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Category results for "Innovation"

Innovation | Perspectives

Engagement and the evolution of audience to advocates

Digital media is waking up to the hard truth that more is not always better. As a result, the strong belief that a high volume of content attracts a high number of page views is being replaced by the stark realization that quality trumps everything – even traffic.

NBC News is just the latest in a string of publishers to shift their focus from pushing pageviews to encouraging audience engagement. The emphasis on quality over quantity is part of a larger strategy to avoid commoditization by ensuring differentiation.

Rather than produce more news content, NBC News produces more original content around the news in the form of analysis, narrative, and additional formats including podcast and video. The outcome is less volume – approximately 25% fewer stories a day. However the goal is to deliver more value as this is a take on the news the audience can only get from NBC News. In an interview with Digiday, Nick Ascheim, SVP of Digital at NBC News, recounts the massive “culture shift” that has taken place in the newsroom. In the past, he says, the company was focused on pageviews. “The approach now is, let’s worry a little less about how many clicks and more about telling a good story.”

But it’s not enough to adopt a new mindset; companies must also adjust internal KPIs to measure success and gauge failure. Undeterred by the lack of industry standards or metrics to quantity engagement, NBC News has developed its own, unique formula. It defines a loyal user as one who has visited the site five or more times in two consecutive months. Of course, the way a publisher chooses to define and measure engagement will depend on key variables such as content category, delivery format, audience demographics and, above all, company objectives.

Engagement from the Start

The efforts of publishers like NBC News to set new performance goals and take on the task of internalizing them is a huge step in the right direction. (NBC News has even gone so far as to print the new goals on cards it distributes to writers and employees.) But publishers would also do well to apply the same rigor to how they acquire and engage audiences in the first place.

An obvious place to start is mobile apps, where app companies are learning the hard way that strategies focused on attracting massive numbers of users are fatally flawed. In the early days, the App Economy was a numbers game where data-driven (in my view data-obsessed) approaches worked well. Companies pursued strategies that allowed them to buy app installs at low prices in the belief that it would pay off. It seemed to work, allowing some apps – particularly games and lifestyle apps – to rocket up the app store charts.

But the gold rush mood sobered when a flurry of reports and blogs made the headlines arguing  that app installs, like mayflies, were literally here today and gone tomorrow. Data released by app analytics and attribution companies, highlighted “insane” app unistall rates, adding gasoline to the fire.

The Mother of all Metrics

Today the companies across all app categories and geographies are coming to terms with the realization that engagement is what I like to call “the mother of all metrics.” Indeed, engagement isn’t just the end-game. It matters at every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Finding ways to grow (and measure) engagement is the toughest task that confronts every company with digital assets, not just apps.

Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from app managers as they rethink and retool to identify, acquire, engage, and retain high-quality users from the get-go. Their journey started a few years back with a singular focus on driving traffic. (Sound familiar?) They relied heavily on ASO (App Store Optimization). But their toolbox of capabilities has since expanded and evolved to include direct marketing, social media, influencer outreach, above the line advertising and marketing, and everything in between. All in an effort to forge deeper connections with fewer users.

By way of background, ASO is similar to SEO. Only instead of publishers optimizing elements of their content and websites in an effort to show up high in search engine results, publishers optimize key elements of their app store landing page and presence – such as keywords, icons and videos – to ensure people discover and download their app. That may deliver a high quantity of users, but the success is fleeting if efforts fail to drive lasting loyalty and frequent use of the apps.

Quality Rules

Indeed, ASO has a role to play at every step of the journey. This inclues production, presence, promotion and the pragmatism app developers and companies will need to build a business, not just release an app. For savvy app marketers, ASO has evolved into an approach that encompasses everything neccessary to deliver great content and great experiences via an app. That is what’s required to move the needle on audience engagement and take an app from being simply discoverable to truly engaging. This ensures that the app goes from being a one-time download to a longterm addiction.

For publishers, winning used to be about creating huge volumes of content. For app makers, winning was about buying huge volumes of users. In both businesses the rules have changed, making way for a renewed focus on quality.

In all areas of your business, quality trumps everything. And engagement is emerging the performance metric that matters across the every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Whether you want to attract an audience or grow revenues, quality matters. Strategies aimed at boosting page views or installs may deliver fast — but not sustainable — growth. To achieve that, companies must double-down on efforts to create content and experiences that are genuinely engaging, thus converting an audience of readers into a legion of advocates for the long-term.

Innovation | Perspectives

Axios and The New York Times explore new business models

The New York Times and Axios couldn’t be more different. The former is a venerable print newspaper founded in 1851 and finds itself in the midst of a digital transformation. The latter was born digital, launching online just last year.

While it breaks more than its fair share of news, The Times is well known for its detailed deep-dives on a variety of subjects from politics and business to cooking, sports, and book reviews. Axios, on the other hand, is the very essence of brevity concentrating on business, politics, and tech. Their stories quickly deliver the basics and let you move on with your busy life . (Though recently it has also branched out into media and science reporting.)

Yet for all these seeming differences, the two publications may have more in common than not. When it comes down to it, both want to earn consumers’ trust and loyalty by delivering quality journalism every day. And both are working on new models for delivering the news in a profitable digital package, however that manifests itself.

At this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Mark Thompson CEO of the Times and Mike Allen, co–founder and executive editor at Axios appeared onstage in separate interviews, and what they had to say offered a fascinating window into the changing face of the journalism business.

Short and Satisfying

Every journalist learns the ABCs –  accuracy, brevity, clarity. Axios takes this seriously but, according to Allen, their focus starts with the brevity. “Traditional newspapers served their purpose in their day, but as we got busier, it was harder to make time to read,” he said. “The idea of Axios is how can we efficiently use your time and catch you up quickly.”

Discussing The Times’ transformation into a more digitally-centric property, Thompson admitted that mistakes were made along the way. But he feels confident that they have a much stronger digital offering today. He explained that in the 70s and 80s, the newspaper expanded into multiple different sections including lifestyles, food, fashion, and people came to think of The Times brand as representing much more than news and opinion.

However, he said “I think one of the missteps in a way was in digital—that the Times got typecast again to be just being about news, where in fact it’s about culture, travel, food and so on and so forth. We’re trying to [return to] the idea of a media provider who can help you with many aspects of your life, as well as giving you the best journalism in the world and a range of opinion,” he said.

A Trusted Source

Regardless of whether you are succinct or verbose, stick to the news or offer broader insights, you need to earn readers’ trust to take a share of their valuable time. And, as we move into an era of social media sharing and an ever-growing number of news sources competing for attention, earning and maintaining trust is increasingly difficult.

