The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Sure, awards are subjective — they subjectively good when you’re included in the finalists and winners, and subjectively bad when you’re not. But there is an interesting commonality running through many of the media websites nominated for 2008 EPpy Awards, the top interactive contest put on by Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek.

For news web sites, the winning strategy is clear — focus heavily on local content and make the most of the web, don’t simply take the stories from the morning print edition and make them available online. The best of this model can be found at sites that are, or have been, run by folks from a very small pool — people like Rob Curley, Dave Toplikar, and Adrian Holovaty, who worked together at one time or another at the Lawrence Journal-World.

Looking at the nominees for Best News Web Site (fewer than 1 million monthly visitors), there’s the Las Vegas Sun, LJWorld.com (the Lawrence newspaper site), and NaplesNews.com from Florida. All of those are places where these guys have worked. And Curley’s current site, WashingtonPost.com, is up for Best Overall Newspaper-Affiliated Web Site (1 million + monthly visitors).

Texas Monthly’s May issue features a celebration of Willie Nelson’s 75th birthday. If the amazing cover photo is any indication, the story inside should be terrific.

Over on his Long Tail blog, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson takes a more optimistic view of the financial situation the newspaper industry finds itself in. The recent news that advertising revenue had taken its biggest drop in 50 years set off the latest round of doom-sayers calling for the end of the newspaper era.

There’s no doubt that newspapers find themselves in increasingly tight times - in addition to advertising revenue, readership of the print version is also down in several areas. But as Anderson points out, the current drop in revenue still leaves the industry “just ten percent off its historic highs (much like the stock market) and is still twice as big as it was twenty years ago.”

Newspapers are still at $45 billion business, but to remain that way, there are clear strategic changes that have to take place:

• Moving from the producing-a-product mindset to an offering-a-service mindset
• Embracing the web and not just pushing print stories online
• Hyperlocal stories that focus on neighborhoods
• Applying a voice and a viewpoint to the stories of the day, rather than reprinting wire service stories

For sports fans, one of the can’t-miss sites on the Web is Deadspin. I’d say I get 90% of my information about national sports from there.

Today I’m honored to have a small piece I wrote appear there as part of the site’s NCAA Tournament preview. I took a look at the Texas A&M Aggies in preparation for their first-round matchup with BYU.

In other Deadspin fandom, I’m midway through reading God Save the Fan by editor Will Leitch. It’s hilarious and insightful, and worth reading even if you’re not a die-hard sports fan.

The New York Times is reporting that this week, Sports Illustrated will take the wise move of making its entire 53-year archive of stories and photos available for free online.

The new feature, called the Vault, will also contain video clips and all of its material will be searchable by athlete, coach, team, sport, decade and year.

The real benefit, according to executives, is in the additional visibility SI.com will get from search engines, a topic I wrote about in the context of TexasMonthly.com some time ago.

“The real hidden value of this is what it does for search,” said John Squires, executive vice president of Time Inc., the Time Warner subsidiary that publishes Sports Illustrated. The move quadruples the site’s volume, he said. “We’ll have to work our way up the search algorithms over time, but eventually, someone searches Johnny Unitas, and SI.com is going to pop up.”

At South by Southwest, the “Future of Corporate Blogs” panel talked about some issues companies have faced in launching blogs, and how they can be used to benefit the business.

The panelist whose story most closely matched with my employer’s was Lionel Menchaca of Dell, who created the Direct2Dell blog 18 months ago. That site now gets a million page views per week and has helped reduce the negative perception that Dell was battling among its customers.

In addition, Dell has created IdeaStorm, where people can suggest ideas for Dell products and services, have others rank them, and then Dell takes the best ones under consideration.

The panelists agreed that the first step in meeting (and exceeding) customers’ expectations through an online tool like a blog is to listen first to their problems, then analyze that feedback, then take action. Taking action, of course, is key, but it’s also meaningless without having real feedback from customers to act upon.

Companies often express fear at jumping in to the social media arena, but the alternative (doing nothing) allows the conversation to go on without any attempt at having an impact. Becoming a part of the conversation with your customers almost always decreases the time between their problems and a solution.

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path addressed the challenges of getting the most out of talented people in their SXSW session titled “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment”.

