Introduction

The media industry is undergoing fundamental structural change. Ever since Rupert Murdoch publicly acknowledged in a speech last year to the Society of American Newspaper Publishers that online publishing was definitely the future, traditional publishers have been falling over themselves to understand their readerships, their attachment to the brand and how interest groups could be commercially developed with additional relevant services — in other words, what we all call CRM.

An important lead indicator for newspaper publishers is the progress already being achieved by directory publishers. Directories have extremely simple editorial transactions — someone wants to find a supplier of a particular service in a particular location. However, for an online directory to be truly effective, more detail is needed if advertisers’ return on investment is to be maintained and improved. Directory publishers have therefore been investing in their taxonomy (categorisation system) development to provide users with a far more in-depth ability to search beyond the broad categories familiar to us through acquaintance with Yellow Pages or Thomson Directories. This kind of more detailed “findability” is possible by creating and building a categorisation system — or taxonomy — that can translate between interchangeable, synonymous terms, can categorise new material automatically and can automatically incorporate and develop new terms or connections based on enquirers’ behaviour.

The result is a far greater ability for advertisers to target more precisely the consumer behaviour (directory search) that predicts likely interest in their own product or service. Moreover, there exists a double-bubble of directory users receiving increasingly relevant and appropriate advertising when they use the directory — advertising for products in which they are really likely to be interested. CRM study after CRM study has shown that consumers do not react badly to advertising as such — only irrelevant or poorly targeted advertising.

Following the leaders

The directory development experience provides a model and inspiration for newspaper publishers. In fact, one or two leading newspapers have already been hard at work to allow groups of readers with common interests to interact with one another. Anyone who underestimates the power of a newspaper’s brand is misguided. The affinity that readers feel with ‘their’ newspaper is exceptionally strong. People often define themselves in terms of the newspaper they read. Certainly, they usually feel that fellow readers are also likely to be like-minded, and people that they would most likely want to interact with.

Creating these communities under a newspaper’s brand umbrella invokes a virtuous circle. Readers get more of what they are interested in, from a content-creating organisation whose output and style they enjoy. Newspapers replace mass advertising revenue with niche advertising revenue, plus a host of premium service micro-payments from the readers themselves. And advertisers achieve highly targeted media reach, eliminating the wastage of mass advertising.

The Technology

Back in the world of directory publishing, we can take the example of a major player whose online service receives over 10 million user searches per month.

At the heart of the publisher’s e-business success is the precision of online search facilities, helping users find the information they need quickly and easily. A couple of years ago, the publisher, along with its software partner, decided to jointly fund the development of a pioneering taxonomy (thesaurus) management tool.

The directory’s Chief Technology Officer recounts, "A practical example of service and findability improvement brings the story to life. Hotels or guest houses need to reach customers outside their local area, display details of their exact location visually on a map and list their particular range of services, such as whether pets are allowed. But we can only extract commercial value from this granular level of detail if the data is properly categorised and structured. Essentially, our challenge was to bridge the gap between user search terms and the unstructured text of our customers’ advertisements.”

“We required a thesaurus to structure the content and manage the vocabulary of our directory, in order to get the most out of our search engine. The search trawls words and phrases not only in advertiser listings on the site, but also drills down to the advertisers’ own website content, and in some cases, even the adverts of our print version. Fitting those words and phrases within our classification scheme requires a combination of data mining, web crawling, search software enhancements and thesaurus creation and management.

Conclusion

So much has a leading player in the directories market achieved in improving their CRM, whether towards their user-customers or their advertiser-customers. With its wealth of editorial content, how much more could a newspaper achieve? Various studies over the years have indicated how strong a brand attachment people have to the newspaper they read. Now that mass advertising revenues for the traditional newspaper medium are plummeting, alternative revenue streams are being urgently sought. Pioneers in the industry recognised that niche audiences were already identifiable through the wine clubs, travel clubs, and so on, that had been set up through the traditional newspaper. However, many more special interest groups exist within a newspaper’s readership, all of which can be served with additional content, exclusive special offers from advertisers, and even events or other means of interaction, all bound together by affinity with the newspaper’s brand.

The same facilities, in terms of taxonomy management and capability, can facilitate a newspaper’s interconnection between advertiser and users of its website. No one person uses exactly the same vocabulary, and so ’translation’ services are needed to connect people to content and people to advertisers. A wealth of content is produced every day, all of which needs to be automatically categorised — to do so manually would simply be uneconomic. Mr Murdoch says the future of the newspaper is online. The winners in the game, however, will be those whose richness, usefulness and findability of online offering grows with its readers.

Jeremy has 15 years experience in complex, high value solution-based software sales, marketing, operations and development. Since 1994 he has worked for Microbank Software, which provided knowledge-based exception processing applications for leading global banks and securities firms. He was initially based in Singapore but subsequently moved the USA where he was Managing Director with responsibility for worldwide sales, marketing, operations and product management. Prior to that Jeremy worked with BIS Banking Systems (now MISYS). From 1987 to 1990, set up and ran a technical consulting business in South Africa. Jeremy has business experience in Europe (6 yrs), Asia Pacific (3 yrs), USA (3 yrs) and Africa (3 yrs). He also has a proven record of rapid business development and in developing a customer-oriented entrepreneurial attitude within the teams that he builds and leads. Underpinning this experience is an in-depth understanding and interest in technology, as well as the business issues facing young, high growth, software companies. Company: APR Smartlogik