How to Become a Future-Ready Publisher

by building a digital supply chain of your content — and audience

But first, a few questions

#Sourcing

We have a good team

of in-house writers and

ad-hoc contributors

across the industry.

What other channels

do we use to generate

content?

#Production

Apart from the usual

articles, we produce

videos, audios, chats,

surveys and listings.

How deep is their

integration with our

mainstream content?

#Packaging

Our archive has five

years worth of stories

on every aspect of

people management.

Can readers find and

experience our content

based on their habits?

#Distribution

All our content can be

accessed on our web

and mobile sites.

What is our visibility

on our audience’s most

preferred platforms for

media consumption?

#Metrics

We generate several million pageviews a year and are

know as the top media platform in our niche.

But do we know which audience segment generates

most of these page views? Or the location? Or device?

Or time of day? What intelligence do we have?

#Monetisation

Advertising, both in print and online, is our primary

source of revenue. We also have a modest income

from corporate and individual print subscriptions.

Can we charge a premium by being innovative with our

inventory? How do we encourage digital subscribers?

What can we change to plug these gaps in our publishing? For starters, let’s pick just 10 points of action.

Segment audiences by industry and role. Then use list-based tools to track their conversations and preferences.

Look for and engage with topics or influencers with high social gravity. Include these in our editorial checklist.

Establish our lists as great resources for the industry to follow. Each list must also be developed into a good sample userbase for any content we produce in that segment.

Similarly, use Google’s keyword and trends tools to track rising searches in various segments. This will ensure that our content machine responds in time to changes in audience interest and rides these graphs to their peak.

These tools will give us a very wide pool of topics to address. How will we ensure our content throughput keeps up?

1. Build a list-ening grid #sourcing

Our team of in-house writers is finite. And they can never be experts at everything. Hence, user contributions.

Brands, industry leaders, even bloggers seek a share of voice in their niche media. But their contributions are usually one-off appearances and inconsistent over time.

Build relationship programs that connect with all types of influencers, map them to an area of expertise and then assign and retrieve regular contributions from them.

Outreach for content will also improve our speaker selection, lead generation, talent referral, even audience development.

Conversely, can we get such non-editorial activities to generate content?

2. Set up contributor programs #sourcing

The Internet Retail Expo ‘14 sessions can be accessed as trailers, full videos, slideshows, Storifys, even audience data charts. Can such event archives evolve into a paywalled and searchable knowledgebase?

Our events — we do several each month — aggregate the industry’s best around meaningful conversations. Why do they need to have a shelf life? Document every interaction as a multimedia recap.

3. Get content, data at events #sourcing

4. Structure your content #production

Create content like code — in modules.

Modules can be reused and repurposed across multiple stories. They are more adaptive across platforms or contexts, and easier to search, sort or filter.

Use natural language processing (NLP) to automatically and thoroughly bag and tag each module of content.

This structure also allows us to produce stories with multiple, distinct sources and creates possibilities for co-creation with our users — even with programs.

With structure, we can also allow users to follow specific topics, writers or stories instead of the entire site. But how will we ensure content relevance?

Once content is structured, we have room for everything from gamification and loyalty programs to engagement tracking by module type, number of modules per visit, and more.

The key is relevance. Know who and what our audience reads, the order they read it in, the platforms or devices they read it on, the time of day and location they read it at, people they share it with. Plan, produce, deliver content accordingly. Merchandise it.

In time, each user’s experience will be customised to his/her preferences. But how will we extend these insights to macro-level editorial planning?

5. Personalise #production #packaging

Audience insights, however granular, show patterns over time. Broadcasters have always used these as the basis for their channel programming.

That’s why we know that Star Movies’Fridays are comedy nights and Sunday afternoons are thriller marathons.

We need to build audience habits and push related properties that we want to be known for, based on insights gathered in sourcing and production.

Set up an editorial calendar to start building monthly themes and recurring genres. Then assign story ideas and formats to writers and contributors.

Now, do we bring the audience to the party or just go where the audience is?

6. Ride the audience’s habits #packaging

Connected audiences today consume news and information in bits and pieces from multiple streams — mobile notification screens, email newsletters, social feeds, aggregation apps, etc.

We need to be everywhere, no excuses. The key is to automate just enough of the process for it to stop being an effort, and manually coordinate the rest so users don’t feel there’s a robot across the channel.

But what happens when people talk back? Social media management is exactly like running a contact centre. Be quick, be relevant, don’t screw up. Set up guidelines.

At a critical mass, our communication will evolve beyond posts/replies to reminders/suggestions. How will we know when?

7. Show up and follow up #distribution

There’s no point to measuring everything if we don’t know what to do with it — and when. Hence, lifecycles.

Use cookies to identify users and compile their online habits. Assign to various stages of the audience lifecycle. Transitions between stages can trigger user prompts to dive deeper or stay on.

Track acquisition, retention, leakage, et al. Identify affinities between user or content segments. Build, act on data.

Correlate these with performance data on our topics, formats, even authors.

With all these numbers, can’t we also give advertisers better opportunities to connect with our audience?

8. Track the audience lifecycle #metrics

Visitor

New Contact

Engaged Contact

Evangelist Contact

Slipping Contact

Dropout

9. Create new inventory #monetisation

Why have just display ads? Why not brand

multimedia content like infographics,

photos, videos, live chats, ebooks, more?

Note how IBM chose power of data as the

single theme for useful content in various

formats, then aggregated them in one unit.

Sponsored widgets are a tremendous way

for brands to build a reputation as a source

of useful content in their niche.

For users, we should also experiment with

freemium subscriptions, micropayments.

Steps 1 to 9 are all key changes in product,

workflow and culture. How will we execute

them without bringing the house down?

10. Work with Content Strategy Experts

#smartpublishing

Sourcing

• List-ening Grid

• Event Content

• Social Gravity

• Relationship

Programs

Production

• Tools, Strategy

• NLP Effects

• Structured

Content, Data

Packaging

• Programmed

Publishing

• Content

Merchandising

Distribution

• Tools, Strategy

• Social, Email,

Mobile, UI/UX

Management

Metrics

• Tools, Strategy

• User Research

and Tracking

• Performance

Metrics, Alerts

Monetisation

• Inventory

Innovation

• Subscription

Programs

Need Help with Enabling Smartpublishing? Call us

Abhinav Dinesh GargVice President – MarketingContact Number - +91 886 063 0933Mail Address – abhinav@wirefoot.com

Pawan Kumar GuptaChief Executive OfficerContact Number - +91 900 878 8500Mail Address – pawan@wirefoot.com