Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty

Today the Web offers many venues for people to get information. Because of the frustration of having to deal with information overload from searching, creating alerts, jumping from site to site, subscribing to RSS feeds and depending on social networks, users often limit loyalty to one site. Arguably, Facebook’s unthinkable achievement, in debunking Google for the most visited web site on the March 13, 2010, is attributed to relevance in the power of connecting active social communities.

Don’t even think about making advertisement revenue without sustainable visitor loyalty:

Creating a Community News Media on the old paradigm of the silo-based portal has consistently failed since the mid-90s. One must understand that community-based information comes from many different sources and dimensions. This means that your town’s events might be more active today than your town’s discussion board, news or police watch. As such the pulse or buzz of latest events has no loyalty to one page or source of content. Just like Facebook, it’s the serendipity of content creation that makes it interesting to visit every day. The same is true for creating a successful Community News Media site, with the added value of formal news and localized resources.

The following is required to succeed in creating loyal visitors:

1. Relevant to the user (not just the community as a single entity which is the old model)

2. Interactive awareness and discovery experience (present aggregated and correlated information)

3. User-personalized topics of interest (don’t waste time on style sheet personalization... no one left Facebook because they could not change the screen colors)

4. Make it easy to share discoveries and bring your visitor's community to the site

5. Introduce community leadership programs (create community-based advertisement and local blog brokers, contribution reward programs, journalist-sponsored bloggers...)

By focusing your efforts in becoming the destination for daily awareness and discovery for the community, you will create the context that allows for effective and targeted advertisement by a receptive audience. In our next post we will discuss how to benefit from creating a community media ecosystem and how to find relevant content from the Web.