiple editions and the constantly updated breaking news that filled them, disappeared.

Back to the Future, Sort of strange thing happened when, early in the last decade, most traditional media companies began to embrace breaking online news. Many editors, expecting resistance from reporters (who already complained of being overworked in shrinking newsrooms), were surprised to find which of the journalists actually welcomed the change.

Many managers expected young people, fresh from J-school and digital natives all, to be first in line to volunteer to step out of the courtroom to file a breaking news update or, to document the game score in real time for a growing online audience. Instead especially in newspaper newsrooms it was often the veteran reporters who were most apt to step up to this new challenge.

The papers that survived, prospered, enjoying decades of high earnings as near monopolies in publishflow.com 10

their medium. But, everyone knows where this story goes next. Along came the Internet. And, everything changed again, but not just for newspapers. t has become a truism that everyone with a computer is a potential publisher. No need for an expensive printing press or TV studio to create and disseminate content. Anyone with a notion to can be a citizen journalist. Professional journalists with a little technical savvy can get together and create a new news site without anything close to the expense of their old media competition.

Understanding Your Live Audience

Whats Old is New Again. But Different

Consumers Have Changed

ditional boundaries of city limits or state borders no longer apply.

dd to the mix audiences that are notoriously fickle when it comes to consuming online and mobile content, and you have something close to a perfect competitive storm. All this means that content companies have to fight harder to win. And, they need the competitive intelligence to do it. Some of the things they are up against: Changed Consumers. The audience has become empowered in ways barely imagined a decade ago. As a report on nielsen.com points out: The expansion of new media technologies and devices has turned the average media consumer into a new breed of media mogul who chooses when and how they enjoy their content.

The numbers are phenomenal. A survey by Netcraft shows just how rapidly the overall web is growing. [The] March 2012 website survey discovered 644,275,754 active websites, to be precise. The Internet is still growing by leaps and bounds. The March numbers were up by 31.4 million (5.1%) over last month.

For content companies trying to compete in the digital space, the rate of growth in the competitive landscape is staggering.

Tectonic shifts in culture and technology over the past decade have rapidly accelerated change in the market, says business design specialist Colin Raney in the Harvard Business Review Blog Uninhibited by high entry costs, emerging competitors have another advantage in the evolving content ecosystem geography. Or, more precisely, a lack of geography. With speed, good SEO and a strong social presence, a news site or blog anywhere in the world can own a story, even if its in your own backyard. The tra-

Eroded Market Share. Online competitors have joined traditional media, which remain the first choice among online audiences for news Long-standing news brands newspapers, network news and cable news channels account for 17 of the top 25, along with 8 online-only operations, says the stateofthemedia.org report

Reduced Brand Loyalty. Empowered consumers result in less brand stickiness as they take advantage of the broader content offering available on the web. Nearly half of all American adults, 45%, say they do not even have a favorite local news source, according to a survey by stateofthemedia.org. Instead, in the modern local news information system, different media outlets, and in many cases entire platforms, are gaining footholds for specific topic areas

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But among those online and especially younger adults, web-only sources, such as search engines and non-legacy sites, are growing. Of those online, 79 per cent said the the Internet is the first or second most important source for [local topics]. To survive in this environment, content creators need to understand the world around them in real time. As Raney points out in the Harvard Business Review Blog:

Understanding Your Live Audience

Heralds Rick Hirsch, in a report by Columbia Universitys Tow Centre for Digital Journalism.

As a result, business strategy today is less about conceiving and executing a brilliant master plan and more about shaping an organization that can quickly launch and learn from smart innovations. Or, as media mogul Rupert Murdoch more bluntly, but succinctly, puts it: The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.

ven as competition grows exponentially and a chaotic future comes hurtling toward them, the ability of media managers and content executives to track and monitor competition has remained a mostly constrained and manual process, rooted in the past of a limited and, mostly local, competitive landscape. One of the great hidden costs in the modern newsroom is the time and effort spent trying to understand what the competition is doing physically launching sites, waiting for pages to load and trying to decipher what new content has been posted. Data on the competitive landscape is missing, and it is important for both editorial development and for ad sales, declares the Miami

Better Data Needed, Now

Intelligent Editorial Crowdsourcing

Even an impressive set of competitor bookmarks is only going to get you so far. There are so many sites out there and so many new ones emerging all the time that effectively monitoring them the old-fashioned way is next to impossible without an army of people with nothing else to do. Even then, speed will be an issue. If they are going to be fast enough to beat the slow, content managers and executives need tools that will allow them to monitor the competitive landscape in real-time, giving them the information they concisely on a dashboard they can view on their computer or their mobile devices.

n short, editors, producers, content managers and executives need to be able to, in real-time, source their competition the way that digital journalists have learned to source the crowd.

