The document provides guidance on creating effective online content, emphasizing the importance of understanding audiences, analyzing competition, planning sites both internally and for external users, testing usability, and analyzing user data to ensure content is reaching the intended targets. It also encourages questioning conventional approaches and integrating social media and community input into content development.

1. Creating Effective Content
Mark Comerford
http://www.retaggr.com/page/markmedia
Created with help from my digital network where many of the better ideas
came from: thanks

2. • Conventional Wisdom
• It is not your friend
– Its conventional
– Is it wise?
• Question everything you do

3. Creating Effective Content
• Its not just what you say
• its also
– how you say it
• When someone decides to share their thoughts and
ideas in a transparent manner, they become a teacher
to those who are observing. Social technology - such as
Twitter, blogs, Facebook - opens the door to sharing the
process of learning, not only the final product.
– When you say it
– Who you say it with/to/for/at

4. Creating Effective Content
Define your user base
• Here there are two categories:
– Your target audiences {want/need}
– your actual audiences {have}
[see “crunch the numbers” below].
• There will in all probability be a number of
differing audiences particularly within your
target audiences. This will involve segmenting
and day parting

5. Creating Effective Content
Analyze the market
Who are the competition?
• Here it is important to understand that the
competition is not another news organization.
It is anyone who produces the kind of content
you wish to spread. This could mean everything
from government agencies to NGO:s to
individual and community blogs and microblogs.
• What do you bring to the area that is not
already there?
• Can you be an aggregator?

6. Creating Effective Content
segmenting
• Segmenting is the process of dividing the market into areas based
on collaborators (used to be customers/clients)characteristics and
needs.
• The main activity segmenting consists of four sub activities. These
are:
– 1. determining who the actual and potential groups are
– 2. identifying segments
– 3. analyzing the intensity of competitors in the market
– 4. selecting the attractive segments.

7. Creating Effective Content
• day parting
• the practice of dividing the day into several
parts, during each of which a different type of
content appropriate for that time is aired.
Content is most often geared toward a
particular demographic, and what the target
audience typically engages in at that time.

8. Creating Effective Content
Map their media situation
• In this case you are particularly interested in the
levels of access to technology.
• Again there are two categories:
– Their present level of access
– their planned levels.
• You need to plan for the foreseeable future
• “Media situation” should be a broad term
encompassing not only Internet access but also
mp3 players, cell phone penetration etc.

9. Creating Effective Content
Map their media situation
• How do they use it?
– Hard data on media usage in your target
audiences
– Report on the developments of media
technologies as a democracy and human rights
issue. ITC issues will have a huge impact on the
political development in your areas and must not
be left to the technocrats.

10. Creating Effective Content
Plan your site
• There will be two levels to this.
• Internal
• External

11. Creating Effective Content
Plan your site
• Internal
– work flow issues
• the relative weight of different media in the publishing
process
• When is video/sound/slide show/graphics/text appropriate
• and who decides?
– Routines
• how to spread information internally
• publishing policies
• user-driven content
• digital collection of material, video/TV, sound/radio,
databases, archiving etc.

12. Creating Effective Content
Plan your site
– Advertising issues need to be looked at
• What is effective commercial content?
• Should you have any? What are the ideological pros
and cons? Where is the sustainability?
• Who are your strategic partners?
• How do you integrate the commercial and the
editorial?
• packages over all media types, geographic targeting etc.

13. Creating Effective Content

14. Creating Effective Content
Plan your site
• Have a taxonomy!!
– Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification.
• This allows for search and delivery across
platforms
• Database driven journalism and the interactive mash-ups this
allows are becoming vital.

15. Creating Effective Content

16. Creating Effective Content

17. Creating Effective Content
Plan
• External
• what the consumer sees and gets.
– This is where you need to gear your site to the technical levels
of your audiences. A more (technically) sophisticated audience
will want some advanced applications (photo shows,
illustrations, podcasts, blogs etc), whereas a less (technically)
sophisticated audience will possibly find these extremely
annoying.
– Differing platforms demand different design.
• Mobile delivery and interactivity vital components (see
taxonomy)
• Judging the correct levels is an ongoing task and as levels of
access and sophistication rise the site will have to be
tweaked to adapt.

18. Creating Effective Content
Plan
• A number of policy and legal issues such as copyright, payment,
libel etc. need to be resolved during this process.
• Ethics
– Should reporters have work and private accounts on Twitter and other
social media services?
– How do you deal with user information in a public/private sphere? (think
ripping images and quotes from facebook etc)
• Moderation of interactive sites:
– Terms of use (must incl. branded Flickr and YouTube groups
etc )
– Creative Commons Licensing
(Liverpool Daily Post Flickr Group as an example)
– Trusted users

19. Creating Effective Content
Plan
• Innovate
• Imitate
• Replicate
• Do not duplicate
– Use existing services like You Tube, Flickr, Facebook etc.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
• Remember its not what you do- its how you do it

20. Creating Effective Content
Usability
• Style book. Have one!
– Cutting edge technology tends to annoy most
users except early adopters (nerds). These can be
a very useful group in establishing the services in
certain areas (cool factor) but remember your
core audience(s).
– It may also be a good idea to stress that the
pecking order is journalism/story building first,
fancy technology last.

21. Creating Effective Content
Test it!!!
• Get some ordinary users in and see if they can
navigate it.
• If something is absolutely clear to the designer
– (“Only a moron could miss this”)
• but gives users a problem – ditch it! (and the
designers if they moan too much about it).
• Every new addition should be user tested. The
damage a non-functioning product can do is
huge.
• Testing is an iterative process. Every change
needs to be tested against your user base

22. Creating Effective Content
Crunch the numbers
• Every organization with a web site has a huge database of information on its users.
– Where they come from and what search terms they used if they found you in
a search engine
– what they look at
– how long they spend on each piece of information
– what sort of bandwidth they have
– what sort of computers they have
– what web browsers they use
– where they go when they leave you.
– And more…
• This information must be used to see if your target audiences are actually the
audiences you reach and to see if you are reaching audiences you did not know
about.
• A service like Google Analytics can also be invaluable and often your organization
will have an account – but you wont know. So find out!
• Statistical information of this type is an editorial tool.

24. Creating Effective Content
Crunch the numbers
• Do you who holds the data in
the org outside of editorial for
hits etc... ?

25. Creating Effective Content
• For later discussion
– How is social media and story building instead of story telling
changing what we see as effective content?
– What does it actually mean – to build stories?
– How can we really build stories with our communities?
– What does this mean for news values? Do we know what
news is? What a story is?
– How do we know when a story is finished?
– How does this change the ideology and self image of
journalism?