Allen points out that in previous generations there were a limited number of news sources, (including The New York Times). In those days, people tended to believe what these sources proffered as news. However, with ever proliferating “news” sources, increasingly disintermediated from the source itself through social media distribution, figuring out what’s true and what’s not has become challenging.

“Now, people – very understandably – don’t know what to believe, whom to trust.” So at Axios, he said “we hope to be a safe place where you can come. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the [political] spectrum, you are going to be able to very quickly see what reality is.”

Thompson sees delivering quality journalism as the natural path to building a loyal audience. Even though some readers may disagree with the message on a given day, the objective is to maintain The New York Times reputation as a trusted source.

“Being true to ourselves and our mission is the best way to build loyalty [with] our subscribers over time. And we have a passionate relationship with our subscribers. Even when they threaten to leave, evidence suggests they are back very soon,” Thompson said.

Building the Strategy

Regardless of the age of these two publications, they are working very hard to create digital products with long-term viability. As Thompson points out, a successful digital strategy needs to be an integration of content strategy and audience engagement.

“In a way, if you can get your audience engagement right, the actual business of turning an engaged audience into money is a very downstream, and in some ways, less difficult, less critical task,” he said. “The real task is getting people’s passionate engagement with the brand, with the  content, and caring about you enough that they are willing to pay.”

Allen says that means avoiding what they call the ‘crap trap.’  “The crap trap is: If you’re just going for clicks, just going for a mass audience, you get pushed down. We are very focused on reaching people who are serious news consumers. These people who to know about something because they are curious and it helps them in their business and professions. That’s what we think about when we post something. We want to make sure it’s worthy of your time,” Allen explained.

Both of these publications are fighting for the same thing: trust, time, and attention. While their approaches may differ, their goals—and many of their underlying tenants—are remarkably similar.

Industry-Research | Innovation

Artificial Intelligence gains momentum with news media

Artificial Intelligence (AI), a computer’s ability to replicate the human thought process and solve problems, is hard at work in today’s news media. And for those not already leveraging AI, the time is now. In the new report, Artificial Intelligence: News Media’s Next Urgent Investment, Martha L. Stone, CEO of the World Newsmedia Network, in association with the INMA, explores how AI is being applied in today’s news industry.

Stone explains that AI has three main forms of behavior: natural language processing; predictive analytics; and machine learning/neural networks. Publishers can apply all three forms to address a wide range of news challenges.

Natural Language Processing

The first form describes the way in which computers understand the natural language process (NLP). It allows for automatic creation of articles (“robo-journalism”). Both the Associated Press and the BBC use Wordsmith, an NLP automated database, to create huge volumes of stories within seconds.

Natural language processing enables speech recognition and is used in devices like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Google’s Home. This type of AI process allows CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Quartz, the Huffington Post, and others to offer “flash” new briefings. Users signal these audio devices to inform them of the day’s news.

Media companies use sentiment analysis, a subset of NLP, to identify opinions in social media and blogs. The sentiment analysis sorts through comments about people, brands, etc. by analyzing both positive and negative words used in online discussions.

NLP also powers the recommendation engines used by many news publishers. Story recommendations help increase both traffic and user engagement. Chat apps and bots can also be used to drive traffic. However, they are especially good at repetitive tasks such as answering specific questions and offering data alerts. A successful example is The Washington Post’s Facebook Messenger feed bot. Users ask the bot questions and responds to overall news inquiries by suggesting links to other relatable news stories.

Predictive Analysis

The second form of AI, predictive analytics, allows analysts to predict trends and behaviors based on a subset of data. Predictive models are often used to target advertising, subscription, or membership offerings. The analytics identify consumer patterns and project the potential the outcome. The Financial Times uses predictive analytics to correlate revenue to content usage and conversion rate to engagement.

Schibsted, one of the biggest news media publishers in Europe, uses predicted analytics to identity the gender of their users. Using predictive analytics, Schibsted’s accuracy of gender prediction grew from 15% – 20% to 100%. Demographic assignments are extremely important in serving personalize content and advertising. Likewise, The Weather Channel uses weather trends to help predict the optimal time for advertising. A cold front or snow storm approaching is a perfect time to advertise hot breakfast foods or batteries.

Machine Learning

The third form of AI is machine learning, which is essentially computers learning to make decisions. Computers identify patterns and apply new logic based on the results. Algorithms allow publishers to make predictions on data, including consumer usage patterns and personal preferences. The New York Times uses machine learning to help identify content for readers. Pinterest uses machine learning to identify relevant user-generated content for their users.

Personalization is a great way to utilize machine learning. These practices include recommendations of text and video, location-specific content, segment-based personalization (identifying users or specific products or a demographic, etc.) and newsletter recommendations. Of course, there are concerns that personalization bubbles leave little room for new content discovery.

Artificial Intelligence offers support and efficiency in real-time using sentiment and machine based audience analytics. It presents the news media with a way to connect with consumers and provide relevancy. Importantly, the use AI technologies has direct and positive impact on revenue and customer engagement.

Innovation | Perspectives

News UK launches V-Studio to create better mobile ad experiences

News UK, whose brands include The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun newspapers as well as social video ad platform Unruly, has opened the doors of its new vertical video studio. The new V-Studio, which sits in News UK’s commercial division The Bridge,  is a bid to boost the amount and quality of video on News UK-owned properties and elsewhere on the Web.

Naturally, V-Studio will both create vertical video advertising for its clients to distribute via its owned properties and platforms. However, it will also allow those same clients (for a fee) to distribute the mobile optimized videos across the Web.

The approach has raised concerns the vertical video studio aims to take on  full-service digital agencies. However, while V-Studio certainly has the capabilities to do so, Milton Elias, head of mobile and video at News UK, says the strategy is to create, not compete. It’s all about producing “better video, better inventory and better engagement” to monetize an audience that has become “by default mobile-first,” he explains. Data that shows 91% of readers accessed The Sun newspaper on their mobile device in April, compared with 82% for The Times News UK. What’s more, The Sun also counted 8.7 million video views in the same month.

“Monetizing audiences and delivering a great user experience requires mobile video that has been created for mobile. That means thinking vertically,” Elias says. Easier said than done in a market where many brands somehow believe they can simply squeeze TV ads and assets onto a smaller screen, regardless of the user experience. “Effective mobile advertising needs video that was created for consumption on that device and fit for that purpose,” he adds.

This is where V-Studio comes in “offering clients and brands a canvas they can use to create vertical video assets seamlessly,” he explains. Less than a week after launch, Elias says the studio already boasts a “well-known luxry brand” as its first client, with more in the pipeline.

