I’ve said it before: Be the platform.
Rich Gordon has a lengthy, comprehensive essay that advises newspapers to be the network, not a destination. You must read the whole thing. It’s full of the right ideas.
Same thing. Different words.
I’m going to suggest a different approach: Instead of trying to build the best destination, build the best network.
The kind of network I’m referring to is a web of interconnections — links between content and between people. In essence, I’m arguing that on the Web, news organizations — perhaps, all media — should focus on building themselves “into the clickstream.” The goal: make your Web site a network hub that connects content and conversations.
If you’re not linking in, linking out, joining the conversation, telling people what’s good on the web, you’re making mistake.
Newspaper managers have traditionally believed they needed to build “sticky” sites and try to capture people and pretend the rest of the web doesn’t exist. That is a strategy doomed to fail. Only by being part of the clickstream can you hope to succeed.
[…] Howard Owens has a lot to say about being the platform. Today he said, Newspaper managers have traditionally believed they needed to build “sticky†sites and try to capture people and pretend the rest of the web doesn’t exist. That is a strategy doomed to fail. Only by being part of the clickstream can you hope to succeed. […]
I guess that’s also a reason to distribute your video content to more sites than just your own.
Yup.
I’d like to see someone perfect an advertising approach that’s less annoying than pre-roll but brings the creator revenue no matter where the video is seen, whether it’s YouTube, e-mail, or your own site. An on-screen bug, or a public broadcasting sponsorship, or even the Taco Bell Video Moment. It’ll probably turn out to be some underhanded form of product placement, though.
There’s a bit of irony in all this.
You and Rich are absolutely right to focus on networks and building yourself into the clickstream. But when most news organizations talk about networks, they’re talking about something different — not the broad network of information sharing that you and Rich refer to, but social networks.
Ironically, most news orgs are building their social networks in a way that walls them off from the network you an Rich are talking about. They’re creating profiling systems, buddy lists and commenting features, but they’re restricting these features to their own site.
As a user, an isolated network has limited value. If my profile on mytown.com can only be linked to profiles of other mytown.com users, it will have a value of X to me. If that same profile can be linked to profiles on other sites — local blogs and the metro area news site, for example — it will have a value of at least X * the number of additional users I can link to.
Content on news sites is more valuable if it’s connected the outside network. The same goes for social networks on news sites.
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One other thought on this: If a local site does create an open social network connected to the community as a whole, it will have the platform it needs to do what, so far, nobody has been able to do well: aggregate then sort the best content in the community. Anybody with a smart algorithm can produce a firehose of aggregated local content. Only the most robust, active local social network will be able to sort that firehose of local content.