Turku Today, project memory

TURKUTODAY.INFO

NETZOOM

Francesco Gui Teri Šírová

Emma Vappula Roger Melcior

TurkuToday.info

© Netzoom 2010 page 2

Summary

1. Presentation

2. The target

3. The channel

3.1. Similar products and references

4. Financial

4.1. Proposal budget

4.2. SWOT-‐analysis

5. About the products

5.1. Product principles: from the mass media to social media

5.2. Needings of the target

6. Tools

6.1. Internal use

6.2. External use

7. Conclusions

TurkuToday.info


1. Presentation

During the course in The Social Web have we worked in groups to make a

strategy for a company to improve their using of social media.

When we first began our assignment thought we that we would like to create a

new product for Turun Sanomat newspaper. Turun Sanomat is the third largest

seven-‐day newspaper in Finland. After we had contacted them and they didn’t show

interest so decided we do an own English digital newspaper. Our newspaper, Turku

Today concentrates on news from the Turku region but also news from other Finland

and the world. The newspaper concentrates most on exchange students, researchers

and international teachers in Finland and of course everyone who has interests. We

noticed that international exchange students don’t get news from Turku region in

English, and just a few understand Finnish or Swedish. We thought it could be a good

market strategy to publish Turku today because Turku has every year approximately

thousand students who comes from other countries. We wanted to create a digital

webpage where you can share information of Finland, news, happenings, blogs,

weather and events etc. Where do exchange students get their information of

Finland before they come here? They need to find information on the Internet, in

many different web pages. Why not put all information on one webpage?

We would like to co-‐operate with Universities in Turku if they would have some

interest to add our webpage to their webpage and that way could students find

information about our little country. Every exchange student need to visit

universities homepage, it would be good if our webpage link would be on

Universities homepages, that way could we even reach Finnish speaking readers. We

think that even students who study journalism could take a course form University

where they could practice journalism and write for example articles to Turku Today.

That would be even good for us because the cost would be low.

TurkuToday.info


We need to be in the right place, in the right time to right people; it means that

we need to be in the social media. We are going to market our project in 2.0 tools;

it’s the place where everybody is today. With 2.0 tools do we mean for example

Facebook and Twitter. Social media is a very good and important marketing way in

today’s business. We think that it’s the fastest and most effect way to get peoples

attention and the information spreads really fast. By using social media can we also

spread our webpage to other countries and that way could even more people learn

about Finland. We need to be careful that we use the social media in right way.

Many companies are in the social media but they don’t know how to use it.

There are differences between social media and mass media. Social media is very

inexpensive and almost everyone can use it. The information spreads very fast. Mass

media, like newspapers are often written by professionals and the costs are higher.

Some people might think that you can trust more on mass media because you often

know who writes for example articles. As we earlier told so anyone can spread

information in social media and the information might be wrong sometimes. Both

social media and mass media can reach a large or small audience by for example

blogs or Television.

TurkuToday.info


2. The Target

An essential step, when a company wants to launch a new product or service

over the market, is to analyze that market. One of the first issues is to identify the

possible consumers, targeting a segment of people and analyzing their needing in

order to find the best possible solution for them. This is important in particular for

online products and services because there is an overload of offers on the web and it

is a very large and competitive market. There are no switching costs for the

consumer, they can move from one product to another just through one click, they

also can get a big amount of information eliminating asymmetries, therefore many

scholars describe the web-‐market in term of perfect competition. For this reason in

the design phase of our project we tried to analyze our future market and focus our

strategy on a very specific segment of users.

Turku Today is a very tailored product, the target of our product are

international exchange students. As we will show, this is not a very large group of

users, at least in comparison with other Internet information services, but we think

that this is the best target for our product. A more general type of online newspaper

could potentially serve the needing of a larger number of people but it would be

more difficult to reach them and realize a suitable product, in that case our

newspaper would also be in competition with a lot of other bigger sources of

information. We decided to realize a service focused on the needings of

international exchange students also because we have a large knowledge about this

target, as three members of our team are exchange students.