The top priority is to drive better results through higher engagement. The goal will be to enhance, rather than interrupt,  the user experience. The seven video formats currently produced by the studio sit in the mobile scrolling flow, where users can choose to click on videos, or simply scroll past them.

Another focus of the V-Studio launch is harnessing News UK first party-data and touch points around content users engage with. This will allow marketers order to hone audience targeting and advertising relevancy . “In the beginning we’re selling them [ads] on a direct buy basis and we’re hoping to make that available on a programmatic guaranteed basis,” Elias says.

As he points out, the industry has seen a fundamental shift in how people consume media, particularly via mobile channels. Given that so much of today’s high impact ads are created for consumption on large horizontal screens, News UK wants to lead the charge in optimizing marketing messages for mobile engagement on its sites, and across the web.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

 

Innovation | Video

The full picture: What’s driving USA Today Network’s Get Creative immersive video strategy?

Immersive video—powered by 360° cameras and 3D platforms—is poised to make a significant impact with audiences across devices. Indeed, the advance of and Virtual Reality (VR) changes all the rules, shifting the focus from reach as the measure of effective content and storytelling to depth. More and more companies are embracing VR to connect with people on a deeper level. A new video gold rush is on, as companies race to understand and integrate some form of mixed reality into their content and marketing strategies to move and monetize their audiences.

USA Today Network, which has become one of the most prominent VR content creators in the news business, is one company that doesn’t have to play catch up. Last year it claimed the pole position, launching the first-ever weekly VR news show. “VRtually There” is a collaboration between its editorial team and in-house agency, Get Creative. The intent is to create awareness for brands such as Toyota through content aimed to educate and inspire consumers.

Kelly Andresen, SVP, Head of GET Creative, USA TODAY NETWORK

Peggy Anne Salz—mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove—caught up with Kelly Andresen, SVP and Head of USA Today Network’s Get Creative, to talk about the rules of immersive storytelling and the impact of VR on content, context and the consumer.

At one level, content has to be crafted to appeal to audiences, which means it has to valuable and relevant. But the advance of mobile and apps means content also needs to be more contextual. How do you manage both?

We see a range. At one end, it’s all about a 100% fully custom and bespoke approach. In those cases, we work with clients and their agencies to make recommendations on the best content to reach their audiences and their KPIs. But on the other end of the spectrum, we also see local clients who don’t just want to tell a compelling story to their customers and potential customers. They also need to drive immediate results like in-store traffic or ecommerce. In those cases, it’s about creating a context—and the right environment—for them to showcase their content and advertising message. So, in that case, it’s really about creating custom content, not branded content. It needs to provide an environment and a context where there the advertiser can showcase their specific advertising message or their unique proposition that will raise awareness of their brand and drive immediate action.

Contextual content for a local audience sounds like a good opportunity for local advertisers, which might not have the budget for content marketing,. They can piggyback” on the content you create and distribute….

Yes, but it is also a challenge for the industry as no one has really cracked local branded content at scale. Getting it right is expensive for these advertisers, and long approval processes don’t match what local advertisers need if they want to engage customers in the right time and place. It’s doesn’t fit the content of the individual. That’s where we have a unique opportunity because we are a network of 110 sites with actual physical locations, real journalists, and real connections to our communities across the U.S. This gives the infrastructure and the team to be able to create really unique solutions at an affordable price that will still drive results in the local markets. It’s an area I am going to be very focused on in 2017 as we work to build out a local branded content solution at scale.

We’re also focused on how can we revolutionize the model to help retailers tell great stories with content that also allow them to bring customers in-store. I’m particularly excited about our partnership with Walgreens, one of the nation’s largest pharmacies that also offers beauty products. They are pursuing a strategy to brand themselves as a destination for beauty products. This makeover extends to creating an entire content strategy. That’s where we’ve partnered to create original content in the form of photo galleries and 2D videos showing customers how they can “get the look” with products. Distribution of this content across all channels, including social, drives awareness of the brand. It also changes brand perception and drives calls to action including signups for the beauty program. It shows us how branded content and custom content can work for both local and national advertisers, in the right context, to move customers across all steps of the marketing funnel.

You have a multi-dimensional view of content, customers and context. You have also added virtual reality to the mix. How are you using it to tell stories that engage your audience – over a 115 million unique every month – and serve your advertisers?

The USA Today Network has taken a leadership position in the creation of high-quality premium virtual reality content, and we’ve been doing it for three years. That doesn’t sound like very long but that’s light years in the VR world. When I joined the company in 2015, the company had already made significant investments in the virtual reality space. For one, it requires a team of people who know coding and how to capture the content. It requires people who are familiar with the specialized 360° cameras, and more importantly: how to tell stories in this medium because it’s very different from any other medium.

I was fortunate to step in and build out a brand-new content studio, which has expanded to a full service in-house agency. It takes advantage of the learnings and expertise that existed in order to cultivate those same capabilities within our branded content studio. I hired people who had produced the award-winning VR and 360° video from our newsrooms to join our branded content team. Our value proposition going out to advertisers was about leveraging our knowledge to help them leapfrog and try out VR at an effective price. They also benefit from our ability to produce that content quickly and consistently.

The VR shows with Toyota are a milestone. What other VR content have you produced since?

We’ve produced original content for the 2017 Toyota Camry as well as original VR work with Google Nest. We’ve seen a lot of excitement and engagement around it. But what is unique about our offering is that we can not only create the content, we can also distribute it to an audience that is actively consuming it and looking for it because they have come to associate VR with our brand.

In theory, because VR is immersive, people can watch it for hours. How do you keep people engaged?

Number one is the storytelling. Number two is the tech. It may sound silly, but it comes down to small details, like where to put the camera, that make a big difference. For example, Honda has created the fastest two-seater in IndyCar racing. When we did the first shoot we fixed the 360° camera to the helmet. But then, when we saw this footage afterwards, it felt like you are floating above the race track instead of actually driving on the race track. It’s small things like where you place the camera make a huge difference in how the viewer experiences the content.

What is going to keep a viewer engaged? You have to give them the freedom to enjoy the content but the direction to get the most out of the experience. With 2D video you can direct viewers to look by where you put the camera. In 360 and VR, a viewer can look wherever they want. They can look up, they can look down, they can look around. So we’ve experimented with audio cues to help them look where they need to look in order to help the story along and make sure the viewer has an awesome experience.

That is about the technology, but the attraction of VR is also how it can create a sense of empathy…

We’ve seen that VR does that, which is why we believe it’s perfect for two main types of storytelling. One is transporting people. In this scenario, the content transports people to places they may never otherwise be able to experience, like the inside of a volcano or to the top of a high wire. They can experience the thrill of doing something they may never do in real life. The second is triggering emotion, empathy in particular. In this scenario, the content help tell a human story that enables people to  literally experience what life is like in someone else’s shoes. Those two storylines are what drives our VR production, because both on the editorial side as well as on our branded content advertising side.

