conversations Archives

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”.

Publimetro – engaging and growing new levels of community with Viafoura

Publimetro, Mexico, is a daily newspaper currently focused on Chile, Colombia and Mexico. It is one of several Metro World News Media Group companies that cover 14 countries, and 7 languages. Their unique and powerful content is a direct result of their specialized editors, who give their readers the best, up-to-the-minute coverage of national and international news, sports, and entertainment across multiple platforms.

Publimetro Mexico is looking to not only grow its audience, but to provide them with a personalized and engaging digital experience that will expand their time on site. Publimetro’s goal is to create an environment that will both engage and grow its communities, while enhancing its first-party data strategy. With the use of Viafoura’s full suite of services, including Conversations, Moderation, Trending Articles, Comment Counter, as well as Topic and Author Follows, Publimetro Mexico will be able to identify how users are interacting with the content as well as create new communities for those segments within its data ”.

With the active, high intent, first-party data now being collected through their engaged users, Publimetro Mexico will be able to diversify their revenue streams by building deep and valuable user segments that will drive in-line ad revenue.

“We are very excited to be expanding into Mexico and bringing secure, eclectic and profitable communities to Publimetro! We’re looking forward to converting users down the funnel and adding a new, growing layer of engagement” says Dalia Vainer, Director Customer Experience at Viafoura.

Digiday Media and Viafoura – a next level partnership with fresh content formats, engagement opportunities, and analytics upgrades

Digiday Media is a publisher known for its frank perspectives across its media brands which include Digiday, Glossy, Modern Retail and WorkLife. Their unapologetic dedication to delivering work that prioritizes ‘honesty over spin’ and ‘quality over quantity’ has won them awards, accolades, and an audience of loyal subscribers who come to them for the truth.

As a global authority on tech and its impact on media, Digiday Media is keenly aware of the importance of providing an engaging and rewarding digital experience for loyal users. In order to enhance the experience for Glossy+ members, they’ve adopted a number of Viafoura’s solutions on Glossy.co, a space where users are craving deeper engagement experiences.

“We’re so pleased to be helping Digiday Media offer new and exclusive content formats and engagement experiences to Glossy+ members.” says Mark Zohar, President & COO at Viafoura, “As a longtime partner, we’ve seen firsthand how the smart folks at Digiday Media continue to improve the experience for its audiences, and we’re proud that Viafoura is now an active contributor to that strategy.”

The team at Glossy is using Viafoura’s digital experience platform to enhance the Glossy+ member experience by giving them exclusive access to new content formats and engagement opportunities. Using Viafoura’s Conversations, paying members will soon be able to take part in real-time discussions during Ask Me Anything events. These events, along with Conversations on traditional content formats, provide new opportunities for engagement, which can be carefully managed with the support of Viafoura’s Automated Moderation. On the back-end, Digiday Media will leverage the rich first-party data and insights uncovered through Viafoura’s Audience Insights to enhance its audience-first content development strategies.

“We chose Viafoura because it’s the best solution for our current needs and there are plenty of additional features for us to grow into as we evolve the user experience,” says Aaron Gottlieb, EVP, Product & Platform Strategy at Digiday Media. He continues, “Viafoura’s digital experience platform adds another layer of value and utility for paying members and will help us build and own the direct relationship with them on our platforms.”

After rolling out the new Glossy+ member experience, Digiday Media will be implementing Viafoura on additional properties, including Digiday and Modern Retail.

NPG partners with Viafoura, bringing new life to its digital properties and audience communities

News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG), a Midwestern American family owned and operated business, is a powerhouse in the broadcast television and newspaper industries. Having thrived in the ever evolving news and publishing landscapes since 1951, NPG is keenly aware that change is good for business – but not without its challenges. With Viafoura’s tools and expertise, NPG aims to turn those challenges into an increase in the amount of time visitors spend on their sites and an improvement in their overall engagement by giving registered users the ability to comment with ease and the option to follow topics and authors of interest.

In a digital world where audiences are largely anonymous, it’s tough to maintain spaces for constructive, informative, and open conversations without coming up against toxicity and bad actors. “As a media company, NPG has a vested interest in open and robust discourse,” says NPG’s Director of News and Marketing, Michael Fabac, noting that “At the same time, we recognize that some individuals take advantage of digital anonymity to spread misinformation and hate. Viafoura is helping us find a tenable middle ground by providing a platform that encourages engagement and civility.”

For NPG, integrating Viafoura’s Conversations, Automated Moderation and Full Service Moderation tools is helping them restructure their on-site commenting and introduce a fast-paced, safe, and engaging community experience on all their sites. After a smooth onboarding, Viafoura’s tools are live on nine of NPG’s sites and driving immediate positive results. Among the wins, NPG is seeing properties that had fallen dormant due to previous moderation strategies come back to life.

Watch as KVIA.com, one of NPG’s properties, introduces its new audience engagement solution powered by Viafoura:

NPG partners with Viafoura, bringing new life to its digital properties and audience communities

In tandem with updated community and moderation solutions, NPG is using Viafoura’s Audience Insights to gain a deeper understanding of audience interests and sentiments that could be used to further optimize audience-first engagement strategies. These insights allow NPG to serve targeted content to ideal existing and prospective registered users by using Viafoura’s Trending Conversations Carousel, even further improving engagement and time spent on their sites and pages.

As they continue to reap the rewards of Viafoura’s turn-key solutions, nothing but positive outlooks remain for continued audience growth, engagement wins, and limitless insights and learnings just waiting to be discovered in new found access to rich first-party data.

