3 Ways Widgets Can Help Local Newspapers.

Assuming you’ve read my post “what is a widget?”, and you now know what a “widget” is, lets take look at how local newspapers can use widgets.

Some of the major newspapers have jumped headstrong into widget development already. The New York Times has created a widget for their crossword puzzle, The Washington Post has a widget for viewing photos and keeping track of 2008 campaign issues, and a stock market tracking widget is available from the Wall Street Journal. We’ve seen less from the more local publications who have much more to gain. It’s true that the business model is not yet clear for widgets and none of major news sites have made any money from their widgets, but here’s some clear opportunities widgets present to local newspapers.

1.Branding:

Besides allowing newspapers to draw in new readers, widgets can be used to create mini local news kiosks on other community web sites. Chamber sites could incorporate widgets with local business news, High School sites can get feeds from Prep-sports. it’s just a matter of time before some local newspaper comes up with the perfect tool or game that “catches on” in the community through widgets which can be easily copied and shared on-line. Regardless of whether or not they read the newspaper or visit the newspaper site, the newspaper’s brand is boosted by being exposed on the widget skin.

2. Advertising:

Widgets can be sponsored by local advertisers. It’s like placing your logo or advertising message on a video game console, your message is in front of the user while they’re using the widget. A pet store might sponsor a “pet finder” widget or a local dealership might sponsor a “sports scoreboard” widget. Newspapers can even be involved in helping advertisers create their own widgets to share important information that they have to share. We’ve already begun to see classifieds widgets with local auto and real estate listings.

3. Promotions & Events:

Newspapers can team up with local advertisers to offer promotions revolving around game widgets. Advertisers can deliver special coupons or deals to these local kiosks on other sites. Widgets can be designed around local community events. The “Tournament Of Roses” widget or the “Western Days” widget might be used for delivering content on local events.

The opportunities to benefit from widgets are only beginning for local newspapers. While steady declines in circulation and print advertising have continued to plague newspapers, widgets are a way to reach out to new, younger users online, who might not otherwise come to a local newspaper’s web site.

“The Word Is Alive”

What is a “widget”?

When I was 9 years old I got my first handheld video game for christmas. It was a football game with little LED lights for each player and although I could turn off the sound, it made the most annoying beeps as I ran a player across the screen or scored a touchdown. “What is that “gadget” you got there?” my grandfather would ask. When I got to high school my Economics professor used “ACME Widget Company” in examples of income and revenue models he was teaching. A “widget” or “gadget” in these cases was a mechanical or electronic device that served some purpose. The video game served as a form of entertainment and the ACME “Widget” was a placeholder name used to represent a product that the company created and sold to earn income. In actuality it could have been ACME Video Game Corp., thus a “widget” is actually a “gadget” that one party manufactures and another uses for some purpose. Not much has changed today.

WWW widgets are nothing more than useful gadgets that can be placed on web sites or on your computers desktop to do something, only in this case the gadgets are not mechanical or electronic, they are tiny software programs. There’s a widget on this page that shows the most recent blog posts. Rather than having to type in the title of the post I just place the widget there and it’s does the work for me automatically. There are hundreds of categories of widgets available to be used on any web site or computer. Most widgets are available free, although some entrepreneurs have started charging for them or charging for more advanced versions of certain widgets.

How Do You Get A Widget?

There are hundreds of sites offering widgets that you can download and use. Here are some of the most popular:

• widgets.yahoo.com
• http://www.dashboardwidgets.com/
• http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ (For Apple Users)

Once you choose the widget you want to start using, you can install it in one of two ways depending upon where you are going to use it. If you will be using it on your computer’s desktop you will simply need to download and install it as you would any other program. If you will be using it on your website, you will need to place it within the code that is used to create your website. Placing the widget on your website may require some technical knowledge, as you’ll be making changes to the appearance of your website to accommodate the new widget. Many widgets come with detailed installation instructions to help you in this process.

“The Word Is Alive”

Are Private Party Ads Going Mobile?

I received the following text message this morning from a friend in my bible study group. “My daughter got a job in New York, does anyone want to buy a Honda CRX -CHEAP?”. It’s not the first time I’ve received what I consider a “private party” ad via cell phone. I’ve even received images and video for some items.

As the price point for higher technology cell phones decreases we’ll see more of this type of FREE peer to peers (group) advertising taking place. Many social networking sites are also making it easier for this type of advertising. Myspace has its bulletin space where you can post a message instantly to all of your “friends” and Facebook has its “News Feeds” which can be used to communicate offers to people in your network. Even the more business oriented sites such as Linkedin.com offer tools to help users look for jobs within their network of contacts.

