building communities Archives

How To Optimize Your Digital Community for Success

Is your media organization struggling to identify the next steps it should take to create innovative and profitable digital experiences?

To help you find some clarity, Viafoura President and COO Mark Zohar joined Christoph Trappe, an industry thought leader, on an episode of the Business Storytelling Podcast.

Throughout the podcast, Zohar sheds light on how the future of growth and success in the media industry will ultimately come down to building better digital communities.

“COVID and all the things that have impacted us negatively has opened up this positive idea that we need to connect more and we need to connect better [with] digital communities,” Zohar tells Trappe.

If establishing a thriving digital community is uncharted territory for your business, dig into highlights from the podcast below for some critical guidance and industry best practices.

What Is a Digital Community?

When you think of a community in the physical world, you probably think of a group of people who are connected based on their interests. The same is true for a digital community — it’s a group of real people who regularly engage with one another online through a host company around a common interest.

Zohar says that many digital community builders focus on creating a one-to-many community, where the host brand connects with users to encourage product feedback or promotion.

“That one-to-many digital community… is very transactional and doesn’t really work well,” states Zohar. “[The] best communities are the many-to-many communities, where we have this very interactive, very spontaneous, very organic affiliation engagement between community members [and] the community host.”

As brands engage and nurture their digital communities, they’re able to satisfy their audience’s need for engagement, gather actionable audience information and unleash revenue-generating power from the people within their communities.

Unlocking the Full Power of Your Community

At the moment, social media gives brands a place to engage with followers. However, brands have no control over their communities on these third-party platforms — and this lack of control prevents brands from owning the relationships with their communities and audience data.

“Most brands who own a digital strategy want to now have a direct relationship with their community,” Zohar highlights. “They want to have that community also present on their own sites, in their own native apps [and] across their organization.”

With full control over your community, you can provide your audience with interactive and customized experiences directly on your owned and operated channels. You’ll also gain precious first-party user data, which will allow you to tailor your content and advertising strategies according to your audience’s interests and behaviors.

As mentioned in the podcast, the end goal for building a digital community is to transform anonymous audiences into known, loyal community members.

“Allow your community members to interact with one another, to connect with one another, to follow one another on your owned and operated channels,” says Zohar. “If you do, what that will result in is retention, re-engagement and a place that people will want to come back to.”

Encouraging On-Site Engagement

Before you can build a digital community, you’ll need to figure out how you can capture the interest of your audience members continuously.

“You can’t create a community unless there’s value for the community,” Zohar explains.

In other words, you have to offer up exciting on-site experiences to convince people to participate in your online community. Only then will they give up their data to register or pay a subscription fee.

Allowing visitors to create social connections through conversations and live chats or access relevant and personalized content feeds can help you prove the value of your company’s community.

Content moderation is another critical part of establishing your digital properties as a healthy, worthwhile environment for engagement.

According to Zohar, people that want to join a digital community are often pursuing meaningful conversations in a social environment that’s respectful and civil.

Community hosts can implement a sophisticated moderation system to protect their social spaces from offensive behavior, keeping conversation meaningful and inviting.

It’s also important for community hosts to engage directly with their visitors, whether that be by highlighting good behavior in the community or prompting discussion.

At the moment, sustainability lies in your ability to monetize your audience. And, as you now know, you can unlock reader loyalty and revenue by establishing a highly engaged, interconnected community around your company.

For more information on how to run better digital communities, you can view the entire podcast here.

Trust in Facebook is at an all-time low: Here’s how media companies can use that to their advantage

Facebook is addictive — for both consumers and advertisers. With over 1.5 billion users accessing Facebook on a daily basis, the social media giant has become a major source of advertising for brands worldwide. However, little by little, the community standards of Facebook have been dropping — and people are noticing.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook leaked data from millions of people to a company that used it to promote political ads, was only the beginning of the platform’s trust fall. Netflix’s documentary, The Great Hack, offers an in-depth view into the scandal.

