Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream- I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?

Want evidence of end user control?

If you really want to underline the way control is now being shared with an ever greater number of people historically know as your ‘audience’, then show people the increasing rise of Firefox browser usage – then show them Greasemonkey.

Now Firefox isn’t the most used browser globally – Internet Explorer still rules, and Google’s Chrome certainly has some advantages and enthusiastic adopters. But whether or not Firefox ever dominates the browser market, the influence of the open source approach, add-ons and plug-ins is undeniable. It’s the reason that many people, including myself, might use Chrome for certain tasks for speed, but can’t give up the utility of plugins which offer everything from easy ways to see the way a page is coded, to Swedish spellchecking, mouse gestures and more.

But why is Greasemonkey so incredibly important?

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scriptson-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparison in Amazon.com web pages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes. From Wikipedia.

So that means:

You can spend as much time and money as you like on designing your webpage, but if I want to disable elements, change the layout, or do whatever I like, I can.

For instance, Facebook’s redesign angered many people – so if you want to hide the Highlights sidebar, just install one of three Greasemonkey options.

Or you can just emulate the old Facebook design.

And what’s really interesing?

As a website owner/publisher, I’m not aware of any way you’d know this was happening via analytics (And I’ve asked a few metrics/analytics types before posting), and you wouldn’t know what users are adding to your site to improve their experience, and possibly conversion rates.

(If you do know ways to track any of that information automatically, I’d love you to share it in the comments.)

Your users would though.

Resources:

You can keep up with the Greasemonkey blog at Greasespot, and find Userscripts for it at Userscripts.org. Please do keep in mind that you’re installing code which may in a very small amount of cases have been created by people who aren’t 100% lovely, so do some research before adding new scripts. Or just don’t blame this post if you kill the internet by accident.

Thanks to Microsoft for a good month for TheWayoftheWeb!

Like a lot of bloggers, I seem to have become slightly addicted to compulsively checking statistics when producing content would be more productive. But occasionally it provides a nice morale boost, such as today.

Despite missing the first 10 days of the month on holiday, comparing month on month shows improvements to pretty much every metric I could want, with a couple of days still left to go:

Visits +2.24%

Page Views +6.88%

Pages/Visit +4.54%

My two favourites:

Bounce Rate: -8.59%

Avg Time on Site: +3.13%

So everything is up except bounce rate – and I like seeing that down! And obviously my post ‘Has Microsoft made a major marketing mistake‘ drove a lot of visit – but strangely, as I’m not really a videogame blogger, it didn’t drive up bounce rate or single page visits!

After that, it’s a three-way tie between:

Strangely, despite the good growth in traffic, I appear to have dropped slightly on Technorati and the Adage ranking – so the quality/quantity of inbound links seems to have dropped? RSS subscriber numbers have also increased, despite one odd day of Feedburner telling me I suddenly had no subscribers on any blog!

And the other boost I’ve had has been attending some great business meetings with some very smart people and companies recently, and having several of them claim to have read my blogging and liked it – and most demonstrating that they’ve at least read one or two posts in detail. I’ll always treasure one person even bringing a prinout of one of my posts with highlighted sections to a meeting!

Breaking the habit of broadcast media

UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

UK newspapers by franckdethier on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s only when you try and break a long held habit that you realise how much we’re all influenced by the way we’ve always done things. Since starting my efforts to cut down and stop smoking, I’ve managed to get to the point where I only have the occasional cigarette once the family has gone to bed – but it’s the hardest one to drop. And when I get writers block, my intake rapdily goes up because I’ve spent so long finding inspiration by getting outside and getting the hit of nicotine while my brain kicks into gear.

And I’ve also started to try and challenge the broadcast media habit of trying to get the biggest audience with the least work. For years we’ve focused on audience figures to suggest that by doing the bare minimum, you’ll reach the biggest audience.

Whereas in the modern world, we need to work harder than ever at making as much of what we do remarkable, and to pursue as many opportunities to the maximum as we can. Otherwise we’ll keep finding someone else that does!

It reminds me of a post I read earlier today, which sadly I seem to have misplaced, commenting on the problem facing the A-List of blogging. Namely, the fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk are finding it hard to scale to respond on an individual level to every email, post and tweet they receive, and in effect, become mini-broadcasters.

The simple answer is that they still remain increasingly popular because they put in a huge amount of effort to stay more accessible than mainstream media. They don’t have to make time for everyone, but by attempting it as far as possible, it gives hope to those who don’t grab their attention at a particular time. It’s why I count myself fortunate to have had messages from the likes of Chris Anderson and Hugh McLeod, but I don’t bombard them with emails, or suddenly thinkg they’re my best friend and will respond to everything I do – they’ll do it if what I say is interesting and they have the time available.

The other option is to scale it, and for them to find someone as similar as possible, or someone they can trust, to work alongside them.

That’s where broadcast media should be. We still have far more resources than the top bloggers, so why not scale back on the coverage that everyone else is parroting, use link journalism, and focus on becoming closer to the spirit of individual response that blogging has fostered.

After all, it’s what we laud Zappos, Dell and Comcast for doing.

But there is a habit of resisting the idea of putting in that much effort for what will be less profit in total. Despite the fact that everything so far has shown that it’s harder to get similar levels of profit from online audiences as you would in print, radio or TV, and that the only way to really be successful is to aggregate lots and lots of individuals monetisation.

Annoyingly, the great David Armano summed this up far more succinctly.

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (http://darmano.typepad.com/)

The Corporate Social Media Curve by David Armano (http://darmano.typepad.com/)

At the point before the curve starts to dip, we need to put in the extra effort to keep that line climbing. Now if only I hadn’t needed a cigarette to think of all this!