On The Media: Hyperlocal and Numbers [en]

[fr] Trois sujets à écouter sur On The Media: un sur le journalisme hyperlocal (qui me fait penser au Bondy Blog -- d'ailleurs, pourquoi a-t-on le Lausanne Bondy Blog et non le Renens Bondy Blog? mystère...), et deux sur l'abus de chiffres dans les médias et le chiffre magique 50'000.

I’ve started catching up with my On The Media backlog. Here are two pieces I suggest you listen to.

Is Hyperlocal the Future of News?

This reminds me of Bondy Blog. Started by a bunch of Swiss journalists covering civil unrest around Paris in 2005 from the Paris suburbs themselves, it has since then been handed over to young local reporters. Bondy Blogs have sprouted since then in various cities, including Lausanne and Vernier — though I remain convinced that the Lausanne Bondy Blog should be the Lausanne Bondy Blog at all, but the Renens Bondy Blog. Isn’t it about putting the local spotlight on the underpriviledged suburbs?

Are Bondy Blogs hyperlocal?

Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts followed by Prime Number

You probably know my distaste for numbers and our obsession with metrics (including in the media, which is the topic of these two pieces). Refresher: my rant about un-scientific Twitter metrics, fan-quoting Seth Godin, and Suw‘s heartily recommended “Metrics” series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. (I’m not dead against analytics, though. Just cautious.)

Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict is a book, and it’s now in my Amazon shopping basket.

Enjoy!

LIFT08: David Sadigh (User Retention) [en]

*Live notes of David Sadigh’s talk, possibly incomplete or misunderstood. Standard disclaimer, you know the drill.*

LIFT08 161

Who was connected to the Internet in 95?

Internet users get the same content, however they behave. But people are different! They should get different content.

– homepage bounces
– marketing and e-marketing campaigns are not well-optimized

98% of visitors leave an e-commerce site without buying.

2008: billions invested to drive more people to these websites. Lots of traffic but not enough sales. We would never accept results like that offline, why do we accept them online?

We don’t focus on user retention and customer experience.

Opportunity: sell more by delivering more relevant content.

Techniques: intentional, geographic, event, behavioral targeting. Push.

Intentional targeting example: you type “family holidays in Italy” in Google, and you get a sponsored link. When you click on it, you would land on the website but get a photo of a family instead of a boat on the sea in the header: that’s intentional targeting.

*steph-note: bunch of stuff on what is more clickable amongst certain Nespresso images.*

It’s not about clickthrough, though, but about sales. Or page views by a specific user.

*steph-note: a very quantitative approach, which is personally not very appealing to me, but which I understand is crucial for business settings today.*