The social media giant’s sudden and strict algorithm changes have also affected businesses in a negative way. These changes drastically reduced the reach of Facebook posts from publishers, which dropped to as little as two percent of followers.

Even as Facebook races to protect its users, their moderation solution still leaves a lot to be desired. And let’s not forget that one of Facebook’s co-founders penned an article about everything wrong with the company

Tips to capitalize on Facebook’s trust deficit

To help your brand use this mistrust between Facebook and its users as an opportunity to gain loyal community members, we put together a few of our top tips.

Invest in your own platform

With trust in Facebook at such a visible low, there’s never been a better time to start building your brand’s reputation as a trusted media source… on your own domains.

Sure, Facebook can be used to promote content and events — but only to an extent. You don’t want to be stuck relying entirely on a platform that decides how to promote your content without your input. Thankfully, you have other options. Better options.

Instead of struggling to build your brand on Facebook, invest in tools and strategies that bring engagement back to your domains. You don’t need to stop using Facebook completely. But you also don’t need to give a portion of your revenue away to a platform that doesn’t give you enough exposure for your content. After all, Facebook prioritizes posts from family and friends over posts from advertisers.

You will find more infographics at Statista

If you can invest in building a safe and engaging environment on your own domains, individuals will no longer associate your content or brand with the abundance of misinformation on Facebook.

Give the people what they want

Have you ever wondered what it is about Facebook that seems so attractive to users?

People are social creatures. Consumers continue to use Facebook despite our trust issues with the platform simply because we crave socialization and engagement. In fact, an analysis of the media industry has found that engagement is key when it comes to building loyal brand followers.

A report by Salesforce also found that “84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.”

Facebook, along with other social media platforms, offers many opportunities for users to engage with one another as well as with publishers and their content. However, attaching this immersive social experience to a brand is no longer exclusive to social media platforms.

Consider integrating tools directly on your platform that allow your users to discuss your content, chat with one another, follow their favourite authors and receive content-related notifications based on their preferences.

By generating engagement on your domains, your visitors will want to stick around and subscribe.

Nurture safe conversations, not toxic comments

Many media professionals find commenting counterproductive to a brand’s development — especially with the rise of trolls, harassment, bullying, misinformation and spam in the digital world. At the end of the day, it’s probably more effective to avoid commenting altogether, right?

Wrong.

To foster a good relationship with your digital community away from social media, you need to craft a solid set of community guidelines and enforce them. According to a new study by the Center for Media Engagement, individuals are more likely to have a negative impression of a domain when 75% of its comments are uncivil.

While it is important to engage your visitors in a social experience, they will only enjoy the experience in a toxic-free environment. This means that on top of providing a social layer for your community, it is also essential that comments are thoroughly moderated and that user data is completely secure.

Enforcing a safe environment will help your community members feel comfortable engaging in, and returning to, your domains.

Produce targeted, reliable content

In the digital age, knowledge is always power. Capturing data on your own domain is, therefore, crucial to your success. More specifically, you can leverage data insights from your community to inform your content strategy. By understanding your community members’ interests as you learn about and track their behavior, you can predict what types of content will perform best.

If you are able to create valuable content that maintains a consistent tone and is highly relevant to your readers, they will start looking to your brand as a reputable source for trusted media.

While Facebook can target content based on people’s interests, your posts are hidden behind the noise of fake news and algorithms in a potentially unpleasant environment. Even as Facebook moves to license news content from publishers, we must be cognizant of the fact that Facebook will still own part of your community.

Other publishers are also beginning to realize that success in the media is no longer just about directing visitors to your domains — it’s also about keeping them. For too long, publishers and consumers have flocked to Facebook in search of content and community. Unfortunately, both have become problematic on the platform. So, the time is right to create a protected social space around quality content and reclaim your community.

The Age of the Cookie is Crumbling Giving Publishers a Huge Opportunity

Last Updated: February 13, 2020

There once was a time when the cookie was all-powerful, drastically changing the advertising and media industries. But the cookie’s time is passing, and publishers are in search of other tools to monetize their readers.

