• Write for the Web | Yahoo! Style Guide –
• How to: write headlines that work for SEO | How to succeed in journalism | Journalism.co.uk – Brevity not best on the web – Why journalists need to think about writing five headlines for every news story
• How to: write for the web (part 1) | How to succeed in journalism | Journalism.co.uk – from Delicious/digitaldickinson http://www.delicious.com/digitaldickinson
• Location, Location, Location | Online Journalism Blog – Damian Radcliffe highlights some recent developments in the intersection between hyper-local SoLoMo (social, location, mobile).

  His slides looking at 20 developments across the sector during the last two months of 2011 are cross-posted at the bottom of this article. From Online Journalism Blog http://onlinejournalismblog.com

• Twitter chat Tuesday | Media, disrupted – Mike Fancher, Melanie Sill and Glenn Proctor. They’ll do the heavy lifting." #asne
• Top Gear powers back with more than 5m viewers – Top viewing figures for "controversial" Top Gear
• ‘Scrap local tv news and leave it to newspapers and online coverage’: says Janet Street Porter – Janet Street Porter speaks out in Independent

• The Blog » ABC, Reuters, Twitter, Klout scores and newsroom policies – Their personality and transparency plays a large part in why people follow them, and why Reuters content does well when either of them tweet or Facebook or tumble it out.

  "@deejackson: Fascinating analysis of @klout & metrics by @producermatthew (h/t @AntDeRosa)"

• 5 Underused SEO Tips to Make Your Blog Uber-Successful – Blogging Tips – More multimedia, interlink, video backlinks, website server maintenance, low hanging keywords from Blogging Tips http://www.bloggingtips.com
• Advancing the Story » Multimedia means more reach, more money – Example of American TV companies experiencing a bump in reach through online content (via @alexgamela)
• David Skok: Aggregation is deep in journalism’s DNA » Nieman Journalism Lab – example of how Time was an early news aggregator
• News International set to launch new Sunday edition of the Sun – UK – Scotsman.com – 29th April at a discounted price
• Any WordPress Theme Can Be a Blank Framework | ThemeShaper – Using themes to create stable child theme, suggests some good themes to customise

• Customizing Your WordPress Theme Using Firebug –
• In praise of Digital Editors | andydickinson.net – @paulbradshaw: Was there when @digidickinson made these points in person – very astute: http://t.co/Bd1q3VYk "In praise of Digital Editors"
• Avoiding the DSLR Temptation – Pretty techie debate between normal cameras and DSLR. In a nutshell "proper cameras do better because they're designed for the job in hand."
• How to: prepare for a journalism job interview | How to succeed in journalism | Journalism.co.uk –
• Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization for SEO | SEOmoz – Nice research based article on what the key components to SEO are.
• Ditch the Dongle: Make Payments With Your Smartphone’s Camera With Card.io – phone camera payment system card.io is thinking bigger. It is giving mobile developers a new software developer kit to institute its payments platform into any application."

I used last year’s project with Shambala as a template for my activity. The live blog in particular carried through similar elements, including a mobile friendly blog and distribution techniques – but there were differences, as I’ll explain.

Wi-fi Network
Uploading material on a 3G network was a real problem at Shambala, and as I’ve mentioned before this made mobile journalism at last year’s festival very tricky. Thankfully this was not an issue at Womad, which was down to the excellent site wide public WiFi provided by Etherlive. I spoke to the MD Chris Green and he told me in total they shifted 1TB (terabyte) of internet traffic this weekend – which I got really excited about, my wife didn’t.

Kit and Tech
Last year I had an Android HTC Tattoo, Flips, dictaphones, SLRs and a Flash mic. 2011, I had an iPhone 4. My dependency on additional bits of tech to give comprehensive multimedia coverage was less needed. It also meant that I approached it differently. Video was shot and uploaded directly to YouTube from my phone and photos were initially shared on Instagram first. I still had my SLR but Instagram tended to be my first port of call. I would like to find a web app that makes it more useable and interactive online – not least an app that allows search and the opportunity to search for tagged photos and install slideshows. Further investigation is needed into the Instagram Realtime API and these interfaces. At Womad Festival, all my photos were run through Flickr with video and slideshows broadcast on YouTube.

