WikiPR

Okay, a few questions come to mind over the WikiScandal...

How many people visited the LA Times’ Web site and/or its OpEd pages before last week?

Not many.

And how many people cared about what the LA Times was planning with their Web site or Internet strategy?

Again, not many.

And now?

How many page views have the LA Times' Web site and its OpEd pages received?

A lot.

And – importantly – how many readers will keep returning to the LA Times’ Web site, and its OpEd pages, into the future, because they’ve become fascinated by what Michael Kinsley and company are planning?

A huge lot.

Oh. And one last question. Or two.

Do you really think, after running a quality online service for several years, that Kinsley doesn’t understand what a Wiki is, or how it could be hijacked by “n’er-do-wells”? ("N'er-do-wells" is Craig Newmark's famous term for those evil forces he and his superheroic customer-support team have been fending off for years. Thnk about how much spam you see on Craigslist...now realize how amazing that is.)

Do you really think Kinsley cared if the experiment succeeded? Or is he as happy as can be that it exploded and spread LATimes bits all over the place?

And do you think he's not even happier to be reaping the "network beta-testing effect," having thousands of smart minds across the Internet offering innovative, focus-tested, detailed, and FREE product-development information?

You know the answers to all these questions.

Kinsley knows what an audience is, and he knows precisely how to move it.

The LA Times’ WikiScandal is the best thing a newspaper has done this year to try and save this scandalously sclerotic industry from itself. Bravo.

Newspapers Have Lost Their Prime Product Advantage

There’s been a lot written recently about the demise of the newspaper. Circulation is down, daily freebies and Craigslist are battering the economic model, and journalists are having to share their professional space with citizens (quelle horreur!).

As we’ve thought about why consumers interested in news have abandoned newspapers, we’ve tried to go back to basics, to look at a newspaper simply as an information product.

Every product has a competitive advantage, a product feature that gives it a value to customers. What’s the advantage for printed news?

Newspapers, like TiVO, have allowed time-shifting, giving readers the ability to read the news when they've wanted – on a park bench with lunch, on the subways on the way to work, at home on the couch in the evening. If you wanted news from radio or TV, you had to tune in at 6 or 11, or on the top of the hour. Newspapers freed consumers from the tyranny of the scheduled broadcast.

Newspapers kept that advantage through the 80s, until CNN and other around-the-clock news programming arrived. At that point, the jig was up. As the 6:00 and 11:00 and hourly spots gave way to constant news, circulation figures started to dip. CNN also offered time-shifting - better time-shifting - for news customers, and those customers responded. The shift began.

At the end 90s, circ figures really started to move down. As the Internet grew in sophistication and size, more and more readers drifted online for news - the product that allowed still better time-shifting, providing up-to-the-minute news whenever a reader wanted it.

Alas, newspapers can’t compete with that innovation. The trend is clear for printed news organizations: Either develop a new product advantage, or continue to lose readers to the always-on, always-updated, whenever-they-want-it network.

And next? Wireless news delivery – from the online aggregators (who now have the lead and technical expertise) and local-news and citizen-journalism sites (Backfence, et al, who now have the lead and technical expertise), not newspapers. What do you think will happen then?

"Mass Customerization Pull" - new approach?

According to the blog of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN): "Volvo is not interested in telling everyone about their automobiles -- just their target group." Tim Ellis, director of Global Advertising, at Volvo (Sweden) recently spoke about their strategic priority in the way the company advertises during their congress in Seoul.

Volvo is interested in balancing mass media with one-to-one communications, or in other words "mass customerization pull". The company used a new media approach to engage audiences by creating a "documentary" about a small Swedish village where 32 people bought a Volvo on the same day. However, they used traditional mass media channels to advertise and drive people to their website.

Will using mass media channels with innovative, nontraditional content attract customers?

Are consumer databases the new "bread and butter" for news organizations?

There are four ways for a news organization to make money:
1. To sell content
2. To sell advertising
3. To sell products and services
4. To sell consumer data

News organizations have used the first three ways to make money. In today's society, to know your consumer for the goal of personalization, and thus use the fourth way, is increasingly becoming the wave of the future.

The choice that consumers have for information sources on the Internet is increasing each day. They need tools to help them with this choice. RSS can be one such tool. Alert emails are another one. The sites like My Yahoo news, Google News are also tools to help consumers organize information. What do they have in common? They allow personalization of information.

Technology is again helping to shape a marketplace and this time for news organizations. It helps to simplify the search and consumption of information. It makes it possible for the consumer to interact with the medium. It allows organization, tracking, and analysis of the needs, the wants, the behaviors and the actions of consumers. News organizations can store this invaluable information. Where? Its consumer databases.

Armed with this information, they can offer personalization to their consumers, and so make an impact on the first three ways to make money. Personalization of content, personalization of advertising, personalization for the sale of products and services - all more interesting for the consumer.

News organizations can offer this invaluable knowledge to other companies. What other medium can boast the daily, if not hourly, and consistent interaction with consumers. All of which leads to very robust details of the paths that consumers take to obtain information.

Knowing your consumers not only enhances the first three ways to make money, but also leads to a new way to make money. Collecting this rich consumer data will become the heart of future business based on personalization.

E-bay, Amazon, Yahoo... and others understand this well. It is the heart of their business.

It all boils down to knowing the consumers' needs, wants, behaviors and actions. Those media companies that have and will have the consumer knowledge will control the future of personalization and will shape the media landscape. Those media companies that do not have the consumer knowledge will depend on others.

The news organizations have a choice.