Combine this competitive data resource with metrics on whats trending on your own site and across the web and a real-time view of social media and you have a powerful analytical engine that gives you advantage in the marketplace.

A mediaroom could use intelligent editorial crowdsourcing to take advantage of its competitors speed and dexterity and turn it to its own advantage. Aggregating and sorting vast numbers competitor content decisions on a single dashboard would provide content managers a constantly updated, instant view of the competitive landscape around the clock, allowing them to modify their own content plans in to win in the real-time digital marketplace.

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Understanding Your Live Audience Using Data to Understand when to Compete and when not to he North American visit of William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, created a media frenzy across North America. Normally, an event like this would be a goldmine for vancouversun.com, a news site that recognizes no geographical boundaries, often dominating search with content that originates a continent or more away. But, as Deputy Managing Editor Paul Bucci explains, live competitor data convinced senior content management that dedicating resources to trying to own the Royal Visit would not be the best investment of time and energy. We could see that [The Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail] were changing their websites between 11 and 15 minutes a piece there was a real website war going on, says Bucci, and so, we asked ourselves, when the two largest websites in Canada are duking it, how do we deal with our own resources? That helps us understand what the most influential websites in the country are thinking about and what they are doing. It also helps us tailor our own decisions do we want to get into the royal game and try to dominate it from here or, do we do something different? In this case, live competitor data convinced vancouversun.com to do something different and not to invest resources where the analysis showed they had very little chance to win. strengths and weaknesses. The ability to benchmark content against a wide-range of competitors allows content managers and executives to truly understand what their organizations are good at and where they need to improve across both the short and long terms. G Identify market opportunities. A thorough understanding of the real-time competitive landscape can help identify gaps and help content managers and publishflow.com 40
GAssess

Following the editorial decisions from thousands of website homepages and category-level pages in real time, in one place, would provide a constant stream of competitive data that could be used to: G Develop a live understanding of competitor behavior. Understanding what competitors think is important, not just this minute, but over time will allow content managers to gain predictive insight into their priorities and an understanding of their content vocabulary.

Understanding Your Live Audience executives modify their own plans to editorial crowdsourcing to gain an instant and take advantage of perceived opportunimeaningful understanding of what is happening ties. across an immense range of sources G Determine where to invest resources. Publishflow also lets you to see competitive data in context with whats happening on your And, just as importantly, where not to. site, a wide range of social media as well as Quickly determine where you can win what topics are trending overall on the Web. and where you are better off standing Publishflows live competitor trending provides down to save wasted time and money. an industry-leading, customizable, mobile dash(See Royal Visit Case Study.) board that allows you to: 1. Gain Instant competitor intelligence- folThe ability to monitor, assess and react to comlow all significant competitor moves petitor data in real time allows modern media2. Monitor more competitors - track hunrooms to compete effectively in an increasing dreds of global media brands complex marketplace. As Raney says: 3. Reduce costs immediately - average time savings of 2 hours per day for clients Today, the brands that set the pace are the 4. View live headline changes- headline ones that build a deep understanding of the change monitoring on competitor homepages needs, desires, and motivations of their cusand category pages. tomersand then engage their customers in 5. Time-on-page tracking - keep a count of authentic, two-way conversations. Investing in how long stories remain in certain zones on deep consumer insight and designing your organization to connect with customers in more competitor sites. 6. Live headline streams - live streams of all meaningful, relevant ways always earn you an competitor headline changes. advantage over your rivals. 7. One click to view stories - click to read or view competitor stories or videos. How Publishflow Can Help 8. Email sign up and alerts - headline change email alerts to desktop or mobile devices igital content organizations are facing an unprecedented wave of competiMedia organizations that use publishflow gain tion from an ever-growing number of online and mobile sources. Keeping track of the real-time competitive advantage, improve effectiveness and reduce costs. competitive landscape has never been more difTo arrange a free 30 day evaluation of publishficult. Yet doing so in an effective, real-time fashion offers publishers immense advantages in flow, please call: 1.866.390.5446 (ext.710) terms of competitive intelligence. or, email: With publishflow, content executives, editors, sales@publishflow.com or, tweet: @kontexto. web producers and analysts can use intelligent

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Understanding Your Live Audience

About publishflow publishflow is a real time media analytics service for digital media publishers. The service provides digital executives, content specialists and advertising sales teams with real time content performance and business performance data to help optimize their content creation choices and improve their advertising effectiveness. publishflow is available on desktop, mobile and tablet devices. For more information visit www.publishflow.com.

About Scott Anderson Scott Anderson is a digital media executive and consultant with more than 15 years of relevant experience as Senior Vice-President of Digital Content Strategy for Postmedia Network Inc, Managing Director of canada.com, Senior VicePresident, Content at Canwest Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of the Ottawa Citizen. Reach him at scottkeiranderson@gmail.com

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