WHITEPAPER

Understanding Your Live Audience

A Guide to Real-Time Audience Analytics
By Scott Anderson

Understanding Your Live Audience

oday's digital journalists, newsroom managers and content executives are a bit like actors Data analysis has moved If you're making a movie or moving from the controlled from being a required skill publishing a newspaper, you world of film to the real-time environment of the stage. Ask in media companies' finance have time to get it right. No such luck on Broadway or the an actor who has moved from departments to being an Internet; the audience is alive movies to live theatre and they will tell you they are completely essential part of the resume and expectant. You need to pay attention to it. There are no different things. On camera you for editors, writers and opportunities to do things over. have the flexibility of doing designers. many takes to perfect a scene. The stage gives you one chance Tow Center for Digital Journalism No longer able to simply stockpile and perfect content for the and demands real-time attention, next day's newspaper or the nightly broadcast, awareness and interaction with the audience. today's content organizations have been thrust onto center stage in front of a live audience As the actor Michael Caine puts it: "The art of cinema acting is the exact opposite of stage act- with no second chances. And, unlike the theatre, this audience is there all the time - 24/7. ing. In the theatre you have to be as big and publishflow.com 10

A Guide to Real-Time Audience Analytics

broad and loud as possible Film acting, on the other hand, is about standing six feet from a camera in blazing light and not letting the tiniest bit of acting show.

The Live Audience is a Different Audience

Yesterday's Audience is Yesterday's News s they move from creating content that is distributed at fixed points in time to interacting with live audiences, journalists, managers and executives, like good stage actors, need a deeper connection with the people they are trying to reach. But, unlike actors, they can't see the audience; they can't sense the mood. Without immediate feedback, they can't play to the audience like any good actor will.

Understanding Your Live Audience Online, you have just a few seconds to capture the reader's attention.You have to get the content right, right now - not tomorrow.

Content creators have always invested heavily in understanding their audiences, but reports that tell you what content people were engaged with yesterday or, in the past week or month, doesn't do much to help you understand what's happening now. And now is different - content is not a static thing, it changes all the time. News doesn't wait.. Understanding live, dynamic audiences requires real-time data that hasn't been readily accessible to newsroom editors, managers and content executives until very recently.

Fortunately, there are new tools that can give you a real-time understanding of audience interest as they are reading, watching or listening to content. These tools put a live lens on top of every piece of content that allows content teams to understand content trends as they are happening. Better understanding of content trends leads to: G More relevant content creation and publishing choices. G Money saved by investing in the rightcontent all the time G Increased ad revenues by publishing high-interest content

The most important content success metric is still page views - they give web producers, newsroom managers and executives a good sense of how relevant or sticky their content is.

Real-Time, Real Benefits

eal-Time audience analytics enabled the Vancouver Sun to act quickly when a story they posted online about a dirty nuclear bomb started to spike.

Drudge picked it up, says then-deputy-managing-editor Paul Bucci, who instructed the newsroom to immediately start building a package of content to complement the story. If you are looking at an opportunity with Drudge in that kind of window, Bucci adds, you want to load it up with as many bells and whistles as possible because 400,000 page views can turn into a million page views. As content is consumed and shared and spread around there is an exponential factor of increase that grows by making the content more sticky. publishflow.com 20

Certainly sales departments love them (if they are going up) because advertisers understand page views.

Understanding Your Live Audience What's Relevant this Minute? This Hour? or content managers trying to meet the needs of live audiences, sophisticated software tools have been developed that enable them to quickly and easily understand what's going on in the digital environment and react rapidly.

But page views circulated in reports at the end of the day or the next morning are not enough.

Understanding how yesterday's news played is of limited value to content managers trying to understand what content they should create right now, this very minute, in the next hour or, for tonight's newscast or tomorrow's front page. And untimely page view reports won't help you understand in real time how you are faring in the competitive landscape or, what impact your story is having in the social space or, what topics you are not covering that perhaps you should.

Industry leaders see the use of data as the next big step in the evolution of news organizations allowing journalists to, as a Tow Center for Digital Journalism report said, understand the role of journalism in the evolving media ecosystem, in ways that better equip journalists to make a difference, get credit for the difference they are making, and find ways to get paid, whether through old or new models Marketers need little convincing when it comes to the value of real-time content data and what it can do for news organizations. The complexities of capturing real-time data and creat-

In short, day-old or week-old traditional digital metrics alone can't tell you where to invest your increasingly scarce resources.