There’s also a certain benefit of buying and selling within your group. The “trust factor” comes into play. People generally like to buy from people they trust and offer better deals to their friends or associates. As the various networks of friends grow that’ll be the first place people look to conduct a private party transaction.

Here’s some things newspapers might consider in light of this trend:

1. Provide tools to help private parties advertise on-line:

With the proliferation of free classified sites and peer to group advertising venues it’s becoming difficult and time consuming for sellers to cover all the bases. Perhaps newspapers can create a communications center which allows users to enter and submit messages from a single site. Services such as Vflyer.com, postlets.com, and vendio.com provide valuable tools that focus on the “Sellers” side of the transaction. Many of these sites offer services for free and rely upon paid ads from traffic generated to the ads themselves. People looking to buy a car, for example might be served up an ad for insurance. Newspapers have already begun to sell contextual advertising within editorial content, these ads present more valuable eyeballs who are in the market to buy a certain or product or service.

2. Build groups of on-line users:

The power of newspapers is and continues to be local. It’s not too late to create spaces for local people to interact and form groups around areas of interest. Whether its pets, prep-sports, or local heath, newspapers have valuable “local” content that drives visitors to certain sections. At the very least, voluntary registration forms should be up in all areas of the site. Providing tools to allow users to communicate and join groups within a section allows newspapers to effectively “own” those groups.

3. Embrace mobile technologies:

Beyond the simple mobile alerts and news updates that most newspapers are providing, how about allowing users to share photos and videos from from editorial sections in the printed paper. For many consumers the cell phone is their primary gateway to the internet. Today their are over 3 billion mobile phones in a world of 6 billion people, that 2.5 times more cell phones than Internet connections. Newspapers need to start thinking more about the handsets and less about the PC’s.

“The Word is Alive”

4 Steps For Selling On-line Banner Campaigns To Print Advertisers

The Pareto Principle applied to sales presentations tells us that 80% of the sale comes from 20% of the presentation.

Many small business owners are not web saavy so you can present yourself out of the sale if you’re not careful. As always, be sure to let the client talk as much or more than you in the process. If you allow your interactive sales presentation to become a lecture you’ll end up with an educated non-customer. After you uncover the pain, here’s 4 key steps to presenting on-line banner campaigns to print advertisers.

Step 1. Lead in with demographics:

Lead with demographic information about your on-line visitors. This makes a great transition from a print presentation. Ask questions like: “What kind of customers would you like to have more of?” or “Where do your best customers come from?”. Often time the answer is “referrals” or higher income “buyers” looking for quality and service as opposed to “shoppers” looking for price.

It’s no secret that on-line users, especially on-line newspaper readers, are cream of the crop consumers. Use visuals with bullet points to show the attractiveness of the on-line user to an advertiser. Mention the the advantages of the newspaper demographic over other media types if you identify that as a concern for your client. Click here for some graphs comparing the household incomes for users of competing media types. On newspaper websites you’re actually reaching the “cream” of the cream of the crop. Click here for a sample on-line demographic one pager.

Step 2. Show Samples And Specs:

Most print advertisers are accustomed to paying more for color so be sure to show them some attractive color banner ads from other advertisers in their industry. You may need to search the web to find them but it’s time well spent. Even if you don’t have a laptop available to demo the animations, a color print out works just as well. Better yet, you can prepare a spec ad for them in different sizes. Seeing their business advertised in a color animation is sometimes all it takes to get the contract. Click here for a list of sample banners across different industries.

Step 3. Show Traffic Reports:

The best thing about internet advertising is that it’s measurable. Make sure you show your client that they can know how many people saw their ad, how many responded, what day of the week, what time of day, where they were located. All of the information in a standard DoubleClick report is impressive to a print advertiser. We can only speculate the reach with print campaigns which are often only measured by phone calls. Bring a sample report from another advertiser with you or show them a report on-line if you can. These reports are a natural lead in to the closing step next.

Step 4: Offer the Trial Run.

“You know Mr. Advertiser, with all of these reports available to us, many of my advertisers will run a 90 day trial campaign. We can place different banners in different sections over a period of 90 days and then analyze the data to fine tune the campaign going forward.” Then you pull out your list of available sections and match up their products or services with the best on-line section -Preps, Sports, Health, Main News etc.

I’ve had far more success selling a “sponsorship” with guaranteed minimum impressions at this point than getting into the CPM discussion. $1500 per month for a home page Leaderboard with a guaranteed minimum of 50,000 impressions is 3x more revenue than a $10 cpm. CPM’s are on their way out anyway as I mentioned in my post on “Selling On-line Advertising for Newspapers“.