Even Chrome is now officially joining in on the cookie crackdown.

Starting February 17th of 2020, Chrome will require web developers to set tighter restrictions on cookies. More specifically, cookies must be defaulted to first-party access — the kind that collects a small amount of user information and stores it directly on the website that the user visits. Companies that use third-party cookies — the ones that follow you around, reporting to an often-anonymous home base that re-targets you with ads — will need to tweak their website code to restrict them to secure websites.

“Only cookies set as SameSite=None; Secure will be available in third-party contexts, provided they are being accessed from secure connections,” states Google on the Chromium Blog.

If developers fail to add the necessary code, or don’t have a secure website, their cookies will be deleted without hesitation by Google. In some cases, websites may even break if the proper cookie code isn’t added in.

Although this update won’t completely eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome yet, the company is limiting their use to secure websites and eventually plans to phase them out altogether by 2022.

While this change could bring about yet another period of dread and uncertainty for media companies, we think it actually marks an opportunity for publishers to reclaim authority as the shepherds of engaged audiences. All it takes is quality journalistic content and a connection with readers. Just like the good ol’ days.

How it Crumbled

Consider the events that led to the crumbling of the almighty cookie: Its fall from popularity started when Safari — often the most-used browser on North American mobile devices — began limiting third-party cookies. Firefox and Google followed suit, blocking more and more tracking with every product update.

End users benefit from this shift because being tracked across the internet feels creepy, so any step away from that is a good one. But while many online publishers currently rely on ads served using tracking data, the Great Cookie Shift will be a boon for them too.

Cookies have devalued the context of where a given ad appeared. Because cookies have been able to find someone anywhere it doesn’t always make sense for an advertiser to pay a premium to serve it on a site producing quality journalism. That has, in turn, disincentivized publishers from producing high-quality content in exchange for sheer volume.

But if third-party cookies are de-powered as a result of browser changes and ads can no longer easily heat-seek their way to a reader in any ol’ corner of the internet, advertisers will have to shift their approach to find the quality audience they seek.

Why Quality Matters More Than Ever

The selling of quality context is going to matter more and more and advertisers, agencies, trading desks and everyone in between will be thinking more about that. Instead of chasing the New York Times’ audience to cheaper third-party sites with retargeting, it will mean advertisers must simply advertise on the actual New York Times.

However, capitalizing on this opportunity will rely on engagement with audiences.

As Martin Pietrzak, Viafoura’s VP of Marketing put it, “If you can no longer target anonymous, single-visit users, quality connections with audience members will need to be the focus. Converting anonymous users to registered users will be key, and the faster a publisher can do that, the better off they’ll be.”

”The big win is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions.
Dan SeamanDirector of Product

The big win, in this case, is that publishers can profile their registered users on the server side, gathering rich behavioural data (pages visited, dwell time, ads clicked etc.) in a way that’s immune to cookie restrictions. That behavioural information — matched with declarative demographic info — is valuable first-party data that publishers can offer to brands who advertise directly on site, or to exchanges who want inventory.

First-party data has always been incredibly valuable, and publishers could become the gold standard for that once again, Pietrzak added.

Before the digital revolution, news organizations marshalled large audiences for advertisers, offering little data beyond the size of readership and overall demographics to help with content adjacency. At a time when cookies are giving way to privacy concerns, those same organizations are positioned to lead the pack again, this time rich with user behaviour information given willingly by an engaged audience.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.

Please note that this article was last updated on February 10, 2020.

How The Irish Times Uses Audience Data to Build Engaged Communities with Quality Content

Sometimes the solution to a complicated problem means thinking outside the box.

Or outside the country.

Just ask Patrick Logue, the digital editor of the Irish Times. Logue joined the 160-year-old paper in 1996 when its website was just two years old, a shadow of the print edition.