TurkuToday.info


As you can see in the picture above exchange students are the primary

target, they will be the biggest part of user of our website, the more loyal, the ones

who will participate more and who will be the first to use the website in the initial

period. The contents and the tools that we will provide will be based on their

needing but not exclusively for them. International teachers, researchers,

doctorates, postgraduate or other kinds of international students that are not part of

an exchange program can benefit from the service too, indeed they do not differs so

much from exchange student, we can say that exchange student are just a sub-‐group

of this large segment. The third group of people is the most general and is composed

by students of every kind or people that want to read English news or are interested

in our services even if they are not specifically designed for them.

The following table shows the amount of foreign students in Turku University

in the last years. The biggest parts of them are exchange student (409 in 2008) and

209 of them are from the Erasmus program. We also must take into consideration

that these data are about the entire student registered during the calendar year but

the majority of them study in Turku for less than 12 months. Therefore they will not

use the service all at the same time.

TurkuToday.info


As we can see the number of exchange students is increasing1, as these data

are from 2008 we could expect a bigger number in 2010 and 2011. Furthermore

Turku University is the bigger University of the city but not the only one, there is also

Abo Akademy whose exchange student are more or less one third (181 exchange

student and 788 foreign students in 2009) and Turku University of Applied Science

that is quite small (at the moment 350 foreign degree students). An average

estimate of exchange student during 2010 should be between 750 and 850. Statistics

by TYS housing office are recently updated and they report that in year foreign

students took 2010 about 1000 of their 7,300 residential places. Concluding we can

say that there is a sufficient number of potential users, even if it is not very big this

should be a very good target for the reasons that we explained before.

1 Source: TUAS, UTU and Abo Akademy International Office.

TurkuToday.info


3. The Channel

Every residential place of TYS has got an Internet connection; Internet is

usually available in other student flats and in several computer room inside libraries

and universities. We presume that every student has got easy access to the web, in

fact internet is definitely the main channel of communication and information for

exchange students. They operate a very large number of activities online, for

example they can take Internet based courses or manage their exams, course and

study career through instruments like Moodle or Minplan. Internet is also used for

applying for a TYS flat, sign in for trips or activities and booking sauna facilities and a

large number of different tasks.

Internet most important function for exchange student is for sure

communication, through e-‐mail, communities and social networks. Facebook is the

virtual place where their spend the biggest part of their navigation time. Facebook

features suite very well to student’s needings, it is almost mandatory for exchange

student to be part of the network in order to communicate through message and

chat and be updated about current events.

ESN associations Facebook accounts and fun pages could give an idea of the

phenomenon:

● Pancho Abo Akademy (Abo Akademy mascot) 1,200 friends,

● ESN Turku – Abo (Uni turku, IAC and Abo together) 990 members,

● ESN Uni Turku 940 members,

● ESN Abo Akademy 842 members,

● ESN IAC 340 members

ESN does not represent all the exchange students but their websites

(www.iac.tuas.fi, www.esnuniturku.fi, www.esnabo.eu) are a point of references

also for who is not on Erasmus. They also provide a weekly newsletter that contains

TurkuToday.info


a lot of information about incoming events and other news that are usually given by

Facebook.

3.1. Similar products and references

We tried to scan the market in order to see if there is similar product in Turku

or in other cities that could be direct competitors. The following online newspapers

share some features with our product:

• http://www.abounderrattelser.fi is the most important online newspaper about

Turku (in Swedish language)

• http://www.unikankare.net is a cultural blog about the city written in Finnish

• http://www.wikicompass.fi/turku a wiki-‐content based website with useful

information for students, provided in English language by the University of

Applied Science of Turku

• http://www.ovimagazine.com is an English online newspapers but its target is

not Turku but the whole Finland

• http://www.sixdegrees.fi/6d/ a printed newspaper in English about Finland for

young people.

Also we find out some experiences that could be useful to get ideas for our

product:

• http://www.universando.eu is an Italian information website made by students

for students

• http://btvnoticies.wordpress.com blog where the Barcelona TV public

broadcasting share the experiences about Internet 2.0 in the media with the

audience.

• http://www.catalannewsagency.com/ official web of the public Catalan News

Agency in English with news about the topics for the international

communication media about Catalonia. Usage of the social tools.

As you can see we didn't find any product of the same typology of Turku Today,

these websites share some characteristics and can give us some hints, for example

we noticed that they are daily updated, but they will not be in competition with our

product that will be unique in its kind.

