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Daily Herald brings vibrant, interactive communities to its digital property with Viafoura

Many publishers experience challenges with enticing their digital readers to elevate their relationship from casual reader to actively engaged subscriber. The Daily Herald is a publisher zealously conquering this challenge.

The Daily Herald, suburban Chicago’s largest daily newspaper, provides up-to-date breaking local and national news. While they did offer commenting to their readers via Facebook, those comments appeared on Facebook.com and not DailyHerald.com – depriving the Daily Herald of building a dialogue between their staff and their readers. By moving commenting to their property, the Daily Herald now offers a healthy and vibrant environment that facilitates community interaction.

Mark Stallings, Manager of Digital Operations at the Daily Herald, discloses “we conducted several exhaustive rounds of analysis during our search to find a replacement for our current commenting platform. We had a list of must-haves for any new commenting platform, and Viafoura was among a small group of vendors that met or exceeded our criteria. First and foremost, we wanted a vendor that placed commenting and social engagement at the core of their business. They needed to be well established, with a proven track record of delivering best-in-class solutions with the following features: reader personalization, strong moderation, simple user management, comprehensible reporting and analysis, and easy integration. After narrowing the list, we talked to other publishing company staff and industry groups to help us make the final decision.’

With Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, Auto-Moderation, and Full-Service Moderation, the Daily Herald will be increasing subscriber revenue, visitor’s time on site, the number of articles they read, and the number of times they return to engage with the content in a set interval.

Ensuring that the Daily Herald is successful and has an exceptional customer experience is Dalia Vainer, Viafoura’s Director of Customer Success. Dalia has the following comment regarding Viafoura’s newest partnership: “we’re excited that the Daily Herald has chosen Viafoura as its partner in community engagement! We’re looking forward to working together to create and grow a safe, moderated space that will provide peace of mind to internal teams and readers”.

Le site d’information français La Provence adopte la solution Conversations de Viafoura pour enrichir son expérience utilisateur

La Provence, le site d’information de presse quotidienne régionale couvrant les Bouches-du-Rhône, le Vaucluse et les Alpes de Haute Provence, s’est associé à Viafoura afin de lancer la solution Conversations sur sa plateforme. Tout en améliorant la modération des commentaires et la collecte de données sur le site du média français, Conversations permet à la communauté de La Provence de suivre les auteurs et sujets qui les interpellent, tout en produisant des notifications de navigateur et des badges personnalisés. De plus, le logiciel s’appuie sur un compteur de commentaires et un carrousel des conversations les plus populaires que les internautes peuvent rejoindre pour commenter les sujets les plus chauds de l’heure.

« L’équipe de La Provence a créé une belle expérience sur son site Web grâce au compteur de commentaires et aux alarmes de notifications situés dans l’en-tête du site Web. Ceux-ci sont attirants et essentiels à l’augmentation de l’engagement des lecteurs », affirme Dalia Vainer, directrice de l’expérience client de Viafoura.

Jusque-là, la modération des commentaires n’était pas satisfaisante, et l’équipe de La Provence souhaitait passer à un système plus performant et présentant plus de fonctionnalités, capable de recueillir davantage de données sur les utilisateurs du site.

« L’objectif était de pouvoir proposer à nouveau un espace de commentaires apaisé, modéré et de qualité », explique Mathieu Cochelin, Directeur des activités numériques, Groupe La Provence. Il ajoute que Viafoura a été choisie pour son équipe très réactive : « L’équipe de Viafoura a su répondre à nos attentes en termes de fonctionnalités. Elle a aussi su comprendre nos différentes contraintes et nous aider à y trouver des solutions. »

M. Cochelin se réjouit que l’expérience communautaire ait été améliorée et enrichie par de nombreuses nouvelles fonctionnalités interactives. Il se félicite également que la solution de Viafoura ait été implantée en mobilisant des ressources de manière hebdomadaire pour cadencer au mieux le lancement du projet.

« À l’avenir, nous prévoyons une augmentation de l’acquisition de nouveaux utilisateurs, une augmentation de l’engagement et du temps passé par page, ainsi qu’une amélioration de la modération », conclut-il.

French news website La Provence launches Viafoura’s Conversations for an enriched user experience

La Provence, the news website covering the latest in politics, lifestyle, and sports for the French regions of Marseille, Aix, Avignon, Vaucluse and Alpes, has partnered with Viafoura to launch the Conversations solution on its platform. While enhancing comment moderation and data-gathering at La Provence, Conversations allows the media brand’s community to follow authors and topics, while enabling browser pushes, custom badges and comment counters, as well as a carousel of trending conversations, so they can jump in on the hottest topics of the moment.

“The team at La Provence have created a beautiful experience on their website,” says Dalia Vainer, Viafoura’s Director of Customer Experience, “using comment counts and notification bells in the header that look sharp and are critical to increasing reader engagement.”

Comments had previously been handled in-house at La Provence, and its team wished to upgrade to an automated system with more functionalities, while gathering more first-party data.

“The goal was to be able to relaunch a quality comment section that’s peaceful and well supervised,” explains Mathieu Cochelin, Digital Director at Groupe La Provence, adding that Viafoura was chosen for its very responsive team. “They were able to meet our expectations in terms of functionality. They were also able to understand our various constraints and help us find solutions.”

Cochelin is excited about the improved community experience, enriched by a wide array of new interactive features, and applauds Viafoura’s implementation at an ideal weekly rhythm.

Looking ahead, Cochelin says, “we anticipate increased user acquisition, increased engagement, and increased time-on-page, as well as improved moderation.”

Readers of Toledo’s The Blade just made first contact with Viafoura’s AI-moderated commenting platform

The Blade, Toledo’s Pulitzer prize-winning source for daily online news, has partnered with Viafoura to launch a full suite of engagement solutions designed to boost readers’ interactions with the website. These solutions include topic and author follows, comments moderated by both AI and Viafoura’s team of human moderators, live blogs to cover breaking events like elections or sports games, chats for community members, and trending conversations.

“We’re very proud to count The Blade as the newest customer to launch Viafoura on its website,” says Dalia Vainer, director of customer experience at Viafoura. “Like so many digital media companies, providing a safer, more engaging user experience is paramount to the folks at The Blade. We’re looking forward to seeing how Viafoura will help create a more civil community and provide actionable data to drive product decisions.”

According to Jen Lyon, digital manager at The Blade, the news site was looking to reduce the amount of time staff spends moderating user content, while also increasing reader engagement in the comments section, and creating more ad revenue opportunities.

“We’re already seeing more civility in the comments, and more engagement,” says Lyon. “Readers can find stories that have active conversations quickly. As more tools roll out, I believe readers will appreciate the changes more.”

Lyon was also keen to implement Viafoura’s digital experience platform because of its full-service moderation, and its highly engaging Community Chat and Live Blogs, which allow readers to interact directly with journalists, subject matter experts or each other.

“The onboarding team was quick to answer any questions we had in a timely fashion,” Lyon says. “It was great to have developers on the call so issues could be discussed immediately…the launch of Viafoura went smoothly.”