Best Practices From A Data-Driven Audience Engagement Manager

Audience engagement managers have become a core component of publishing teams in newsrooms across the country. An audience engagement manager’s primary purpose is to manage how the audience evolves from casual readers to engaged members of the community.

To do that, they need the right audience engagement solution to moderate how people flow through the customer journey across your website. You want a platform that will encourage conversations to occur about your content so that people form an attachment to your brand and your community.

Brand attachment and affinity breeds customer loyalty. As an audience engagement manager, customer loyalty is one of the most important KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. Using the right audience engagement platform, you can leverage detailed audience profiles built upon first-party data insights to create the types of personalised content experiences that will help build that customer loyalty.

Know your target conversion rates

The aim of most publications is to increase the number of subscribers who willfully choose to consume and interact with your content. These companies use metrics like paywall stop rates to measure how many unique visitors are choosing to go beyond the paywall and become subscribers. A metre stop rate of 5 to 7 percent should be the target to measure effectiveness; if you’re performing above that threshold, you have a very active and engaged audience.

As the audience engagement manager, you also want to segment the types of people who are hitting your paywalls into different tiers of users. Start by creating segments for the one-time and passive visitors, which are people who interact with one to five pieces of content over the course of a month’s timeline.

Then there are the active users who regularly consume your content, perhaps on a daily basis. According to The Shorenstein Centre on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a subsidiary of the Harvard Kennedy School research centre, approximately 9 percent of your users can be classified as active or regular readers of your content.

With those benchmarks in hand, an audience engagement manager can formulate strategies for how to meet or exceed those targets.

Identify the needs and interests of key demographics

As an audience engagement manager, you need to create content and communication strategies that speak the same language of your target audience. To do that, you need to develop deeper insights into what topics get their attention, how they’re likely to interact with different pieces of content and, perhaps most importantly, what is least likely to earn their attention and engagement.

One of the best ways to monitor that engagement is to use the right on-site metrics. As an audience engagement manager, you can use first-party data like page views, on-site engagement actions, time spent on pages, overall retention rates, and more insights to build rich audience profiles.

Those profiles will tell you more about what your readers are most interested in when interacting with content on your website. Using those insights, you can develop personal engagement tactics to grow the size of your audience base and guide more people to become those highly valued active consumers of your content.

What to look for in an audience engagement platform

So what is the type of solution best suited to help you create effective audience engagement strategies that help drive higher subscriptions and fuel growth for the business? Above all else, you need to know that the platform you integrate into your site can help you achieve your goals for the business.

Remember that sustainable audience growth is based on engagement and the valuable exchange of moments you have with your community. A beneficial audience engagement platform should help you acquire predictive analytics and data-driven insights to make logical decisions with your content, which will further enhance the value of your website experience.

Focus on how to drive up customer loyalty

For example, a strong audience engagement platform will improve engagement across your website. It can potentially increase conversion rates up to 25 times above existing site conversion rates.

Higher engagement and conversion rates is an excellent indicator of user lifetime value, which is indicative of strong customer loyalty among your users. Graham Media Inc. was one media company that sought to achieve this exact objective and, thanks to their partnership with Viafoura, they were able to boost user lifetime value by over 150 percent.

Final takeaways

Above all else, any audience engagement solution you implement should be provided by experts that can function as partners to your business rather than simple vendors. Your partner should be proactive by providing you with strategic recommendations on how best to gain those valuable insights from the platform. Once you have that first-party data on hand, you can focus on how to implement the takeaways and optimise your content to help drive direct impact on your business.

By leaning on insights gleaned from these platforms, audience engagement managers can spend more time on the big picture. You can focus more time coaching the rest of your publication team on how best to use these insights and improve engagement with audiences across all digital channels.

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.”

La Nación launches Viafoura’s Conversations on its platform with goal of boosting registrations and civil dialogue

La Nación, Argentina’s preeminent conservative newspaper, has launched Viafoura’s digital experience platform on its website, integrating the latter’s industry-leading Conversations solution. Viafoura’s Conversations will enable automated comment moderation on La Nación’s site, while also capturing data and analytics about the media company’s registered users. The Conversations solution also includes a community feed, the option to follow topics and/or authors, and a trending content carousel.

With 46 million monthly users and 343,000 paid subscribers, La Nación wanted to cultivate and nurture its community, while making it easy for readers to express themselves.

“One of our objectives is to increase our registered users’ interactions,” says Juan Alvarez, product manager at La Nación. “By switching to Viafoura, only our registered users can comment, so we hope it promotes a civil dialogue while helping our users have more mindful interactions.”

Before adopting Viafoura’s digital experience platform, La Nación was using Livefyre. Alvarez notes that his team wanted to improve the newspaper’s community experience beyond commenting, while also increasing engagement, registrations, subscriptions, time on site, and return visits.

La Nacion comments powered by Viafoura Conversations.

Part of what convinced La Nación to choose Viafoura was the scope of what the Conversations solution could offer, as well as recommendations from other trusted media brands.

But once the contract was signed, what impressed Alvarez the most was the high quality of service his team received from Viafoura. Implementing the solution happened in a short amount of time, and regular meetings helped guide La Nación’s team through the queries about the technology. Translation services were also provided during meetings to facilitate communication where needed. Alvarez adds that technical support since launching the solution has been especially efficient.

“We aim to grow our community hand-in-hand with Viafoura,” says Alvarez. “We hope to implement more solutions in the future and to continue to promote our community’s growth.”

Viafoura shares Alvarez’s enthusiasm for what’s ahead.

“We’re so excited to expand our reach in Argentina with the wonderful team at La Nación,” says Dalia Vainer, director of customer experience at Viafoura. “We’re looking forward to growing their engaged community while highlighting civility and creating a seamless end-to-end user engagement series!”