TurkuToday.info


4. Financial statements

As part of the market analysis we also tried to make some prevision about

the economic aspect of the product. The initial idea of being a new product of Turku

Sanomat was rejected so we can not get resources from this big newspaper. In any

case we think that Turku Today project will have zero-‐cost. In fact, following the web

2.0 paradigm, it will be based on voluntary work and free sharing of information by

users, we will also employ open source software and social tools that can be found

on the Internet for free. A good opportunity should be to make some agreements

with university and other international infrastructures in order to obtain some help,

for example articles from journalism students.

We will finally want to answer to a typical question: Where is the profit in this

project? Profit is in fact the final objective of almost every company and a key-‐point

in developing a web strategy. In our case there is actually no profit, some revenues

can come from the advertisements (Google Ads) but they will be a small amount and

can for example repay the cost of the web domain. But as we are a group of student

and not a company our goal is to get participation instead of profit; an active

community that use and sustain the online newspaper should be the best return and

should benefit the whole student life in Turku.

4.1. Proposal budget

Nowadays, as you can see in the previous point, our project has non-‐profit

because we are amateur students and we are not interested to get profit. In the case

that our online newspaper would achieve a big success and somebody would like to

get an economic viability here we present a potential budget. As we see, the website

is potentially self-‐sustaining with this proposal budget you can get more incomes in

the order to empower the project and make it more professional.

TurkuToday.info


Expenses Incomes

Domain (per year) 15 euros Advertisements (yearly) +

G Ads

3000 euros

Hosting (per year) 30 euros Sponsor company

(yearly)

1200 euros

Rewards for the regular

staff (per year)

2000 euros

Technical web support

and graphic design (per

year)

500 euros

Legal support (per year) 300 euros

Promotion (per year) 1000 euros

Others (per year) 355 euros

TOTAL EXPENSES 4200 euros TOTAL 4200

About expenses

Domain: keeping the propriety of the domain www.turkutoday.info and

subdomains.

Hosting: keeping in a server the files, the web information, pictures.

Rewards for the regular staff: small salary reward for the people who works

for the project regularly (keeping and upload a section or service, writing

almost two news for week, getting advertisements or specific projects).

Technical support and graphic design: external support for the webpage,

HTML code, development application and corporative image. A friend price

from the company because we will put an advertisement in the website.

Legal support: about the treatment of the images, the law of personal

information data copyrights…

Promotion: advertisement in some events in Turku during the year (such

student parties, half marathon or Facebook pages about Turku).

TurkuToday.info


About incomes

Advertisements: we will offer to Turku business and companies the

possibility to advertise in our web and newsletter. The quantification of the

cost of the advertisements will be per display. The goal for the first year is to

get at least 30 companies that pay 300 euros for 3 months campaign (100 per

month).

Sponsor: is a kind of special advertisement for companies that want to show

their support to the project and have exchange students in Turku as a target.

The advertisements from the sponsor company will be in a premium place of

the layout. In the Turku Today marketing campaigns will be the icon of the

sponsor company. The contract will be at least for one year.

4.2. SWOT-‐analysis

We decided to do a SWOT-‐analysis for our project. SWOT-‐analysis is the way

to evaluate our projects strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We think

that our projects strengths are that we don’t have any competitors in Turku region in

English, we use social media, which is very cheap to use, and almost everybody can

use it. Our weaknesses are that we are going to have students that work on our

project so their knowledge is not that high and as we use students so we need to

think that do they really have time to work on this project. Opportunities are that

other Universities in Finland would be interested in our product; they maybe want to

create an own webpage to their hometown. Our opportunities are also that

companies find our product interesting and they want to market on our webpage or

they want to co-‐operate with us. Threats are that we work in Internet. Internet is a

very risk place, many knows how to us it, there could be wrong information. Threats

are also that we get competitors and maybe we don’t get enough readers.

Strengths-‐ no competitors, social media, cheap

Weaknesses-‐ students work, time

Opportunities-‐co-‐operation with companies and universities

Threats-‐ competitors, Internet, enough readers

TurkuToday.info


5. About the product

5.1. Product principles: from the mass media to social media

Turku Today wants to integrate applications and medias on-‐line in the order

to make easier the interaction, collaboration and sharing content.

New tips for a non-‐organized environment

1. Democratization: establish news supports to emitting messages and catching

and communicating with the target audience.