Mason and Nelson studied theater troupes, orchestras, a restaurant kitchen, a magazine and a screenwriting collective to find out how these creative groups work well together, and found some common themes:

1. Cross-train the entire team. Everyone on the team should get experience with all the other related disciplines and administrative tasks. This gives you empathy for others’ experiences and allows you to understand what’s possible in other realms.
2. Rotate creative leadership. This creates a sense of security, with people knowing that at some point they’ll have a sense of ownership
3. Actively turning the corner. The corner here is from divergence (brainstorming) to convergence (decision-making). Moving from one to the other at the appropriate time is key.
4. Know your roles. Once the corner is turned and you move into the production phase, everyone should know what they’re meant to do — what they can make decisions on and what they can’t.
5. Practice, practice, practice. Give time to improve individual skills as well as group skills, so that you can repeat the process each team. However, you have to find the right times to practice (not on deadline or at crunch time)
6. Make your mission explicit. It’s important that everyone understand the end result and define a purpose among the team.
7. Killing your darlings. Find respectful ways to remove material that doesn’t support the mission.
8. Leadership is a service. Being a leader is the ultimate support position. You’re helping others represent themselves and giving people the space to be creative. You’re a facilitator, not a dictator.
9. Generate products around the group’s creative interests. Identify tasks with what staff is actually engaged in to give people more ownership.
10. Remember your audience. Think about whether something is just part of your creative vision, or whether it would serve the audience. Consider how you will emotionally relate to your visitors and learn to anticipate the feedback.

They also threw in a bonus item: celebrate failure. There’s always something in a project that can be done better next time. People should know it’s OK to fail.

One of the most interesting panels in all of South by Southwest Interactive was “Going Social Now“, Shiv Singh’s look at social influence marketing.

Singh, who works in the New York office of Avenue A/Razorfish, points out that today’s online shopping experience is not a linear process. We need to take advantage of the social influence — input from friends and family, comparison across sites — as we shop collaboratively with other people.

In today’s world, customers are influenced by each other more than ever, and less than ever by traditional marketing messages. Research from Forrester Research and eMarketer shows that online shoppers trust recommendations from consumers more than any other type of advertising, and that most people look at from 4-7 customer reviews before buying.

The corporate site isn’t a destination for customers any more, he says. You have to tap into the immersive and social power of the web to create great experiences with consumers wherever they live in the digital world.

In the traditional model of communicating to customers, the message has come from the marketing and sales groups. But in a Web 2.0 model, every group within the company (Marketing, Sales, Research and Development, Strategy, Human Resources) has their own customer, and each one of those groups needs to be talking to their constituents and external stakeholders.

Some key points:

1. Become your consumer
2. Aggregate information for your consumer
3. Articulate product benefits better
4. Amplify the business stories
5. Participate where your consumers are
6. Don’t do it all at once

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For the second straight year, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh put on an inspiring performance at South by Southwest. Zappos, an online retailer that sells mostly shoes, but also is branching out into clothing and accessories, has built its reputation and business on providing amazing customer service.

This year’s edition, titled “Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce” was a leisurely walk through the big-picture items that have given Zappos some of the most loyal customers around. Here’s a copy of his presentation:

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Breaking it down, here are the Top 10 Lessons:

1. The e-commerce business is built on repeat customers.
2. Word of mouth really works online.
3. Don’t compete on price.
4. Make sure your website inventory is 100% accurate.
5. Centrally locate your distribution.
6. Customer service is an investment, not an expense.
7. Start small. Stay focused.
8. Don’t be secretive. Don’t worry about competitors.
9. You need to actively manage your company culture.
10. Be wary of so-called experts.

On Sunday, I hosted a discussion at SXSW Interactive titled “How Accessible Should Your Site Be?“. The format was different from the traditional PowerPoint slides and panelist presentation. This session was structured to encourage discussion and interactivity. It was held in a big ballroom, with five other discussions on accessibility and web standards happening simultaneously in the same large room. We had a great turnout, probably 40-50 people, which was among the largest gatherings in the room.

Among those participating were folks who do accessibility work for federal government agencies, the Federal Reserve Bank, Dell, the State of Texas, and several mid-size and smaller firms. After a brief introduction, I led them through a list of questions and topics. Among some of interesting tidbits to emerge:

• Practically no one had resources dedicated solely to accessibility. It was always included as part of the mission of another group (user experience, human factors, developers)
• Nearly everyone had used additional benefits to help sell the idea of accessibility to business owners and clients. Among those benefits were: better search engine results, enhanced browser support, better support for mobile devices and improved findability of content.
• Business owners and clients tended to think of accessibility as making a web site available to visually impaired users, and needed additional explanation of the wide range of areas that could fall under the umbrellas of accessibility (including older users, low bandwidth users, and international users)

One other item: On Saturday, I did a brief preview of this presentation at another Austin tech gathering: BarCamp Austin III. That also went well and gave me good feedback for the SXSW presentation the following day.

I attended some other great sessions, and I’ll post the notes I took here in later posts.