RTNDA: Lost Remote takes the stage

Steve Safran October 25th, 2006

Lessons From the Lost Remote Guys
By Chip Mahaney/KDFW

PANEL: Stephen Warley, Steve Safran, Richard Warner

WKRN.com – this is not a simple website, but a collection of pages knitted together by RSS. It isn’t necessarily about getting people to your site, but getting your connect on someone else’s square-inch of space on the web. It’s a series of pages built custom for you based on your selections.

YouTube.com – tags, keywords that someone would use to find that information. 5 keyword rule to create a blog post.

What are the 5 keywords someone to use to find your story? Clever headlines won’t help you. Be literal, even if it means being boring.

Richard: What you want to do is compartmentalize it – high school football, gardening.

StevenW: You can’t just have a free-for-all with all this raw material. You have to give your viewers specific reasons to send material – specific event (weather, for instance). We can’t compete with technology any more.

Steve: Lesson from YouTube. If you make it easy to share and embed, they will use you.

Buzzhunt.com: It’s all about search now. Great text search, but not so much for video. Buzzhunt is a tool for stations that want to have a video search tool. Buzzhunt.com does voice recognition, use them to help your viewers search for local video.

myFOXphilly.com – Rich the weather guy has a blog. As a storm was approaching, the three days before the storm, traffic was very heavy. Their weather guy put up narratives about what the weather was going to do. The best doing this now is accuweather, publishing weather stories in addition to all their automated content.

StevenW: It’s most important to be the aggregator of all the local content.

SavannahNow.com – a great site by a local newspaper. Know Savannah, Share Savannah, Shop Savannah, Do Savannah … no content on the front page, just a pretty picture and the links to the four categories. Discussion as to whether this is effective.

StevenW: the most profitable arm of the Savannah newspaper is renting out the printing press. There’s a lesson in this.

Weblogsinc.com – very good example of how to write for the web, how to blog. Great tags, categories. “One size fits all” doesn’t fit on the web. It has to be custom.

King5.com – Kudos to KING-TV in Seattle, how they’re using mobile, pushing information to Blackberries.

SteveS: The key to all this is dedicated web sales people.

StevenW: Yeah but. How do we inspire our broadcast sales staff to sell the web? It’s about expanding value and opportunity of the brand.

Audience comment: The web is often an added-value only.

SteveS: NO MORE ADDED-VALUE!

Audience comment: At one station, a dedicated web sales expert goes along on sales calls with traditional sales reps.

WXIA – 11alive.com – new VideoNow player will soon be rolled out among other Gannett stations. There is now a 6% Mac rate, plus all the Firefox users. USE FLASH for all your video, not Windows Media.

SAMessenger.com – this local site does so many things right. They invite so much from their community. St. Albans VT. They look at themselves as a local provider, rather than a local newspaper with a website. Even without a big budget, they are monetizing the site.

EastTexasReview.com – another hyper-local site.

Richard: lowest-hanging fruit for local TV stations: 1) is hyperlocal – that’s where the money is. If you can slice and dice your area into communities, then find someone to post content, then you can sell hyper-local too. 2) better integrating network programs, better vehicles coming for monetizing and promoting those programs.

StevenW: some of the best websites are from these little local newspapers. First, they’re already ingratiated into their communities. It’s no longer about creating a 30-minute newscast to attract 100,000 viewers, but it’s about using technology to manage 100,000 conversations.

JournalTimes.com –

StevenW: what are we doing today? It’s moderating, sparking conversations. It’s our job to make sure all the key points are addressed, all the viewpoints are heard.

SteveS: Why do people want to contribute?

StevenW: 1) Passion, 2) Empowerment, 3) Recognition

NBC4.TV – uploading photos from viewer family vacations.

SteveS: FOX Charlotte does a show called FOX News Edge. All viewer-contributed content. (Safran note, per comment below - I said they feature user generated video from all over the web, although not from Charlotte. The videos are part of the overall show which is a fun, irreverent look at the news. What I was suggesting was that this show - and by extension, all locals - would benefit from great locally generated user content. Chip Mahaney transcribed the entire day quickly, and we talk very fast. We apologize to him for the confusion. Also, please note the disclosure that Fox Charlotte is a client of mine.) Is it all great video? No. But it is entertaining. http://www.foxcharlotte.com/edge_home.htm

Richard: There aren’t rate cards for all this. Cheapest and least-desirable is a banner ad. With NBC4 site, there’s more value being associated with this content.