In the more than two decades since his arrival, the editor has seen the paper move away from the traditional newsstand sales-dependent model and transform into a profitable multi-platform media organization that in recent years has actually seen its audience grow.

“It’s been a mammoth task,” says Logue of the transitions he’s witnessed. “The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”

As other Irish papers have watched their circulation numbers shrink, Logue and his team are drawing in new readers in droves – and not from where or how you might think.

Paywall Innovator

Back 2015, print sales at the Times were plummeting and online advertising was hardly making up for it. The Times’ circulation had dropped 45 percent in the previous five years, and things were looking dire. It felt like a race to the bottom, as other publications pumped out click-bait stories in pursuit of page views.

The Times made a bold decision. Instead of focusing on page views in the hopes of generating advertising revenue, they would create premium content that users would be willing to pay for. Up until then, all the major Irish dailies had been providing their online content for free.

That year, the Times became the first Irish daily to introduce a digital “leaky” paywall meaning readers could view 10 articles for free each week, but to read more, they had to subscribe for either 12 or 16 euros ($13.40 or $17.86) a month. “We decided that we were not going to chase traffic in an aggressive manner,” says Logue.

The other benefit of this approach? Developing content paying readers want.

Logue says the paper then began using the new data generated by online readership to discover what was important to readers — be it abortion laws, Irish History, or these days, Brexit.

“We become the experts on these big issues,” he says. “We break things down in simple ways using explainers, infographics, and evergreen digital content that informs the reader.”

This dedicated focus on quality has led to several Times stories dominating global news cycles. A story reporting the Times’ exit poll of the 2018 abortion referendum was viewed more than a million times, with the BBC breaking into regular programming to report the poll’s results. An editorial about Donald Trump’s ties to fascism by revered columnist Fintan O’Toole broke the paper’s record with 1.3 million page views.

”“The traditional model is broken, so we’re creating a new one focused on finding new audiences and revenue.”
Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Data-driven Community Building

Audience data has continued to reveal unexpected opportunities to develop active, loyal communities with existing readers. For example, one of Logue’s responsibilities is to search for new, untapped readers, and he was surprised to find them beyond Ireland’s borders.

“We recognized that there is a large Irish diaspora around the world,” he says of the one in six people born in Ireland who now lives overseas. “They’re hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

To satiate this audience, Logue created the paper’s Abroad Network. Readers anywhere in the world can sign up and will receive a weekly email containing a collection of Times stories as well as e-ballots to participate in polls about important political events.

”“We recognized there is a large Irish diaspora...they're hungry for a sense of community and for information from home.”

Patrick LogueDigital Editor, The Irish Times

Abroad Network readers are also encouraged to contribute as photographers, writers or interviewees to the online project Generation Emigration, a digital section featuring the images and personal narratives of Irish readers living abroad, including a personal report from New Zealand after the Christchurch mass shooting in New Zealand, reports from the front lines of climate change in Australia, and numerous essays on Brexit from Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom.

“We found these readers were looking for a sense of community and were also willing to contributing content,” he says. “Generation Emigration brought in a new audience, and in a very real sense created that community.”

Logue explains that the overall goal is to drive traffic, engagement and ultimately subscriptions while at the same time bringing in ad revenue. It has proved effective — some 35 percent of the Times’ page views now come from outside Ireland, and the Abroad Network has 35,000 members.

This two-fold approach of quality content and community building within its readership has been an important part of the strategy that has kept the Times in the black in recent years.

An audit of the paper in February of 2019 showed digital edition daily circulation of 21,275 — a 26 percent increase over the previous year. The paper also grew its total daily circulation by two percent to 79,406, with sales of digital subscriptions rising more quickly than the decline of print. As such, digital revenue has grown by 8.7 percent in 2018 even as print sales dropped by 8 percent. The paper posted a €2 million euro (US$2,200,000) profit last year — which is no small feat in today’s newspaper market.

Read more about how media companies can drive retention, loyalty and trust in our guide.