Product approach

• Provide a unique experience
• Focus on a strong brand, good performance, good design and provide easy to use services
• Define business objectives
• Be transactional
• Make it fun
  • Gamify local news and information if you can

Audience approach

• Recognize mobile users are task driven and formulate everything around that
• Know what users are doing on mobile devices in the market
• Sharing+Location+Socializing

Mobile content strategy around local news and information

• In general
  • Define what’s in and what’s out. Don’t be everything to everyone.
  • Adhere to the business objectives
• News
  • Daily flow of information for just mobile users
    • You picks
    • Community’s picks
    • Traffic/weather/breaking news
    • Easy submission tools where content goes live immediately
  • Quote of the day with some context
  • Events to go to right now, later today, tomorrow, next week
  • Daily poll
  • Social flow of local news, information and people
• Sports
  • Information unique to mobile users
    • Scores
    • Video highlights
    • Games, player recaps
    • Best of local personalities/bloggers
  • Best sports performance of the week
  • Athletes/games to watch this week
  • Events
  • Social flow of local/national/collegiate sports news, information and people
• Search
  • Local search for things to do right now
  • Local business directory of places to eat, drink or get service right now

Business model

• Location based opportunities based on preferences, behavior
• Coupons
• Deep discounts
• Virtual goods
• Buy photos

Analytics

• Measure the quality of the interactions
• Measure real-world interactions
• Reward influence in real-time

Some links I referenced for this post:

• The Mobile Moment: A content strategy and transactional goals
• How social media can jumpstart your mobile strategy
• Mobile Trends for Marketers, Product Marketers and Product Managers

Are you Experienced? – At a minimum, everyone using social media and participating in innovation should understand that they are new tools, not completely understood, and often lack participation and involvement by the people most experienced in life. – Jeffrey Phillips

Cooperation vs Collaboration – How can we ensure that collaboration and cooperation coexist without threatening the organic, self organizing nature of connectives? – cloudhead

I’m amazed at the number of times reporters at media companies use the same sources or cover town meeting the same way they have for years. Being a part of a highly engaged  and active community is a personal choice and requires living, working and playing in different ways with new behaviors.

Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning… reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.

Modern community building – Joel Spolsky

Modern community building -Fred Wilson

NASA Shuttle Launch Photos

The need for culture change in newsrooms is well documented, including most recently from Doug Fisher citing Earl Wilkinson.

I won’t recite past specifics on why or how it can be achieved. Ultimately, it’s a personal decision where each individual must decide to change.

Here’s an idea I floated a couple of weeks ago to a team at work. I want to launch something new every 30 days. I’ve never done that before. The items in bold listed below seem like good places to focus.

Culture change in the news industry involves a collection of practices that break from the past, some obvious and some not-so-obvious — yet all not generally practiced in our industry even today:

• Listen to the market.
• Prioritise expenditures to your USPs.
• Outsource, link or cut what isn’t your USP.
• More sales feet on the street.
• Invest in research.
• Digital first.
• Focus relentlessly on your differentiators.
• Sell market solutions, not space.
• Dialogue, not monologue.
• Embrace the crowd.
• Be willing to fail, but fail fast.
• Go on the offense for readers and advertisers.
• Speed over perfection.
• You can’t be all things to all people.
• Respect the platform for its unique value.
• Go where the growth is.
• Be relevant.
• Place many small bets.
• Low-cost innovation.

The last thing I was apart of that went out to the market launched June 13. I guess I better get going.

Why INMA will keep talking about culture change at newspapers

I’m doing some research today while working on a project request for a new mobile app (mentioned in this post) I’m pitching and came across this example of a mobile content strategy implemented by a hotel:

One major difference is telling multiple stories (web) vs. telling a single, focused story at a given moment (mobile). To make this happen, along with the functionality, the editorial structure had to change significantly. For example, for the mobile site, content that encouraged booking was prioritized, and the language became less marketing, more instructional. – Three things about mobile content

Do you have an example of a mobile content strategy that you’ve implemented?

That shift actually occurred about three to four years ago when, in my view, skills like community management, content strategy and content marketing became more well known and part of normal business practices. It’s time to move on.

The one glaring problem that maybe the example between Steve Buttry and Gene Weingarten proves is this: Traditionally, media companies and journalists haven’t viewed content as a business asset, while other industries outside of publishing have embraced it.

Journalism has an ethic of “objectivity” that pushes us to pretend we are objects, not people. And you can’t develop a personal brand without being a person and being seen as one. – Buttry

The truth is every business, person, brand or journalist with a blog, Twitter account or Facebook fan page is a brand and a publisher. So is the guy sitting in his mother’s basement uploading videos on YouTube.

Of course, the problem with the whole argument here is that Weingarten is a brand, and he kind of knows it. He even says as much in his own way.

When I was a hungry young reporter in the 1970s, I thought of myself as a superman, an invincible crusader for truth and justice — even though, looking back at old pictures, I now see that I resembled an emaciated weasel in unattractive clothing. My goals, however, were unambiguous, and heroic: 1) Get great stories that improve the world. 2) Get famous. 3) Get doe-eyed young women to lean in close and whisper, “Take me.” – Weingarten

“When you design the business around the experience, (instead of the experience around the business) you create a more powerful and relatable offer.” – Colin Raney

Business Model: Create a Platform for an Experience

IowaCaucus.com

I work at a media company in Iowa and politics is one of the things outside of work that I follow most closely. We’ve launched a niche site, IowaCaucus.com, without many resources to keep people engaged. It’s a start. We have one internal content resource and two people contributing regularly to compliment curation efforts and wire content.Our SEO efforts need to improve, and we have plans for a couple of features that would help engage with the audience.

Hoopla Music

I’ve been involved with the Hoopla Music project from the start. I enjoy the live music scene in Eastern Iowa, and it’s better than you might think. This site is easy to navigate as include the most comprehensive list of live music shows in the area. From the start, we committed a live person to contact bands and local venues to create the data. It launched about two weeks ago and so far the traffic is low but the audience has had nothing but good things to say.

BarcampICR

I’m no stranger to the barcamp experience and when I heard a group of local people in the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City area were starting the process to organize one I wanted to help in some way. I am currently working on the content of the site. It’s live and we formally hope to launch late next week. The goal of the barcamp is to get the creative and innovate minds together in the area and start a dialogue and  do some things that help better the community.

Other ideas I’m working on:

The essential mobile app for Univ. of Iowa college students – The name sounds pretty lofty but all the mobile apps out there seem to cater to the classroom experience. We are working on focus groups to learn exactly what could make the experience of living in the Iowa City area better. So far, the hypothesis centers around these topics: study, drink, recreation, style. We should learn much from the focus groups.

Proactive approach to community contributors - Our company has done well in recruiting and receiving photos, videos and news tips from people who are willing to help us cover the news. But we have no internal mechanism to easily contact them when breaking news or weather events occur. These contributors could also be good sources for community news and events we don’t know about. I’m working with a small group to define the requirements of building a service to group contributors into affinity groups with a trigger to email, text or phone them when it is most relevant.

Mobile strategy – As the web continues to shrink and the need for local media to be more liquid, how a media company plays in the mobile space will be essential to our survival. Not to mention how we make money on mobile platforms.

Product differentiation via storytelling – We have newspaper and broadcast television packages that look and feel very similar on web and mobile platforms. No on is really training or educating well on storytelling on digital platforms. I’m working with a few others to define the training and tools necessary to transition our teams to work that into the everyday workflow.

What projects are you currently working on?