It sounds as if VR – done well – is also a way to beat ad blocking. 

Ad blocking is a challenge for the content industry. But, at its core, it’s a call from consumers. They’re saying, “We want a better experience.” And I think this is a call to action for all of us to really deliver better experiences. So, yes, we are focused on creating better experiences for our audience, and our advertisers, and VR allows us to do this.

VR is in its infancy; it’s early days. What do you see as it matures?

We’ve all only scratched the surface of how we can use virtual reality as a storytelling medium. I can definitely see a future where, instead of sharing text or sharing photos like we do on social channels or even on our phones, we share whole virtual reality experiences. People can capture entire experiences and share them as content. We’re not there yet from a technical standpoint, but I do think I can see adoption and technology going in that direction. I also think we will see new kinds of interactivity. Experiences with brands and content companies will move beyond contests and quizzes. The next wave is all about enabling and empowering people to interact with brands and the content they produce to build deeper connections for both.-

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Innovation

Bloomberg’s customer-centric design ethos

AIGA, the design industry’s oldest and largest professional membership association, recently honored Bloomberg with its 2017 Corporate Leadership Award. This award was established to recognize a perceptive and forward-thinking organization that has been instrumental in the advancement of design by applying the highest standards, as a matter of policy, as well as its role in exemplifying the highest design standards within its respective industry. In announcing this honor, AIGA cited Bloomberg’s history of design innovation and advancement of design on multiple fronts:

Bloomberg L.P. advances design on multiple fronts through its industry leading products and unique company culture. Starting with the groundbreaking design of the original flagship product, the Bloomberg Terminal, the design of media products such as Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg.com, and its innovative work spaces and sophisticated branding programs, design is integral to how the company operates and provides value to customers.

In conjunction with this milestone recognizing Bloomberg’s commitment to great design across all aspects of the company, we discussed the importance of design ethos with three experts who are heavily involved in the design of Bloomberg’s core Financial Products:

Fahd Arshad, head of User Experience (UX) design for financial products, Ali Jeffery, Visual Design Lead for the Bloomberg Professional service, and Mike Mallon, Engineering Manager in Bloomberg’s application toolkits group.


ALI JEFFERY: Bloomberg’s design philosophy is to lead, not to follow. We definitely have a very strong opinion and express it in all of the facets of design across Bloomberg.

FAHD ARSHAD: Our design ethos is to make sure we are being useful to our customers. Every time we sit down and design something, we start with questions like, “How is this going to help our customers do their jobs?” “Is it going to make them more efficient?” Then, everything else comes from that. It’s a classic case of function over form. And that starts all of our design conversations.

When we express a piece of information, it is going to be in your face. We utilize high contrast colors to enable our customers to pick out information from a lot of noise. I would probably argue that this is the hallmark of our design, especially when it comes to the visual aspect of it.

MIKE MALLON: We’re aiming for efficiency, trying to make everything fast for the users, but also make it fast and easy to learn new things. Both of those pieces are important. We need to support both our power users and people who are just getting started and aren’t familiar with things yet.

Does Bloomberg have a design hallmark or style?

ALI: Definitely, especially with our software. Our black and amber color scheme is our strongest hallmark. You can see it across the trading floor. You know which application is Bloomberg from very far away.

Amber is our base font color. A lot of systems you see today will use much more neutral tones. But the amber and black has really become who we are. And it’s something we protect as part of our brand.

Our keyboard’s yellow keys are also a part of our design presence and our recognizability across a trading floor. They became a unique feature for Bloomberg and something that we chose to highlight and see as part of our identity.

FAHD: The color scheme just became iconic. You’d walk onto the floor and you’d see a row of amber and black screens and you knew you were in a Bloomberg shop. It’s interesting how we’ve seen that evolve and some of our competitors have started picking it up. It became sort of the hallmark of being a financial superpower that you had a dark background. But we stayed with it, because that is our hallmark. That is our brand. And our customers love it.

 

How does design apply to your area of focus?

ALI: I think one of the things I’m the most proud of working on is the framework of our system. We are creating the building blocks for the rest of the company to design their software. We’re working on making the underlying toolkit that the applications rely on more user-friendly.

MIKE: My role is to implement the designs that the UX team comes up within our applications. A big piece of that is figuring out how we can be reactive to new designs. One of the most interesting things we do is bring users into our User Experience Lab and try new things out with them and then react to their feedback. Then, the thing that we actually release will be something that is really useful to actual clients who have tested it out.

FAHD: That extreme focus on customer needs is what drives our design language or design process. For that matter, we start each conversation with our business managers, for example, who are often subject matter experts. So each conversation about a design problem starts with, “What is it that we’re trying to solve?”

How is Bloomberg design different from how some other companies might view or articulate design?

FAHD: At Bloomberg, we don’t spend a lot of time looking at what other people do. We know what our goal is. We have customers that we need to satisfy. The one big difference I hear from other people is how much we cultivate our relationship with our clients and how willing our clients are to come in and help us improve our products. It’s non-trivial for a portfolio manager or trader who has different time commitments to give us an hour-and-a-half or two hours of their day and to come to our office and sit in the lab. We’re lucky that, as an organization, we have cultivated that amount of loyalty among our customers and that sense of shared mission.

MIKE: With our focus on efficiency, it’s not just what looks pretty on the screen, which is what a lot of companies use to define good design. That is, they open it up and ask “Is it aesthetically pleasing?” or “Is it pretty?”

Our whole philosophy is about showing all the functionality to the user – that is, making it very accessible, very easy for them to use. This may sometimes lead to screens that look complicated at first glance, and someone might say, “Wow, there’s a lot here.” But what we’re actually doing is putting all of that at the user’s fingertips right away.

How do Bloomberg’s customers influence design?

MIKE: Well, they’re part of the process. We try new things on a bunch of employees first, but then we always bring customers in to try it out before we actually build something and turn it into a product. This way, we actually know that what we’re building is valuable to them.

FAHD: We take whatever our hypothesis is, we talk to the subject matter experts and we express our findings as early designs. But we try and validate them with our customers, because our end goal is being purposeful in our designs and providing value to our customers.

A big part of the design process is all working towards a single understanding – talking to our customers, understanding their needs and then designing to them. Since our sales force is constantly in touch with them, we get a lot of feedback. This has caused us to really evolve our product. We have an underlying technology infrastructure that allows us to push new software out to our clients very quickly, so we’re able to react to any of their needs. It’s actually really beneficial for our clients.

