Knowledge To Be Shared

Web content is an exhaustive topic that includes everything from podcasts, text news stories, blog updates, video, and all points in between. You can find detailed essays and resources on most of these throughout the knowledge section of our website. There is one consistent theme amongst all these various elements, and it should be familiar to all media professionals: Engaging with the consumer. The difference is that the Internet provides a much more interactive and immersive experience.

Adapting from a singular model like audio with radio to a multimedia and interactive model like the Internet is the primary challenge in considering content.

Multimedia
When considering your website content, the first thing you need to do is change your point-of-view. You are no longer dealing with a single distribution point featuring a single medium of formatted content; you are dealing with multiple media and multiple distribution points, and the content itself can include highly personal ideas and thoughts. Let’s look at each of these individually.

Multiple media
By now the web experience includes text, photos, audio, and video. These are not just opportunities but also expectations. Even book sellers now include “video trailers” of their books on the web. Why? Originally it was due to the fact that it was new and different, but now the expectation on book releases is that you’ll get a video interpretation of the novel. Using the whole web toolbox is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. A media site that doesn’t include audio, video, photos, along with text is just not complete.

Multiple distribution points
Users want their media in the way that is most convenient for them. For a radio broadcaster, that means not just a terrestrial stream, but also an audio stream online and a mobile stream via cell phones. For online content, that means that you can’t just provide content but also allow users to take it with them and consume it in a way that is convenient for them. RSS feeds and social media sharing are examples of extending your content’s distribution beyond a radio tower and the website.

Personal
The rise of reality TV, blog journalism, Twitter, and MySpace and Facebook has created a heightened connection between media and consumers. It is not enough that stars produce movies, now they blog, twitter, and update their Facebook pages. This is the new reality for all media: If the executive of a shoe company can become a celebrity by personalizing his business via Twitter, imagine what you can do with your content.

Interactivity
The Internet is disruptive for a number of reasons, but one of the most important for content providers to understand is that it is an interactive medium. Your listeners, viewers, and users want to have a voice—to comment, applaud, discuss, and complain. For media, this means that you need to empower your users to be able to communicate with you, receive communication from you, and communicate with each other.

Traditional media is used to the first two—users have always been able to phone the radio station, and the radio station has always broadcast to its listeners, but this is qualitatively different. The new media landscape empowers a whole range of touch points between a media company and its users. You can now elicit feedback via email, text message, Twitter @ replies, Facebook wall messages, website comments, message board posts, and—yes—even phone calls. This works the other way, as well. A radio station can—and should—now communicate with its users via all these ways.

The essence of this is interactivity—the engagement between the user and a media company, not just from one to the other. It is important for media companies today to empower this conversation, by allowing not just the commenting on content, but also the participation in it, as well. This is the strategic underpinning of UGC, a web 2.0 buzzword if there ever was one—engaging with your users and giving them a voice.

A good example here is a site like the Huffington Post—while the site is known for its political articles, a significant amount of the site’s engagement takes place below the articles—within the comments. For a media company looking to increase engagement and build monetizable page views and time-on-site, allowing comments is a powerful tool.

This leads to the final piece of the interactive puzzle—empowering your users to communicate with each other. One of the real powerful aspects of content on the Internet is that it acts as kindling for the flame of engagement that lasts long after the content is posted. The content is posted, a user comments, and then another user disagrees, and then for days afterward you watch as the conversation unfolds on your site, all thanks to a single content item and the empowerment of the consumer to comment and discuss.

As you address your site content strategy, you need to assess all these aspects. Having compelling and engaging content that mirrors your broadcast is a critical piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only one. You need to think of other media to include, how to make your site more personal, and, finally, how to leverage the power of interactivity.

More information: History of Content

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