The Retail Model: Using Data to Make Paywalls More Effective

he Financial Times (FT.com) is a pioneer in understanding what will make readers pay for content online. Through the effective use of paywalls over an eight-year period, FT.com was able to increase digital readership by 27 per cent while growing the number of registered users by 77 per cent to 2.5 million. How did they do it? Data. Where we've found inspiration is Internet retail, not publishing, FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told the Nieman Journalism Lab's Ken Doctor. We're becoming a direct Internet retailer and we have to have expertise to do that. When you do that with publishing, it looks like a different business. As Doctor points out, the only way to do this is through a thorough understanding of the audience. Think Amazon - it seems like a very different business than publishing, says Doctor. In the endlessly measurable digital age, though, the parallels are striking. It's not in what you are selling - books, electronics, or news stories - it's what you know about your customers, their habits and wants. publishflow.com 30

Understanding Your Live Audience

What Real-Time Data Lets You Do

ext generation publishers can follow and respond to to the live movement of data and view audience information all the time, not just in outdated snapshots. Understanding what your audience is really interested in right now allows you to create the right content by category, sub-category or topic across web, mobile and social platforms: G Content leaders can experiment with new content on the site and quickly determine if it's working or not, saving time and effort. G With instant access to live audience interest, managing editors can focus increasingly scarce resources on the most relevant content. G Web editors get critical feedback - never available before - helping them determine which content to add value to. As the Vancouver Sun's Paul Bucci puts it finding the moment something is moving and making it stickier. G Editors can determine which authors resonate with the audience. G Editors can see what is trending throughout the day and can use this information to inform the content mix of the nightly newscast or the next day's paper. G Sales and marketing departments can easily identify content trends that can lead to new or larger revenue streams. G Newsrooms using or exploring the use of metered paywalls can determine the content readers are most likely to be willing to pay for.

It's the difference between capturing 10,000 and 300,000 page views
-Paul Bucci, Director, Digital Products at Vancouver's Pacific Newspaper Group

ing a relevant audience from it, says Earl J. Wilkinson, President of the International News Marketers Association [It] is a barrier that must be crossed. Culturally, this is mostly about showing the courage to invest.

Understanding audience behavior in real time is key to building engagement. But, filling a screen with numbers is not the answer. Real-time data needs to be understandable in real time, by busy people. Presenting content in a clear, concise manner and customizing it to your needs (a content executive and a web producer, for example, might want to track different things) is the key to making real-time data truly valuable.

In an article in the Columbia Journalism Review aptly titled Traffic Jam, journalist Lucas Graves empathizes with newsrooms struggling to make sense of online usage data. The Web has been hailed as the most measurable medium ever, and it lives up to the hype, says Graves. The mistake was to assume that everyone measuring everything would produce clarity. Lastly, real-time data has to be mobile. You need to be able to understand and measure audience interest away from your desk on your mobile or tablet device.

publishflow.com 40

Understanding Your Live Audience Fortunately, tools have been developed that you can tell instantly what's resonating with allow you to get real-time data about your audithem and what is not. ence any time, anywhere: Publishflow's live audience analytics provides an G Across content categories - underindustry-leading, customizable, mobile dashboard that allows you to follow: stand which parts of your site are providing relevant content G Page View Trends - Live content G By topic - what's popular with your page views by category and time frame audience right now G Category Trends - Live breakdown G By author - which of your content of best performing content per category creators resonate the most G Author Trends - Spot hot authors G By location - where is your audience and breakout content by author name coming from? Very important, for G Search Trends - Live Google, example, if you want to understand how your local content strategy is working Yahoo!, Bing and other search trends for every link G By devices - understand how mobile G Social Trends - Live Twitter and your audience is and which devices are driving viewership. Facebook referrer trends for every link G Mobile Trends View all live audience How Publishflow Can Help You trends by iPad, iPhone and Android

he benefits of real-time audience analytics are obvious. The question content leaders need to answer is about which tool will best meet their real-time data needs. We believe publishflow has a unique advantage in the analytics space. With publishflow, newsroom executives, editors, web producers and analysts can visualize their live audience. It allows you to easily monitor content viewing trends on you own websites so you can be sure you are adding relevance and value to the content you create.

But, it doesn't stop there - with publishflow you can also monitor live competitor publishing activity, emerging topic trends across thousands of sites and follow any topic on Twitter, Google News, Digg and Facebook (coming soon) in real time. All of this is available in a single service on your desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

Publishflow allows you to step beyond pure analytics and make sense of the data It's not looking at more, says Publishflow CEO Tom St. John, it's understanding more. It really is like being on a stage in front of your audience - you can see how they are reacting,

costs. To arrange a free 30 day evaluation of publishflow, please call: 1.866.390.5446 (ext.710) or, email: sales@publishflow.com or, tweet: @kontexto.

The Bottom Line:

edia organizations that use publishflow gain real-time competitive advantage, improve effectiveness and reduce

publishflow.com 50

Understanding Your Live Audience

About publishflow publishflow is a real time media analytics service for digital media publishers. The service provides digital executives, content specialists and advertising sales teams with real time content performance and business performance data to help optimize their content creation choices and improve their advertising effectiveness. publishflow is available on desktop, mobile and tablet devices. For more information visit www.publishflow.com.

About Scott Anderson Scott Anderson is a digital media executive and consultant with more than 15 years of relevant experience as Senior Vice-President of Digital Content Strategy for Postmedia Network Inc, Managing Director of canada.com, Senior VicePresident, Content at Canwest Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of the Ottawa Citizen. Reach him at scottkeiranderson@gmail.com

publishflow.com 60