Bloomberg was founded on bringing transparency to financial markets, how is that principle reflected in Bloomberg’s design?

ALI: We really never design for design’s sake. It’s always meant to address our customer’s needs. We’re trying to create a clear hierarchy. We’re trying to make sure that they can find and parse information as quickly as possible.

MIKE: I think transparency is very important in how we do design. One way we show transparency is by showing clients ahead of time what it is we’re going to build.

Another way that we’re very transparent is we try to release our designs across the whole Terminal. So, all customers get access to the same designs. They all get access to the same types of things. And we’re very transparent in that we’re releasing these different features to all our clients at the same time. Everyone gets the same benefit. And we keep them in the loop on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

FAHD: Today, there is such a wealth of data that people are drowning in it. The important part is not having access to data, necessarily, but paying attention to the right amount of data or the right kind of data. And that’s what I personally see as the definition of transparency today: surfacing what you need to know, when you need to know it, and why this is relevant to you.

The goal of our design process has to be to make our customers more efficient and more productive. If we keep doing that, we will continue to bring value to them and be useful to them. And that’s where we will continue to be successful.

Note: This interview is reprinted with permission from the Tech at Bloomberg blog.

Innovation | Perspectives

How to use push for mobile engagement—without being pushy

Consumer dependency on mobile apps for information and entertainment has shot into the stratosphere. In the U.S. alone, audience measurement and research firm comScore reports that mobile now represents almost two out of three digital media minutes. As a result, comScore declares that mobile apps “have completely shifted the digital media landscape in favor of mobile,” with mobile apps accounting for a whopping 60% of total digital time spent.

Clearly, apps have become the new addiction. Consumers spend more time “in-app” than ever before. To address this opportunity, smart media companies and app marketers are evolving comprehensive strategies to connect with consumers in ways that enhance, not interrupt, the user experience.

At one level, it’s about new uses of push. Push is the first direct-to-consumer communication channel designed specifically for the smartphone, to message and engage consumers on their devices home screen. At the other level, it’s about in-app messaging. Unlike push, in-app messaging allows marketers to deliver contextually relevant conversation, not just campaigns.

Push is widely used and offers marketers a broad range of benefits, which stems from the fact that it’s a perfect format to direct attention to a desired action. In practice, push prompts users who have opted in to engage with content or a mobile campaign. But without context (and therefore a clear purpose) push notifications can quickly get “pushy.” Done the right way, push can drive users into your app. Get it wrong, and you can drive users out of your app altogether.

Marketers Get the Message

This is where in-app messaging comes in. Messaging allows marketers to insert themselves into the flow at that all-important “mobile moment” when users are deep in their journey and dependent on their app. But marketers can’t just use in-app messaging to target audience context. Marketing content, which can only be displayed while the user is active within the app, must have the “look and feel” of native. (And that’s a huge plus if we consider the survey data that underlines the growing appeal of native advertising and the massive increase in the use of ad blocking tech on mobile devices.)

Granted, both app messaging formats have abundant use cases. But it’s time for companies to look beyond marketing and begin to view mobile apps as what they really are: the vehicle of a new kind of customer communications and engagement paradigm. Success is all about maximizing mobile messaging capabilities, including push and in-app messaging, to enable ‘conversations’ with consumers. This will encourage engagement and help build trust through ongoing interaction.

Two-Way is the Right Way

We can already see an exciting proliferation of in-app marketing elements and types. Insert, a company that offers an automated in-app marketing platform, which provides provides marketers a broad set of customizable features – “inserts” – which can be launched into any live app without coding, picked up on this trend in The Giant Book of In-App Campaigns.

Examples range from “push with an insert” to send users to a specific piece of content or video, to “combo” approaches that allow marketers to tailor a “flow” to keep pace with user responses. All and all, Insert has collected 30 in-app campaign types. They offer insights into a brave new world of app communication approaches. And it should inspire marketers to use mobile for two-way conversations, not one-way campaigns.

Conversations are the real benefit of mobile. Unfortunately, we have somehow lost sight of this in the race for app installs and eyeballs. Over a decade ago, in the early days of permission-based text messaging and marketing, I advised companies to consider using SMS to ask consumers for their ideas and feedback on products and services. My view that the real power of mobile lay in its ability to spark “conversations” with valuable customers had its roots in the work of Eric von Hippel, an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who wrote the milestone book, Democratizing Innovation.

Fueling Engagement with Feedback

Back then, von Hippel was focused on harnessing “lead users” — users who have a high incentive to solve a problem and the ability to innovate. He believed that their input could yield breakthrough and profitable products and services. His prediction that advances in computing and communications technologies could enable lead users to innovate and develop exactly what they want is now a reality thanks to smartphones and apps. Of course this is great for everyone since what lead users want is precisely what the rest of the market will demand.

Dustin Amrhein, Solutions Leader at Insert, tells me that campaigns that use in-app marketing to ask users for feedback is “one of the most popular user cases thus far, and where we see some amazing conversion rates.”  But the boost in customer engagement – because users feel their opinion counts and will have an impact – is just one of the benefits.

The quality and appeal of their apps contribute to the ongoing success of media companies (and other app makers). Focusing in-app marketing and messaging on requesting user feedback allows companies to move the needle on their app, while saving much of the cost and wait associated with “trial and error.”

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

 

Innovation | Revenue

Email newsletters connect with core audiences

In a time when the email channel is becoming increasingly clogged, you would think email newsletters would take a back seat to other forms of audience interaction. But just the opposite seems to be happening as media outlets see the newsletter as a way to communicate directly with their core audiences. Email newsletters are popular and proliferating.

Perhaps this trend is being driven by the success of newsletters like The Daily Skimm, an email-only news briefing delivered every morning with a colloquial tone that treats the news with a sense of humor and gives you what you need to know in an entertaining fashion. Regardless, every major media outlet seems to offer a variety of newsletters. These are often segmented into subjects like finance, politics and sports, full of links and information, and designed to provide the core audience with details tuned specifically for them.

A little something for everyone

Newsletters remain popular because they deliver value to both the audience and the producer. The audience gets the information they want delivered straight to their in-boxes, often tailored to their specific interests.

The publisher gets something valuable as well. While interacting with people who clearly like your media outlet and the content you produce, you also get to own the information about your readers, says digital strategist, Jacqueline Boltik.

“For newsletter producers, having an email newsletter is smart because it’s the only way to really own your audience online. Ultimately Facebook owns your Facebook fans, Twitter owns your Twitter followers. Building your digital base anywhere other than email is like building a house on rented land,” she said.