Radio Womad
Being involved with the Radio Womad staff meant audio was a priority, features and “Secret Sessions” (essentially backstage acoustic performances), were broadcast on the radio and enhanced for the internet. Unfortunately a big question mark still hangs over whether we have the right to publish this material. I hope we can as the Secret Sessions were fantastic – particularly the session with Bomba Estereo whose improvised instruments included a fire extinguisher and a water bottle.

Radio Womad’s backstage gazebo was a perfect platform to let the artists do what they want in their way and I’m delighted there’s a digital archive of this ready to be shared with a global audience. I think it would be great for Radio Womad to have a shareable archive of the sessions.

Whilst the video was by no means professional it would offer music fans a glimpse into the unique, unplugged gigs. Also many of the labels and artists liaisons want to see the material so it seems a shame not to share with the wider public. Surely sharing this material would be good for everyone?

Staff
My experience with Shambala was essentially to manage a team who in turn managed our Press Gang (teenagers we trained to capture footage on our behalf). For Radio Womad it was about adding value, enhancing social media and putting a multimedia twist on the audio material. Although the Radio Womad team were largely impressed by what I achieved it was difficult to wrangle multimedia stuff (which they were taking personally) off them, in the end I managed to steal memory cards and copy clips from the station server to create my material.

The benefit of the team at Shambala is that we saw the festival through younger eyes. I’d love to work with Radio Womad again but I wonder whether next time the project might benefit from repositioning itself with the main website, which could also help sidestep any reproduction permission issues.

Moving on
Whilst for the moment the secret sessions may remain secret it seems to me that this is a direction that I’d been thinking about with Village Underground “In The Cab” performances. I know recording and sharing the performance of the artist Marques Toliver secured him several UK gigs because the material was so shareable and exposure extended beyond the 300 people who turned up to see him live. This is an area which I will no-doubt return to when I undertake some more work with Village Underground later this month. As for the festival itself and working with Radio Womad, it was a hugely enjoyable experience and I would love the opportunity to do something next year.

I’ve collected everything together at the working blog, Facebook, and have hosted all material on the Mashed Festivals Soundcloud Flickr and YouTube Channels.

I would love to know what you think – or if you’re interested in working with Mashed Festivals.

As James Cridland points out, the combined audience of the Radioplayer online radio platform in the UK is 5.7 unique users a month, with more than 22 million individual sessions, a bigger audience than ITV and Channel 4 combined.

And the possibilities are huge: according to RAJAR, radio listening reached its highest level ever recorded (91.6 percent of the UK population) in the first quarter of this year.

But the BBC still looms large with an audience including more than 55 percent of the UK adult population, making the job of commercial radio brands – facing the threat of platform shift and the BBC – a tough one indeed.

One man charged with understanding all that is James Rea, who was last month appointed Guardian Media Group’s deputy group programme director. He still retains responsibility for for news output and special broadcasts, but with a lot more besides, including “developing new partnerships in the digital arena to extend the group’s content to new audiences,” according to the company.

According to figures from last October, one in four listeners of GMG stations (which comprises Rock, Real and Smooth radio) audience are tuning-in via a digital/online platform. I caught up with Rea to ask him what the plans are…

TMB: How will GMG distribute its stations across different platforms in the months and years to come?

Rea: GMG’s radio brands are already available reaching new audiences across many platforms: on mobile, online, on DAB digital radio, digital TV and on FM. Our focus is on creating content and then finding the most relevant platforms to deliver it on. Radio listening is at an all-time high; people love it and it also works in increasingly converged digital world.

