Washington Post’s launch of the hyperlocal site LoudounExtra.com is an important step in the right direction towards implementing hyperlocal content for communities. Given WaPo’s resources and Rob Curly’s track record, WaPo will be a major beacon of innovation which the newspaper industry desperately needs. While there are many other features in the pipeline, and what’s introduced is good, there is one key element missing in its approach: leverage, meaning that while community contribution is asked for, the bulk of the hyperlocal content is still provided by dedicated staffers.

What’s the problem? 99% of newspapers don’t have WaPo’s resources. Most of them, especially large metro publications, are under intense pressure to produce more compelling content with fewer resources. Many are laying off. They don’t have the luxury of WaPo taking more than one year to implement this site and hiring a dedicated staff. This approach, a traditional one, doesn’t have the leverage required in the new publishing paradigm.

There is a much better approach, that can supplement this initiative or be on its own. And that is through wikis, specifically MindTouch’s Nexus service.

MindTouch Nexus Overview

MindTouch Nexus is a wiki publishing and social media platform that powers the new paradigm. Delivered primarily as a turnkey hosted service, Nexus is a wiki-centric publishing system that enables websites to accomplish three objectives in the new paradigm:

• Harness multimedia UGC—text, video, images, audio—in wide-ranging applications.
• Integrate other social media elements from across the Internet to complement and supplement a particular story.
• Blend the three elements of site content—editorial, syndicated and user-generated—seamlessly into a rich, contextual story.

Nexus Features Overview

MindTouch Nexus is a groundbreaking wiki publishing and social media platform. It is scalable for use by a small community paper with one wiki to an Internet portal with tens, or even hundreds, of wikis. As such, it needs to have some key features demanded by these enterprises. They include:

Customization

UGC must be blended seamlessly into the main website as part of the overall presence in terms of look and feel (“skinning”) and content layout, ad placement etc. so that it’s indistinguishable from the rest of the site.

Integrated Web backend

The wikis need to be integrated with a site’s existing infrastructure easily, including the advertising, search engine, account management and security systems.

Content management controls

This is a critical element, the ability for site editors to control and blend UGC into the whole content canvass to meet their editorial and commercial objectives. Some of these tools are:

• Multi-level page permissions—the ability to set different rights for different groups of users based on profile, behavior or usage patterns. The permissions can be set down to the page level of any piece of content, and can be revoked or reinstated based on policy.
• Each page can be set to read-only, comments or fully editable modes.
• Each page has full versioning audit trail and revert capabilities, so that every change is tracked and an editor can restore any version to be published.
• Content filters supplied by Nexus and the site owner can be the first level of defense against obviously inappropriate content.

Reusable Content

UGC can be a valuable and significant component of a newspaper’s content assets. As such, any UGC garnered should be able to be integrated with the paper’s existing content management systems so they can be archived and reused for different purposes, including reverse syndication. MindTouch Nexus is the only wiki system that publishes in XML format, the leading data exchange format for the Web and enterprise, so that every page can be reused in the paper’s publishing system. Without this capability, any UGC becomes “dead-end content” that does not reach its full potential.

The Power of Wikis

What are wikis? How are they used?

Wikis at their simplest are web pages which can be edited by a community of users. They are best used as a collaborative tool for a community of people bound by their shared interest in a topic to foster knowledge, opinions and dialog. Wikipedia is, of course, the best showcase of the power of wikis as it is among the top 10 trafficked sites in the world. Beyond that, there are thousands of wikis worldwide drawing significant traffic and building large communities around practically any topic or group imaginable.

Wikis have proven beyond doubt that if an environment is created for people to express themselves and interact with other like-minded people, they will. Newspaper websites are the perfect environment to capture this phenomenon because not only can they group people by common interest, they also have the bond of a shared physical location already in place.

While wikis have been around since the late 1990s, they have not been widely adopted by commercial enterprises until 2005. How are they different from blogs and forums (the current state of the art in Web 2.0 technologies for most)? In summary, wikis are best for people to collaboratively write in-depth content—a reference piece or story—that has long-lasting value and can be constantly refreshed by the community at large. They can be a permanent and evergreen information repository for any web property. Blogs are a great medium for expressing one’s opinions, rants and raves, often on specific events or issues. The vast majority of the content is meaningless, vapid or vile, and has no lasting value.

Applications

Wikis can be the community portal for just about any topic or group. That’s why newspapers are the perfect medium for wikis, because they have a built-in geographical community that is strong and vibrant. In the circle of awareness, interest and impact for every human, what’s local is by far the most important. This is a huge advantage, one newspapers can defend and extend through wiki communities.

Community Wikis

The “killer app” for newspapers in this context is a wikipedia for every local community which they serve. For some, there could be just a couple; for a large metro area, it could be 20, 30 or 50. In such a community, its residents contribute content on local history, interesting places to hike, restaurant reviews, retirement, educational or child rearing issues, real estate profiles, or whatever unique issues they are interested in. Imagine tens or hundreds of contributors comment, edit and collaborate with each other to make a topic up to date, fully contextualized with other content linked from elsewhere, and all the newspaper has to do is monitor the spontaneous interactions and join in the collaboration.

Is this model better or the current one of having one or two reporters covering a topic write all the stories?

