Personal content and connection

This is the sixth section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.

A longtime contradiction of life in the news business has been that we ignore or downplay the biggest news in the lives of the people we serve. If someone in your family graduates, gets married, has a baby, dies or has a major illness or surgery, that’s the biggest news of the year in your family and often in a broader circle of friends and co-workers.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, the biggest news in my family now is my nephew Patrick’s battle with leukemia (it looks like he’ll be ready to be released soon from a Boston hospital after six weeks hospitalized for a bone transplant). In other recent years, major news for our family was a son’s wedding or graduation, a niece’s baby or my surgery. 

Some of these events that are huge news in small circles don’t even appear in the newspaper and won’t make the evening news on TV. Some will be a line of agate in the paper or a formulaic announcement or obituary. Digital versions are usually little more than the same text (and photo, if a photo was even used) that we provided in the paper. The possibilities for community connection, personal storytelling and revenue generation around personal content are great and community news organizations need to recognize and develop these possibilities.

We are early in the history of social networking and we need to develop at the local level the kind of platforms that Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other social networks are developing on a global level. Sometimes we will interface with existing global networking platforms, as on our Facebook page and adding Twitter feeds, but more and more we will develop community networks, doing the local connection jobs that we’ve always done with other tools and doing new connection jobs that were not possible before. Others are already entering this space and we need to pursue it swiftly. We can’t know now all the ways we can or need to serve the community through personal content. If we wait to see all the possibilities unfold, we will be too late. 

Life’s milestones, big events and different stages are a way to connect with people in the community and beyond, adding content that is newsy today but gains lasting value. In general, the approach for each milestone will be multi-tiered for both content and revenue. We need to offer a basic web page to celebrate the event (preferably another branch of the site we already have with this person, but if not, this should be the first of many). In each case, we would offer the basic site, with options for automated messages to family and friends, user-generated content, gift registries, direct venue and/or hotel reservations. We also could offer some upsells on the site that would make the design much cooler and personalized for a fee.

We need to develop the tools and opportunities to generate revenue from personal content on four levels:

• Direct sales opportunities of gifts, flowers, reservations, etc.
• Targeted advertising based on the event or life stage itself.
• Targeted advertising based on what we know about the person from previous activities, preferences and information registered.
• Customized products such as a four-page newspaper with a person’s graduation or retirement as the lead news story, with supporting stories and pictures provided by the family and friends.

Cradle-to-grave observance of big occasions can be a huge opportunity for building audience and generating revenue that we barely tap now. Other solutions are already operating in some of these spaces, but they often are not community-based solutions and we can offer solutions with local connections and other benefits that will help us be disruptive. In other cases, these are “blue-ocean” opportunities where we can build audience with little or no competition.

News has always been our core job. We need to take advantage of new technology and new social tools to help people make a big deal of each event. We can become the place where people find out what’s happening with people they care about in the community, where they celebrate, worry and mourn. And many of these events are occasions of big spending that we can accommodate. 

Continue reading plans for types of personal content:

• Births
• Growing-up milestones
• School
• Graduation
• College life
• Military service
• Weddings
• Parenthood
• Divorce
• Jobs, pets, health, food
• Illness
• Empty nesters
• Retirement
• Reunions
• Holidays
• Memorials

Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with Personal content opportunities: Births.

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