With digital media what has and hasn’t worked?

There’s nothing that hasn’t worked – we’ve gone into this in the spirit of experimentation and trying new things.

It’s been a very encouraging start for Radioplayer. The first audience figures showed it had 5.7 million listeners in May. Radioplayer is a great example of how the industry – the BBC and commercial – can cooperate on technology which is crucial because our futures are locked together and we want to expand the overall listening audience.

We’re working with digital services like We7, not against them, and want to look at all the new technologies and how audiences are using them. We have music and entertainment radio brands which are loved and listened to by millions of people every week but the key to their success is the expert teams who understand the audience and build a listening experience that really connects. Digital solutions have a long way to go to deliver that heritage so there’s plenty we can bring to any partnerships.

In terms of digital expansion for GMG Radio – what’s on the horizon?

We think radio has a hybrid future – a coalition of many platforms and infinite choice. But it’s the quality of content that we should be obsessed about not the platform. We have human editors who know their audience and that is crucial. That level of understanding can’t always be delivered by a computer.

Do station audiences have a distinctive way that they use different platforms – what are the trends in usage?

Audiences are expecting more from radio brands and new digital listening platforms open up massive creative opportunities to connect with listeners. What’s clear is many listeners want more from radio – not just to listen – but to watch, share and feel much more involved. There are also others who don’t want interactivity so we need to deliver radio on many terms and different platforms allow that.

How is digital affecting the business, is there clear ROI or are you still experimenting?

Digital flows through everything we do. New listening platforms will grow overall listening hours, open up new content and fresh opportunities for advertisers.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing

Find more interesting articles about radio from around the web in our dedicated channel and by signing up to our weekly radio newsletter.

Thinking big but not acting locally

For example, Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) is making serious money online from Mail Online – £8 million in the six months to April 3 – and pushed past the Huffington Post to become the world’s second largest news site with 60 million unique visitors a month. But at the same time digital revenue from its regional Northcliffe division actually dipped two percent.

Guardian.co.uk has more than 50 million users but it stopped its Guardian Local experiment because it was commercially “unsustainable”. TheMediaBriefing’s contributor Ed Oldfield suggested that the scheme may spark other local startups to follow in its wake, but they will need to avoid the same mistakes of failing to innovate enough commercially.

Self-serve ad managing tool Addiply generated only £500 for the three sites over the past year, although there were local advertising opportunities for Guardian Local, including its highly profitable Soulmates dating service and Google Adsense revenue, but not enough. (Read Addiply founder Rick Waghorn’s comment clarifying that £500 figure here)

Could a start-up prevail in local ads?

Are established newspaper publishers putting the content first and the business model second when it comes to online media?

This is where a smaller operator could make a big impact. Media Street Apps, which launched with Kingsroad.co.uk in 2009, was founded by online marketer Jack Rutter and tech specialist Jonathan Lloyd. Their approach was to generate revenue first.

“We’ve started backwards,” says Lloyd “By that I mean we started with the local business owner first and then have added local news content last. I know that seems crazy but it’s enabled us to shape both the Media Street software and our products.”

Focusing on the London street which stretches from Chelsea to Fulham, King’s Road is a community site and carries local news like many other “hyperlocal” start-ups. By choosing a street renowned for clothing boutiques and other independent outlets there was a clear opportunity for person-to-person ad sales. Local businesses that advertise or are listed on the site range from the independent FiFi Wilson boutique to the established King’s Road Sporting Club.

In May, King’s Road joined the Glam Media network – the American digital female-focused ad network. Major brands such as Boots and Net-A-Porter have appeared on the website. However the buck doesn’t just stop at placement ads.

“Our business model is not just built on online advertising; we do video, online marketing, competitions and paid content. Hyperlocal sites should look at these other revenue streams too,” says Lloyd.