2. Audience fragmentation: the public is the same but have more interaction

challenges, more media. More calls to their attention.

3. Focus in the conversation: the main point is the interaction between the

people to create new content.

4. Micro-‐actions requirement: we need to focus our campaigns and send the

message to smaller groups in the order to get replies.

5. Building presence: our brand must “stay” in the net building presence and

generating reputation.

The new media should listen the people by speaking.

5.2. Needings of the target

The new product, of course, must have new content that would be attractive

for the recipients – young people speaking and reading in English, especially

exchange students of Turku universities. But of course, it might be attractive also for

everyone who is interested about news and interesting things about Turku life and

wants to practice his/her English.

The goal is, to convince students to participate on creating of the news and

other content. Concerning content, we suppose that students know what kind of

information they need.

But here is a short list of possible new products, which may be most important and

most useful:

TurkuToday.info


Local news in English -‐ especially important are those who have an importance for

exchange students -‐ changes in prize of tickets, snow calamity, airlines strike,

increasing alcohol taxes etc. All kinds of news should be produced -‐ not only articles

but also some photo galleries, sounds, videos.

As was already said, students should participate. It would be good if cooperation

with Turku universities might be touched. Then students might choose a course

called like “Creating On-‐line News” and get some credits for their work. This would

be also good for advertising because young journalists are often proud about their

products and they share their articles or pictures on social networks.

Events calendar -‐ including culture, sports, fun, parties, trips etc. Students who will

attend those events will take some pictures and write a report about the event,

which will be published on the website.

Interactive map -‐ exchange students who come to the town don’t know Turku and

its neighborhood. They don’t know where are good and cheap pubs, where is a good

place to be visited and seen, where is good to go shopping or where to

accommodate your friends who come and visit you. All these useful or important

places will be added into the map, people can also add new places and write why

they are important.

Blogs network-‐ students can share their experience and help to students who would

come next. It is always good to know a real experience about living, food, transport,

weather, Finnish way of life or anything.

“Buy or sell” -‐ advertisements or online action, for students who will come to Turku

or go home. While staying here, a normal student gets a lot of stuff that they can’t

take back home (like bikes, carpets, kitchen tools etc.). So he can place here an

advert and surely will find anyone who will come and would like to have these

things, cheaper than in the normal shop.

TurkuToday.info


“Sharing experiences”: It would be very useful if the exchange students can get the

link to Turku Today website, before they will come – to read the experience etc.

Here is very important the cooperation with the universities. When a student will be

accepted as a exchange student, university should send him/her the link. It also may

be placed on the website of the university.

All the products should be published via separated RSS channel, to make

possible to choose which kind of information would like to get.

TurkuToday.info


6. Tools

6.1. Internal tools

Newspaper and the people who make them usually have their own ways of

work, some of them use social web tools, some of them not. But they might be really

very useful, especially in case that all the journalists don't work in one place (which

would be true if some exchange students will participate on making news).

Documents sharing and co-‐creating (Google Documents, Prezi, TitanPad,

SlideShare) -‐ makes work easier when one article has more authors or when the

article needs to be read by an editor before it will be published.

Chats and videoconferences messages (Skype, GTalk, Gmail) – make easier

cooperation, distribution of work and so on.

Shared calendar (Google Calendar, Doodle) -‐ use for reminding of deadlines, events,

press conferences etc, because people who work in media usually are overloaded by

information and forget a lot of things. Doodle to find a time for meetings that fits to

everyone.

Sharing of documents, sounds, pictures, videos (DropBox, Drop.io) -‐ Turku Today

wouldn’t need their own publishing system for sharing and storaging these things. It

is also possible to share them on other social networks, not only on the Turun

Sanomat website. It also makes easier the cooperation because people don’t have to

send data by e-‐mail etc.

Checking on-‐line reputation (Google Alerts, Google Analytics, TweetVolume,

BlogPulse and Topsy) -‐ to check the reputation and the feedback about the brand in

the Net. The next step should be to optimize keywords and SEO in the order to get a

better position in the main search engines.

TurkuToday.info


6.2. External tools

The external social tools will be the most important way to get information

and feedback from the students. Also the tools will allow us to uploading a real time

information.