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Building An Interactive Sales Team

I was approved to build out an interactive sales and development team today.

In some ways it’s a classic case of “be careful what you ask for”. The revenue objectives, although average in comparison to print revenue, are quite aggressive. I guess this is a way of forcing interactive to kick in.

Sales up to this point have relied heavily on up sells from print reps who already have a book of accounts. The model here is to reach those advertisers that have never advertised with us at all.

It’ll be a pretty slim department to start. The initial team will consist of a full-time developer and two full-time sales people. We’ll be doing some heavy cold calling both on the street and the phone. The objective is to at least touch over 200 local businesses each month. We’ll also be making use of on-line prospecting and in paper advertising in an effort to get prospects to come to us.

I don’t expect a full suite of stand-alone products to be available until March 08 so we’ll begin generating revenue by selling bundles, niche on-line products, local search packages and banners on-line. The developer will be as much a part of the team as the feet on the street. The book hasn’t been written in this space yet and I’ve seen some good development people come up with the best on-line products by accident.

We’ll also be working closely with editorial teams to build new opportunities and empower our sites to capture more information about our users. Currently we collect nothing from anyone that visits any of our web sites. We’ll be looking to build in “voluntary” registration to access key content etc. asap.

The task won’t be easy but I’ve done it before so I’m up for the challenge. More importantly, its going to be fun to be free to make things happen again.

“The Word Is Alive”

My First Newspaper Next “Idea Resume”

I finished my first Newspaper Next “Idea Resume” today.

Newspaper Next is an initiative of the American Press Institute designed to provide a blueprint for transforming the newspaper through new business models. The “Idea Resume” is one of the Newspaper Next tools developed to help newspapers summarize new business ideas. It’s basically a one page template of questions about the idea and anlysis of critical assumptions. Click here to download the N2 Idea Resume template.

My first idea proposes to generate monthly fees from clients that have never advertised with the Newspaper. It turns out that there are over 80,000 businesses in our marketplace yet we have maybe 500 who advertise with us. We’ll be partnering with a technology company to build a site that allows businesses to promote themselves on-line and in the paper locally.

I wasn’t really in on the Newspaper Next hoopla meeting but the white paper makes a lot of sense. Any intiative that promotes “failing often and failing fast” is ok by me. I really liked the Idea Resume form which helps to identify strengths and weaknesses in new business ideas. It also does a good job bringing out certain key revenue assumptions. The whole process took about 20 minutes so I should be able to crank out quite a few of these first drafts and then go with the best one.

It’s my objective to get as many irons in the fire as soon as possible. This “Newspapers Next” initiative is basically giving us the green light to innovate. Something that I think the industry should have done 10 years ago. I intend to document my progress throughout each of these projects so stand by for more.

“The Word Is Alive”

The Case For Special Section Sites

One of the first “secrets” I discovered while working in print is that special sections were great revenue generators. Whether it was a glossy tab type publication or just a couple of banner pages within the paper, it gave me something to talk to the client about. A reason to make the phone call is all I needed. The editorial staff, in my opinion, did not really enjoy creating the special sections. Especially sections like the wedding guide or local event guides. Often times they would simply pull out the content from last year’s guide and rehash it to get the section out. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference from last years section when you’re looking for a sample to show advertisers.

Being new to the industry, I was quite intrigued by the special sections sales process especially by the execs that had been around for a while. Everything seems to start with the special sections calendar which the Sales Exec reviews and notices that there’s a section coming up. The exec immediately starts looking around the office for last years section which he or she takes over to the advertiser who was in it last year and says “you were in it last year, do you want to advertise again?” and that’s the extent of the sales process. They hardly ever get 100% participation prospecting that way so each year the section generates less and less advertising.

Many of these special sections focus on billion dollar industries like the bridal industry, for example. Rather than put the section up on-line as a PDF version of the print product, how about creating a bridal section on-line which updates every week or even once a month? Now you’ve got something to talk to the advertiser about.

Where the newspaper may not be reaching the younger crowd, the web is. Taking the bridal example, we know that most weddings are planned by women 6 months to a year out so we are trying to catch the attention of 1/2 of those 18-34 year olds who are on-line and in the planning stages of the wedding. What better place to advertise that on-line right next to fresh wedding-related content that updates weekly. The print piece, which targets an older demographic, delivers the second punch. These are the people who are actually paying for the wedding –Mom and Dad.

So the happy couple reads the ideas on-line next to the ad and takes those ideas to mom and dad who are reading the print piece in the paper. Sprinkle in some well placed loss leader ROP ads during wedding season and you’ve got yourself a knockout campaign for successful bridal advertising.

The Word Is Alive!