Marketing as a service

This is wider trend on small scale. Publishers are beginning to offer more than just simple advertising: trade publisher UBM is offering varied and interesting packages in B2B, and magazine publisher Condé Nast launching its Ideactive client services division, as my colleague Patrick Smith detailed here.

Media Street also has plans to increase SEO for clients and online and affiliate revenues as well as paid events. This will be the first full financial year for the company but and it has a modest target of £60,000 revenues for its financial year end on December 31 2011.

By this time Lloyd hopes to transfer the Media Street model and software across several streets in London starting with Fulham Road.

Herein lies a digital media business model for our times: keep the content local but the operating system universal.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing

Just five years ago when the company was founded as the independent agency Inside Mobile, mobile content was a tricky terrain. Phone apps were created in Java and required individual builds which, even after a considerable investment, wouldn’t necessarily run on all handsets.

The irresistible rise of the smartphone

But now smartphones have revolutionised how and when we interact with the web and online-enabled apps. Hilton believes a major shift in perception came from the stability that the Apple store and the iPhone platform provided.

But development costs are high. In order to get a successful uptake there needs to be considerable investment and bug testing. When the app is launched it needs to be closely monitored and promoted carefully to be picked up in the Apple Store or Android Market.

Nevertheless if he had £10,000 to spend on a campaign, he’d opt for a mobile site rather than an app:

“This makes it agnostic of all technology so all users are open to the opportunity. If you are designing for mobile internet then the content needs to be a lot shorter and more snackable.”

The bad old days

Illustrating what can be done without apps – and that people have been doing this stuff intelligently for years – Hilton mentions one of Inside Mobile’s most award-winning campaigns was for Reebok, built around the 2008 NBA basketball playoff final. The campaign combined branded SMS and ringtones while greater context and exclusive content was carried by voice messages and a WAP-enabled microsite.

See it for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Resistance to viral

Whilst certain things stay the same there is no longer a secret formula for making digital or mobile content go viral. In fact it’s much more difficult to do this now given the number of agencies specifically trying to make their product take off on forums YouTube….

“In 2000 almost everything on the internet was viral. Now we find that our audience has matured and become more sophisticated. We can still provide the touchpoints for viral – allowing sharing of something using social media – but it’s difficult to predict what will work.”

Apps are currently leading the mobile media debate but perhaps this won’t always remain this way – according to Hilton, something very close to all phones around today can access the internet. He anticipates that because of increasing deployment of Google’s Android operating system, there will be some innovative use of HTML 5 on the horizon – and the boundaries between apps and the web will start to blur.

“We’re finding the lines between mobile and digital is blurring. Companies such as M&C Saatchi appreciated that their clients want to move smoothly between different platforms. Mobile is now integrated and at the heart of the business.”

For more vital analysis and case studies on the evolution of mobile media, come to Mobile Media Strategies 2011 on June 14 in London, the second-full-length conference from TheMediaBriefing.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing

Which side are you on?

Kate Day, social media and engagement editor for Telegraph.co.uk, and is about to appoint a community manager, a new role for the title. Although Day admits she spends a lot of time in both marketing and editorial departments the new role will be closely linked to editorial.

She tells me: “We received a lot of applications from journalists, and also social media marketing people. This role is rooted in editorial so we are looking for someone who really understands the newsroom and it’s likely that they will be a journalist. The role will involve helping journalists source and develop news stories by making the best use new tools and platforms as well as helping to build a loyal, engaged digital audience.”

As far as Day is concerned, this role is there to not only help journalists do more but also to recommend the best social tools and skills to others. They will be required to have an overview of the industry and what competitors are doing with socially online.

The Telegraph’s community manager will focus largely on Facebook and Twitter but also keep an eye on comments on the site and the My Telegraph blogging platform.

Making it count

Day claims that because the Telegraph’s audience is fragmented across external networks and its own website, it’s no longer possible to generate a single stat to measure success.

“We can measure referral traffic, the number people on Facebook and Twitter amount of time they spend on the site and so on,” says Day. “There’s no single number that represents engagement or revenue return very well.”