WWLTV.com – also nola.com … lots of great local content. Also selling copies of their Hurricane special online, via 3rd-party fulfillment partner.

WSFA-12 Montgomery – created a blog about an ongoing trial. Lots of smaller posts throughout the day. Stuff that might not even make it on the air that night. Helpful for a core set of viewers that really want deep information.

The CBS O&O sites – ie wcbstv.com . Video featured prominently in the upper-right of the page. Lose the temptation to promote yourself in this prime real estate.

KUTV.com — sports blogs … custom sports blogs about all their beats. Own hyper-local content. Use your personalities. Sell it.

CBS4Denver.com – blog by a reporter here who’s really into snowboarding .. do this in your market.

StevenW: In Baltimore, lacrosse is really big. That’s a place to generate unique local content on your site. What’s big in your market?

TBO.com – really good site that gets you to deep, rich content. Obesity is a big story. They created a page “My Fat Florida”, always adding content to this page. Lots of links, all the stories they’ve done. A great example of aggregating this content.

SteveS: “Content that solves a problem for people.”

StevenW: What are the top 3 web stories in your community?

TheSituationRoom has a web reporter. MSNBC.

SteveS: We’ve got the greatest information tool at our disposal. Use it. Some newsrooms still block the web. Stop it. Don’t worry about copyrights, just show it.

StevenW: It’s great for getting quick pictures to air when you don’t have your own photos/video yet. Use someone else’s site (ex: segment from SituationRoom where the reporter showed off and gave information from US Rep Patrick Kennedy’s official website, when he was in the news that day)

Best practices for hiring web sales

Richard: Almost every station we’ve worked with has hired their web sales person from another TV station or from print.

Jonathan from CBS: Postings online. Craigslist, Monster.com. Recruiting online-specific sales people. Biggest challenge is escalating expense, payscale is rising. Retention is hard. Competing not just against another TV station, but against everyone.

LJWorld.com – publishing original documents (investigative etc) online.

TBO.com – publishes crime-tracker database, uses it on air. TBO.com keyword crimetracker

Questions about design – beauty vs utility

Look at the most popular sites … Google, Yahoo. They’re not pretty.

Richard: Your design comparison is not TV, but print.

SteveS: People spend way too much time on design. Worry about the information.

Content & Design

Make it Unique
Make it Searchable
Aggregate, Don’t Produce

Del.icio.us – use it to help your research, tag things as you go along.

Reddit.com – like digg.com … people voting on stories to rank the good ones higher on the site.

StevenW: side-by-side, your top stories, plus the ones that the viewers click rank

Newsgatoronline – aggregator for your own personal news page

Flickr – can use photos on your air and on your web, as long as you link back to Flickr and credit them

Newsvine.com – digg-like

Craigslist.com – single-handedly killing newspapers. Not just classifieds, but good local information.

SteveS: Put stories directly on YouTube. You won’t get the clicks, but you will get the word-of-mouth.

SteveS: We’re not doing any social-networking. You have the community in the palm of your hands. Now’s the time to network it.

Richard: Wireless alerts, e-mail – do it right/consistently, RSS feeds – set it up so your site pushes headlines

** Don’t just set up a generic RSS feed. Break it out. Micro.

StevenW: Put the hyperlinks in your story, not just at the end of the story.

24 on FOX – Richard’s company developing a game to coincide with the launch of 24 this January. You need to embrace and monetize your prime-time schedule.

Paltalk.com – Interactive talk chat client. Used by Opie & Anthony radio show.

Richard: By April of next year, you need to have a plan to monetize high school football. kmov.com is a good example. Looking for a vertical to monetize in 2007? Focus on HS football.

StevenW: Looking at the advertiser as a source of content. Infortorial advertising page (clearly labeled). Example was discussion of a complicated medical issue, story written and sponsored by local hospital

myabc5.com – contests

dailycandy.com – here in New York, fun, entertaining. It’s a 30-second fix for regular readers every day. Advertiser provides content. Promoting local commerce. Very local. Very targeted. People opt in.

turnhere.com – a little travelogue, slice of life in your local community. It’s all paid-for content, told as a story. Steven W: Let’s start thinking about longer-form advertisements. We are story-tellers, we are marketers. We have the best connections, in a way that nobody else does.

Overture.com – click on Resource Center, View Keyword Bid Tools. Matching up content with advertisers keywords. Search-related advertising. Get a sense of how much people are paying for keywords. Drive more value for paid search ads.