“Newspapers should harness the power of communities—rather than wire service copy—to help fill pages. Half of the newspaper’s service-oriented content can be done by users in an engaging way that can enrich the audience. Such a model would free precious resources to do the craft of journalism and create content that sets newspapers apart from other media. You don’t need journalists to put out a travel or food section. Users are better served by having user-generated content. Use the journalists to do highly differentiated journalism.”

Lincoln Millstein
SVP Digital Media
Hearst Corp.

There are many other creative, fun, useful—and lucrative—applications possible, including:

Kids Sports

The U.S. is crazy about sports, especially with kids. In some small towns, the high school football or basketball team is the glue that binds the community together. Imagine if a paper sets up a wiki for every kid’s league in every sport from age 5 onward. A centerpiece of this wiki is a multimedia profile page for every player where the parents, coaches, friends and relatives, teammates and team boosters can write about the child, post images or video clips of Johnny’s first home run or touchdown pass. Someone can compare this child with his older brother, some other player in town, or with the child’s previous performances. This will be an instant pageview and traffic booster for the site.

School Wikis

Kids’ education is a central topic for every community. To become a deeper part of its readers’ lives, a newspaper can set up a wiki for every school in its served market. Through that wiki, teachers, administrators, parents and students can interact and collaborate on any topic that’s of interest or concern to them. It will be a live collaborative forum conducted through the paper’s website.

People Profiles

People like human interest stories, and everyone has a story to tell. Tapping people’s desire to share and tell their stories, a wiki is the perfect tool to enable that expression with all the power of social media on the Internet. These stories can be categorized into different events and passages of life: birth, graduation, marriage, divorce, death etc.

Big Topics

Aside from the gamut of usual topics that most people find interesting or useful, such as sports, entertainment, pets etc., a newspaper can also use wikis for high-impact issues that interest a particular community. Examples: global warming, illegal immigration (especially in border states), a proposed new sports stadium, or the scandal of the day.

In the end, it is all about creating compelling content and a forum of expression so readers have a reason to visit a newspaper site again and again.

Value Proposition

Cost

Nexus is the most leveraged publishing system that enables the site owner to generate large amounts of evergreen content without requiring any extra headcount. By working with volunteer contributors and monitors, a media company’s existing editorial staff can leverage themselves many times over. Getting large volumes of compelling content that boosts traffic for essentially free is a winning formula.

Revenues

• Boost traffic —There is no longer any doubt that UGC generates much greater traffic than the typical content written by the editorial staff. Two examples: 67% of the pageviews of one major metropolitan paper’s website is generated by UGC. A mid-sized paper’s photo gallery of 15,000 images generated 500,000 pageviews each month. Wikis are generating hundreds of millions of pageviews across thousands of websites.

• Improve search rankings —This is accomplished through the intricate linking (backward and forward) feature of wiki pages that elevate the importance of the linked pages.

• Enhance stickiness —With more compelling content that is refreshed, people stay longer, making the site more valuable. Stickiness is an increasingly important metric measured by advertisers.

• More targeted ads —The current practice is to scroll the existing ad inventory across a site’s pages without any rhyme or reason. People ignore them or treat them as a nuisance. That’s why current CPM rates are going down. With a wiki page, site owners can serve up much more targeted ads to the audience. Targeted ads increase click through rates and boost ad rates (CPM).

• Higher revenues — More targeted ads, higher CPMs and click-through rates mean more revenues. These are incremental revenues that couldn’t have been generated by the current content creation process. Wikis’ highly leveraged publishing characteristic makes this possible.

• Build community and deepen brand loyalty — By using leading-edge technology to make it a hub of information and interaction, a media property can build and strengthen existing or new community of users and increase its brand equity.

“MindTouch Nexus will generate large volumes of fresh content which will in turn build traffic, increase the ability to post more targeted advertising and deepen our connection with the dynamic San Diego County community. The need to harness community-generated content is the new reality for all online media, and MindTouch Nexus provides us with a powerful tool to fulfill that need in a controlled way.”

Chris Jennewein
V.P. Internet Operations
Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

Software as a Service (SaaS Model)

A big part of Nexus’ value proposition is the SaaS business model, which is also known as a turnkey, hosted service. The advantages of SaaS include:

• No capital investment—There is no need for capex to buy any technology or expend major IT resources to deploy it.

• Low upfront cost—There is a one-time fee (in the low thousands of dollars) for initial setup, customization and integration. Standard templates which are customizable are provided that makes initial “skinning” of a wiki site by your staff as self-service as possible.

• Immediate deployment—Nexus is ready to consume. No need to have a 3-6 month IT project to start the service and delay time to market.

• Leave the technology to us—The service includes support, software updates, bug fixes, backups and monitoring services. We continually innovate so you’ll have the latest features and fixes on a regular basis. You focus on your business, we focus on ours.

• Pay for performance—Our main revenue source is payment for wiki pageviews generated through our service, at a small percentage of the CPM value of typical pageviews. We make money only if our service generates incremental revenue for you. We are also open to ad share and license options.

In summary, Nexus is a very low risk service in terms of cost, human resources, time and technology. The cost of failure is minimal, but the reward can be significant. It can be a game changer for you.

“MindTouch Nexus is a perfect fit for us and other online media sites since it does not require any capital investment or large upfront expenditure, no new editorial resources, and is immediately deployable with an attractive pay-for-performance model.”

Ron James
Content Manager
SignOnSanDiego

categories: MindTouch