She says beyond owning your audience data, there are many other reasons to offer a newsletter. These include driving traffic, monetization, and the ability to leverage your email data to strengthen your digital strategy on other channels.

Building connections to your audience

While the data certainly has value, a newsletter is much more than simply a data collection exercise. It’s also about building a strong connection between your audience and your publication, and in some cases to your journalists or other content creators.

“The best newsletters feel personal. Even though email is one to many, it feels one to one. In general, the more you can make your newsletter feel like it’s from a person while still fitting in with your brand, the better your newsletter will be received by readers,” Boltik said.

Quartz publishes a newsletter called the Daily Brief that it sees as a key way to interact directly with some of its most avid readers. “For audience engagement, it’s immensely valuable. Daily Brief subscribers are among Quartz’s most fervent and dedicated readers, and they’re also what advertisers consider to be a “premium” audience. About half are senior leaders at their companies,” Mia Mabanta, Quartz’s executive director of product and brand marketing explained.

Beyond that, Andrew Golis, general manager of Vox Media’s news brand says that newsletters provide a way to understand the news from a trusted source in a world where social media is bombarding us with stories. “We’re all more and more overwhelmed. As consumers, newsletters allow us to connect to a curator and analyst we trust. We get a finishable wrap-up of what’s important to pay attention to and why.”

The value proposition

You would think that driving traffic back to the site would be another primary goal, but publications don’t necessarily see it that way. Email newsletters build and maintain brand loyalty with core audiences—which is valuable in the long term. If they drive traffic, that’s a bonus, but it’s often not the objective.

In fact, Quartz includes links to other sites besides their own says Mabanta. “We explicitly don’t use the email as a way to drive traffic back to our site. It’s meant to be a self-contained experience. The user can click through if she wants to dive deeper, but she doesn’t have to. And oftentimes that link doesn’t lead her to QZ.com,” Mabanta said.

Vox’s Golis feels the same way. “We don’t approach newsletters as traffic drivers. Instead, they are distributed media experiences valuable in and of themselves. We love them because they give our loyal audiences a way to establish a permanent relationship with Vox. They also give our journalists the opportunity to build that connection and a set of stories and insights with a consistent community over time,” he said.

A valuable proposition

That engaged core audience also draws in sponsors and advertisers, who are willing to pay a premium to get the attention of a known quantity, and because you own your email data, you should have a good sense of who that audience is. “Better leveraging email data is a significant opportunity for many companies and as combining data sources becomes more flexible, digital advertising is going to become much more efficient and effective,” Boltik explained.

You can get those sponsors or premium advertisers on board to directly monetize your newsletters. Or you can simply use them as a way to stay connected with your most ardent readers. Whatever the strategy, newsletters remain a valuable way to understand and interact directly with your core audience. And that, in the era of distributed content, is a valuable connection indeed.

Innovation | Revenue

When shift happens at Telemundo, opportunity knocks

For years, Telemundo was viewed as a distant second to Univision’s domination of America’s Hispanic media market. Then, shift started to happen. Now, “Every week, prime time ratings are a nail biter,” according to NBC Universals’ EVP of Digital Media and Emerging Businesses, Peter Blacker. But—like most overnight success stories—this shift, which the company will highlight with it’s theme “Shift Happens” at the Upfronts on May 16, has been happening for some time now.

Blacker traces the origins of Telemundo’s strong and steady growth trend to its decision a few years ago to focus on “Generation M.” No, that doesn’t just stand for the desirable millennial demographic. Telemundo’s definition includes two other major factors that are impacting media: multiculturalism and mobile.

The racial breakdown of the American consumer is steadily moving towards a multicultural majority made up of non-whites. From a programing perspective, that means that audiences are more socially complex and less starkly defined. Combined with the technological forces of social and mobile, a wave of innovation is occurring at NBCUniversal overall, and Telemundo in particular.

Authentic content and ongoing relationships

According to Blacker, this is readily apparent in their approach to social content. They consider the unique properties of each social platform and aim to create distinct experiences and programming for each one. As an example, Blacker noted the shift in their social efforts around their popular Telemundo series El Señor De Los Cielos, which boasts 8.5 million Facebook fans. “We used to approach these shows as very connected to television programming. When the show was on the air, we were very active. Then, when the show ended, we went on to the next show.”

However, those millions of fans had a year-round appetite. With the help of some additional staff, his social team worked with the show’s writers to create eight-minute mini-episodes to “feed the fan base all year.” Other social-specific content may take the form of a simple gif or meme. The important part, according to Blacker, is that it is that the quality and tone accurately reflect what the audience loves about the show itself. And the strategy seems to have paid off. And the strategy seems to have paid off. According to Shareablee’s 2016 data, “not only did Telemundo come up as the biggest inside NBCU, top three across all media companies.”

When the developers on Blacker’s team approached the studio about creating a second-screen app experiences for El Señor De Los Cielos “they wanted to kill us” because of the added complexity. The app, Double Acción, uses audio queues to sync up access to secret archives, exclusive photos, videos, trivia, games and more. The impact of their complex request was softened when AT&T signed on as app’s debut sponsor.

Much Ado about innovation and monetization

Blacker notes that the ability to work closely with the larger creative team at NBCUniversal helps keep Telemundo’s social strategy authentic to their show brands. He also points to NBCUniversal’s investments in companies like Buzzfeed and Snapchat, as well as its own innovation lab, as inspiring and informing experimentation.

Blacker hinted at multiple pioneering projects that will be announced at the Upfronts in May, including virtual reality and ad innovations. An advance preview can be seen in his partnership with Buzzfeed on a digital telenovela “Much Ado About Nada.” The program will take the form of 10-minute episodes that will be distributed on a weekly basis across Telemundo and BuzzFeed digital platforms. It was created in response to research about what resonates with Generation M, this younger, mobile-oriented and multicultural audience.

The ability to identify and engage Generation M has supported continued investment in innovation, Blacker said. “Our partners are trying to connect with a multicultural millennial audience on mobile devices. That is the future of their business.”

Ultimately, said Blacker, “the reason why we’ve been able to continue to invest in virtual reality and new pioneering formats like the Buzzfeed project is because we’ve been able to connect with sponsors and advertisers. We’ve developed a reputation for innovation that we can back up with scale.”

Innovation | Perspectives

Less chat, more info: Facebook tries to revive messenger bots

At Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference last year, executives touted the rise of chatbots. These automated personalities within the Messenger app promised to answer your queries as seamlessly as a human — or so was the expectation. But in fact, mismatched expectations regarding the purpose of the service, the lack of strong AI to back it up, and lack of awareness by the public left many industry analysts doubtful of chatbots’ ability to fulfill the hype.