Web page/blog (www.turkutoday.info): the main page of the media. In the home

web the audience can find whole production of the media (news, movies,

transmission in live of events...). Only in English. With a link to Turun Sanomat

webpage. Social media tools in the order to share the information. RSS feed (just a

summary of each post). Comments are allow in every post. Cloud widget.

Advertisements and Google Adds.

Tabbloid RSS: the new consumption habits of the audience recommend to have a

RSS channel for every topic from the newspaper. Also the users ask for a feed based

on their desired schedule.

Twitter: to exchange in both directions the information. Updating in real time the

information. Interacting with the readers. Participate in active way in the city events

with hashtags.

Facebook: to contact with Erasmus and Exchange students in Turku. Advertising.

With Fan Page. Link the content from the homepage.

In Facebook page we will have a bidirectional conversation with our audience. We

will reply to any questions of our costumers.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Turku-‐Today/142334249152226

TurkuToday.info


YouTube: to upload videos about events of the target audience. Create the own

channel. The YouTube channel will have a weekly news programmer in English.

Agreement with the university media students for content production.

Google Calendar: with the international events in Turku during the weekend.

Inserted as a widget in the main webpage and with the public link in the order to

allow the people synchronize with their own calendars.

http://www.turkutoday.info/p/next-‐events.html

Flickr: to upload a live event pictures. Tagging pictures of events.

Forum: with embed html forum in our website we will provide “Buy or sell” service

and “Sharing experiences”. We will moderate the Forum. Register required.

Formspring: to answer the questions that the students have with a possibility of

interaction. http://www.formspring.me/TurkuToday

TurkuToday.info


Google Maps: the survival map with the most important places for the students,

geolocalitzation of the news and events. http://www.turkutoday.info/p/student-‐

map.html

TurkuToday.info


7. Conclusions

We are particularly satisfied about the course and the group’s project because we

transform our paper and theoretical project into a real existing web service

(www.turkutoday.info). Also we have had the possibility to use some of the social

tools that we saw in class. The website has been on line for 2 weeks and we already

got many audience and followers in our social networks.

One of the most important advantages of our product is that the target that we have

(exchange students in Turku) is quite large but with a specific needings that are

uncovered by the current supply. In fact, there are not competitors in the market.

We are the first on-‐line based newspaper in English about Turku student life. We

expect big success because Internet is the main information channel for the

exchange students. Also we have a secondary market, uncovered too, Turku citizens

that want to improve English skills.

About the economic side of our www.turkutoday.info, we are proud because we get

a product based on voluntary work and sharing through open free software and free

tools. In fact that we are only amateur students we are looking for collaboration in

order to provide a better and frequently updated content. We can currently offer

the service with 0 cost. In the case that somebody wants to make it professional we

think that the webpage will sustain itself with our budget proposal.

The use of the social web tools is the key of the potential success. We noticed the

lack of social networks use by the traditional online media. Therefore we should

have a competitive advantage. Social web tools allow us to reach visitors from the

target and keep going on the interaction. We are native social digital media and our

priority is the active interaction with our audience. With the cooperation of our

social networks followers we can offer real time information, events,

recommendations and other useful services for students.

TurkuToday.info


Our expectation is that the users number will increase and also the content

production and sharing. We would like to control our success and improve the

strategy through reputation and visibility checking tools and visitor statistics.

TurkuToday.info


Bibliography and netgraphy

Bloch, Ethan. How Are Companies Leveraging Social Media?.2 Breakenridge, Deirdre. PR 2.0: new media, new tools, new audiences3. Cortes, Marc. Web 2 0 de los Mass media a los Social media4. Safko, Lon and Brake, David K. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success5.

2 http://www.flowtown.com/blog/how-‐are-‐companies-‐leveraging-‐social-‐media 3http://books.google.com/books?id=DdhyJ_n1HFkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=new+tips+for+2.0+media&source=bl&ots=twp5wVjcgG&sig=UydtbA3ybQnvzLDCys_9HOPW3So&hl=en&ei=ADz_TNTaOZS08QO5_byMCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=new%20tips%20for%202.0%20media&f=false 4 http://www.slideshare.net/marccortes/web-‐2-‐0-‐de-‐los-‐mass-‐media-‐a-‐los-‐social-‐media-‐presentation 5http://books.google.com/books?id=YzLo5x6QX7IC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

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