Justin Fogarty is online community manager for Ariba a spend management site. He oversees a customer community called Ariba Exchange as well as managing several LinkedIn groups. He maintains that even from a B2B perspective the money is often difficult to trace, at least at first.

He writes on Mashable: “It’s not about ROI or advertising dollars at the beginning. It’s not about messaging and positioning. Customers will come back to a place with a compelling reason for going there in the first place.

“Let the user determine the model, and look at the type of user that you want to attract as the primary driver behind the online presence.”

But surely some companies by now are reaching a point where we can begin to see the money?

Social monetisation manager?

Mashable’s community manager Vadim Lavrusik, who previously worked at the New York Times, says making money is the next logical step for news organisations. He cites a job advert from Cox Media Group, which emphasises the revenue generation aspect of community management. Cox runs 15 broadcast television stations, 85 radio stations and eight daily newspapers. Interestingly, it already has a social media manager, Mathilde Picard, and this is an extra role – another example of how media groups create interaction first before moving to monetisation.

“In some ways, Cox is making a big bet that social media will play a big role in its revenue strategy — at least one big enough to require such a position,” says Lavrusik. “The position is part of a further shift in company strategy to invest in digital.”

The question is: are we ready to take this leap into a focus on not just interaction but revenue in the UK? Social media is about conversation, not pound signs, and brands risk losing credibility by seemingly selling out to advertising and harsh marketing messages.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing

If you were to ask Screen Digest senior analyst Ronan de Renesse the best price is for an app, he doesn’t consider the answer for very long: “Free”. Giving apps away is still the most popular app strategy – look how much green there is on this graph of Distimo data from March.

But in an interview with TheMediaBriefing, de Renesse argued that while free is the best entry point for new users, freemium is the most promising business model. Hook your customer in and you can still charge extra for improved functionality.

Here’s our video chat with de Renesse:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Easier with TV?

In the UK, Sky is offering mobile access as part of its premium subscription package. For example, for its iPad app Sky customers paid just £6 extra while non-subscribers paid £35.

News monetisation

In March this year Sky announced that it intends to charge for its Sky News app. Despite showing promise by being a live app rather than edition download, de Renesse is less convinced that this will work.

“The more devices you include the more you reduce the addressable market. So how many people today have a tablet, smartphone, PC and are reading a lot of news as well.”

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing

It may only be three months since we published Mobile Media Strategies for Media Owners but already there have been significant shifts in the digital publishing industry. As the author of the intelligence report Dominic Jacquesson mentions in this video, many of its predictions have come to pass.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Platform changes

Things are changing fast. Now Research in Motions’s Playbook tablet will run Android apps, Nokia is no longer producing new phones using its Symbian platform and is working with Microsoft. Apple still dominates with Android in second place but maybe Microsoft can surprise everyone.

Publisher re-imaginings

Many national newspapers are really shining on the app front. Jacquesson singles out the FT and New York Times as moving away from the traditional print news-cycle and the trappings of established workflow. Regional newspapers are also – slowly – grasping how they can improve their classified adverts and mine the rich geo-location vein that Patrick Smith mentioned in thus article.

According to Jacquesson, magazines haven’t changed enough and they’re still “locked in with the design departments”. He continues: “They need to get their web teams in there and innovate around proper functionality. Re-imagining what magazines should be like for the future.”

Price switches

With Hearst and Condé Nast picking up the Apple’s new subscription model there’s been some speculation that this might force app prices down. But interestingly Jacquesson thinks that the new deal might give stabilise prices. However, he warns if publishers develop for Android apps it could affect overall pricing – consumers who use Google expect most of their apps for free.

Jacquesson’s final message is clear. There are plenty of ways to make money but some real thinking needs to be done about innovating fast. If you don’t act now there will be a new tech company who will take your audience.

Originally published on TheMediaBriefing