With this year’s F8 conference upon us,Facebook is trying to shift the gears on this with the announcement of “group bots” within Messenger, a new Discovery tab for bots and more commands related to bots in Facebook’s virtual assistant M. But it looks like the social giant must also do some inward scrutiny — and involve marketers — to get users on board in much bigger numbers.

The Promise of M

When Facebook released M to a select group of some 10,000 California power users in late 2015, the promise of the virtual assistant was usurped by insight into how it could maintain such intelligent operations. “M is so smart because it cheats,” as MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite put it succinctly. Unlike other virtual assistants, which admit defeat when a question stumps them, a human being “invisibly” stepped into the role of the bot to cure the disease of not knowing — without ever letting the user know otherwise.

Of course, this is an expensive design to scale for Messenger’s 1.2 billion users. But M — along with competition from Siri and Amazon’s Alexa — inevitably laid a foundation for misrepresenting how users might realistically benefit from such a chatbot.

Siri and Alexa are trained to be generalists. However, Facebook has largely pushed developers to create more specialist bots. Of the more than 30,000 bots on Messenger, most of them serve a single purpose. That, in itself, makes creating a habit of use difficult. After all, unless you truly have an affinity for pizza, how many times will you use Domino’s Messenger bot in a single week? But Facebook also let the promise of chatbots spiral downward by not doing enough to inform and educate users on how to best use them.

Discoverability and Bugginess

That brings us to the twin disorders plaguing chatbots: discoverability and bugginess.

There was no native way on Messenger to find a chatbot, so unless a user already knew the name of a bot to type into Messenger’s search box, there was no way to actually use one. While third-party bot browsing options like Botlist exist, they are little-known and thus, little-used.

In part, that’s what Facebook hoped to address when it announced a new class of group bots to work inside Messenger at this year’s F8 conference. Once one person introduces the bot into a group conversation, everyone will know about its existence (although how to get that first user to know of the bot remains a looming question). And whereas users might have previously been misguided into thinking chatbots could be true, humanlike discussion partners, these group bots are meant to be more “information bots” (think scores and or stock prices) rather than “chat bots.” Feeding chatbots enough data to maintain conversation flow, and ensuring the AI was up to task, were hopeless hurdles that have made “bugginess” a default bot personality type.

That people have spoken little about chatbots since their initial hype may actually work in Facebook’s favor if it wants to reset people’s expectations. With little regard and much ignorance about the service (in fact, a November 2016 online survey by Publicis Groupe’s Digitas LBi found 78% of U.S. adults hadn’t even heard of chatbots), Facebook could help bring the popularity of chatbots outside the music fandom crowd into the mainstream population.

Can Payments, Marketing Pave the Way?

Kik CEO Ted Livingston, for one, argues the real benefits of chatbots come from their enabling the offline world around us, rather than functioning solely as app replacements. Paying for items is one way to do that And, if U.S. chatbots can make that territory theirs, they’d follow in the footsteps of China, where it’s common for QR codes to trigger interactions, and where more than 600 million WeChat users use its peer-to-peer payment service. While Kik is in talks with its Chinese counterparts to introduce payments, Facebook has already launched this option. Still, addressing Facebook’s buggy bot issues is necessary for users to trust making financial transactions.

Yet aside from all the hype and wonder, there is huge potential for publishers and marketers to seize control of the potential for bots — if they can seize control of the AI and have a common goal for users. Just like voice assistants, bots can get smarter over time with the right technology enabled. Another issue is that a simple question to a bot can yield multiple responses. However, if the aim is to get the user to do something specific — whether it is go to a website, make a purchase, or look up a news item — the answers need to actually be both human and robotic enough to do just that.

It’s not only Facebook that has to do some inward reflection on bots — marketers and publishers must too. They must also demand that Messenger (or any other messaging platform) be the right kind of environment for their goals to thrive. This involves much more nuanced AI programming to make brand interaction a clear-cut goal. It also requires much more education by both Facebook and marketers to let their audiences know bots exist, without setting them up for disappointment.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion | Innovation

Outside takes on diversity in media at the newsstand

It can be hard to make heads or tails of gender equality in the media landscape. One minute we hear that women are rising on media boards – and the next we hear that news is controlled by white men. When 46 of 50 U.S. media boards have at least one female director, it’s easy to be optimistic about the state of women in media. But then the wind is taken out of our collective sails when we hear Wall Street Journal employees are so distressed about the state of their newsroom that they wrote a letter “expressing concern about the roles of women and people of color in the newsroom.”

Additionally, the Women’s Media Center found that at “20 of the nation’s top news outlets, men produced 62.3% of news reports analyzed during a studied period while women produced 37.7% of news reports.” On a slightly more encouraging note, the WMC also found, “At least one woman was among the top three editors at 77% of responding ASNE organizations.”

So, with all of this conflicting information at our fingertips, what’s a girl to do?

Girl Power

Well, if you happen to work at OUTSIDE Magazine, you strike a blow for gender equality by putting out your first ever all-female issue. Also known as the “XX Factor Issue,” the May installment will feature nothing but women, and will be created by them too. From the writers to the photographers and subject matter, this content is by women, about women.

“There have been studies done on newspaper sports sections that show most publications cover women far less than they cover men,” says Mary Turner, Deputy Editor, OUTSIDE—who received a promotion for this issue to run the show. “That’s true in the outdoor industry, too, in both [editorial] and advertising creative.” At the same time, she says, “women have never been a stronger force in our world, representing 51% of all outdoor consumers and spending billions on gear and travel alone last year.”

OUTSIDE isn’t stopping at just the one print issue. They plan to run additional women-centric stories and bylines at Outside Online. This includes an Outlook episode on Outside Television, a podcast series hosted by Florence Williams, as well as a documentary film produced in partnership with sponsor R.E.I.

Finding Balance

“During our 40 year history, OUTSIDE has always covered women. The issue we’re trying to address is overall balance, and we wanted to start a conversation about that,” Turner says. “We know we can do a better job, and we want to be a leader in this space. It was very important to us that the women on our cover and in the magazine represent all parts of our world and a diverse range of ages, sports, ethnicities, and professions. We’re very proud of how it worked out. And we’re also proud of our partnership with REI, who launched their Force of Nature effort in the issue, announcing their multiple initiatives to get more women into the outdoors and challenging the industry as a whole to do more as well. As R.E.I says, you can’t be what you can’t see.”

R.E.I isn’t the only sponsor getting in on the XX Factor. “Not only did a number of advertisers juggle budgets and campaign timing to be in the issue, several went as far as to create female-focused brand ads specifically for the issue,” says Turner.

For some publications handing an issue over to the female staff might have presented some logistical challenges, but the team at OUTSIDE was ready for it. “I’m happy to report that OUTSIDE’s [editorial] and online staff is almost 50% female, so yes, we had enough women on staff to manage the issue,” Turner says. However, they didn’t do it entirely alone. She adds, “it’s important to note that while all of the writers and photographers we used in the issue are women, the men on our staff did edit stories and contribute in other ways. They were so excited about the issue, which was really cool to see. Creating this issue brought a lot of good energy to our staff as a whole.”

What Real Diversity Looks Like

Diversity (in media or elsewhere) is not only about gender, which is why OUTSIDE wanted to make sure they represented a wide range of women of different, ages, ethnicities, and interests in the XX Factor Issue.

“In the issue, we have everyone from 8-year-old Girl Scouts to 93-year-old Gert Boyle, the Chairman of Columbia, who we interview on the last page,” says Turner. “And there are a wide range of subject matters covered, from how women are better endurance athletes than men, to a poignant memoir from writer Rahawa Haile on hiking the Appalachian trail alone last year, to a hilarious romp that writer Taffy Akner takes into the billion-dollar wellness industry.”

And OUTSIDE took the same approach when it came to creating its fold out cover. It features everyone from soccer player Abby Wambach, who is fighting for equal pay for women, to GirlTrek cofounders Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison, who aim to have one million African Americans walking by 2018.

The XX Factor issue hits stands April 11, so it’s still early gauge audience reactions to the issue. Will men skip picking it up at the store? Or will it fly off the shelves? Considering that women drive 70-80% of the economy, it’s a safe bet that quality content aimed at their interests and concerns is a good investment.

Innovation | Perspectives

3 ways we’ve been looking at working with algorithms at The Guardian

Publishing into algorithms

There are two sets of people you’ll find constantly moaning about the implementation of algorithms on services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter—which focus on showing users the best stuff. Power-users, who visit so frequently that the algorithmic approach really doesn’t work for them, and social media managers, frustrated that they can’t get their content to all of their followers instantly.

I’m more relaxed about it. If we had our way, every single piece of content pumped out by our news organizations would be hogging the user’s news feed on Facebook. But think about it for a second: If they want to see what our news organization is doing, they’d come to us. They’ve come to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter to see what their friends (or possibly with Twitter, their enemies) are doing.

And we have to work out how to fit into their lives at that moment. So it has got to be the earth-shatteringly good pieces. It must be things that will surprise and delight and invoke emotion, not just the mundane routine of pushing out articles because we have a quota of space on the internet we feel we need to fill up every day.

I look at the Facebook algorithm as being a whole series of A/B tests for your content. Facebook shows it to a few people, if they interact with it, more people will see it, and so the best things you do will snowball and travel far. In many ways in an algoritmic internet, pieces get the audience they deserve.

Now let’s flip it in its head for a second. It always slightly reassures me that, thanks to algorithmic social feeds, if we publish stuff that is boring and un-engaging, fewer people see it. So people get an overall better impression of your brand, because they only see the good stuff. Now do you hate algorithmic feeds?

Working with chatbots

Over the course of a now pretty lengthy career looking at how the web and news publishing interact, I’ve worked on some things that became very huge. This includes Facebook, Twitter, getting content indexed and ranked by search engines. I’ve also worked on some things that very much fell by the wayside — Google Wave, or desktop widgets anybody?

At the moment, I suspect that chatbots are much more likely to fall into the latter category. I’m unconvinced people are going to tap out messages asking what’s happening rather than go to a news site or a news aggregating app.

However, with the rise of devices like Alexa or Google Home, we are really beginning to see many more examples of ‘conversational UI’, and that interests me. I don’t think it is too far-fetched to think that in a couple of years time my kids will just be yelling at the telly ‘Put on Scooby Doo’ and it will play it out on demand. And that I’ll be able to walk in the room, call out ‘What’s the news?’ at some (or maybe several) devices, and they’ll know the last time I checked, and update me accordingly.

In that context, what does the news published by an organization like the Guardian even look like? I suspect it isn’t 800 word articles, and our Facebook Messenger chatbot and our Alexa Skill have given us an opportunity to explore that possibility.

Three things I have learned:

  1. It is very hard to get people to discover that you have a chatbot.
  2. It is very hard to quickly convey to people what they are expected to do with a bot, and what commands are available to them.
  3. People really do chat to bots as if they are living sentient beings, and the technology at the moment is really nowhere near ready to cope with that.

Working with robot colleagues

The blurb description for a panel I participated in on collaborating with algorithms at the International Journalism Festival session stated that “Some journalists approach algorithmic assistance the way one might consider hopping into a self-driving car: some are delighted, some are wary.” I’ve certainly seen the looks in the news room when we are publishing stories about how robots are going to take all our jobs that have a definite expression of “and mine too?” about them.

Unsurprisingly, given the future-facing aspect of my role at the Guardian, I am perhaps more enthusiastic about the prospect than some others in the building. I’m not, at the moment, concerned that an AI is going to be adept enough to start writing 800 word opinion pieces with my authentic voice. My colleague Alex Hern has experimented in that area for one of our hack days, and the results didn’t look that promising. And while I would for sure read some of the articles that Clickbait Robot suggests, at the moment it is only generating headlines, not the actual stories.

But I think computers absolutely have a role to play now in helping us to write the first drafts in several areas. Imagine a bot that automatically ingests stock market movements, or sports data, or the latest YouGov opinion polls. A computer can instantly see “This is the biggest shift away from supporting Labour among the over-65s for a decade” or “Sunderland are on their longest run of not scoring since a similar spell in 1956” or “While the FTSE on the whole remained high, stocks in the mining sector collectively fell by 12% yesterday”.

Those may not be stories in themselves, but they might be the inspiration required jog to a journalist to phone up a source in the mining sector to get the lowdown on what is happening, or to try and see if anybody from that 1956 squad is still alive and available to interview, or give them a unique angle on a story that everybody else will be reporting in a broadly similar way. And sure, someone who knows their beat very well might be able to just look at those figures and instantly have all the relevant comparative data at her fingertips. But for most journalists, I reckon a robot saving them time and chucking out potential story ideas and angles would soon become a very useful little friend.

So what I’m interested in, is not whether algorithms can write my articles, but whether a combination of 70% algorithm grunt-work and 30% human inspiration, can produce stories that people are more engaged with and more likely to want to read.

Want to learn more? Watch Martin discuss this topic further at the April 2017 International Journalism Festival 

Martin Belam is a designer, journalist, and Social & New Formats Editor at the Guardian. Martin has spent nearly twenty years building digital products for the likes of the BBC, Daily Mirror and Sony.

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