Posts Tagged ‘ cover it live ’

4
9
Nov

Daily Cover it Live Show: Lessons Learned

After close to nine months of doing am:gi, a daily morning “conversation” with our readers, we ended the show a little over a week ago. Why? Because it’s time to take what we’ve learned from it and evolve the concept a little.

There was some pressure from above to do something with the show. Either change it up or kill it. We decided to do both. We could not seem to grow our viewer numbers. We needed big numbers to show advertisers to sell it and with the format of am:gi, (90 minutes every weekday, occasional guests, too much free-form conversation) we simply couldn’t get enough participants or replays to entice advertisers. The time involved for the two of us who ran the show every morning was another factor.

So we killed it. We killed it a lot.

But there were some awesome things that came out of having a daily conversation and we are now going to take those awesome things and spin them into four separate things that will be so awesome it might just make you explode with, well,  awesomeness.

First thing’s first: We love Cover it Live. We love it so much, we’re using it in all four new ventures. So big giant HURRAY for Cover it Live.

  • Breaking comments. One of the ventures we are implementing right now. As some of you know, we’ve back and forth-ed on commenting for a long time. We simply can’t moderate every single comment as decried by our corporate owners because we simply don’t have the manpower. Also, the commenting system that comes with our software is… antiquated. But we really do want to have some form of commenting available. Our solution? We will embed a Cover it Live ‘chat’ on hot topic stories. The ‘talkers’, if you will. We’ll have one for Breaking stories, of course, but we’ll open up the conversation for severe weather, for example, as well. It will be moderated so we’ll remain in compliance with corporate policies, but we’ll at least be offering some way for our readers to engage and talk about a story.
  • Live Coverage. Another “spinoff” of am:gi will be live coverage. Our highest replays ever came from the day George and I went to Husker Harvest Days. George manned am:gi,  I went roving around, sending pics from HHD to Twitter which fed into the show. We learned that the people, they like this! Hopefully with the help of the Verizon MiFi (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) and Cover it Live, we will continue to be a presence at events such as Black Friday, Expos, and the biggie: the State Fair’s first year in GI next year. The MiFi will let us not have to worry about whether the event has wi-fi and allow us to be pretty flexible. Plus it’s just cool.
  • Newsmaker Interviews. “Newsmakers” will be a spinoff of our guest segments from am:gi. We will do simple interviews and Q&A’s with people in our community who are in the news. We’re shooting for two per week. We will solicit questions from the community ahead of time (using email, a submission page, a Google Voice number to leave question) and during the show. The real value for this is in the replays and in the reverse-publishing.
  • Ask the Independent. Ask us anything. We’ll find the answer for you. Need to know how to contact a City Council member? We’ll get you numbers. Want to know where the money to move the State Fair came from? We’ll get that info for you. We may not be able to help you find your socks, but we can tell you which color looks best with khaki trousers :) This show will be once a week and we’ll take questions via email, our Google Voice line, and a submission page on our website – oh and live during the show, time-permitting.

So those are our four spinoffs. The timesuck and manpower is lessened, but we feel the potential for advertisers is a lot bigger than it ever could have been with am:gi.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved am:gi and we met great people and discovered a little about what our community was talking about. But now it’s time to take those lessons and try the next thing. I’m very excited about these ideas.

3
11
Aug

Using Cover it Live for Daily Conversation – a Way to Engage

After two weeks of doing a daily “conversation” using fantastic software system Cover it Live, I wrote this post talking about how it was coming along. Well, it’s been over 5 months now, and time to update on what we’ve learned.

The main thing we’ve learned is that we still enjoy it. Very important.

Over the months we have refined how we run it and we have tried several things to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s nice to have that sort of freedom. For instance, we moved our chat time from 9am-10:30 to 9:30am-11am. Yes, we go for a full 90 minutes. This may change over time, but we found that a shorter show sometimes hinders a discussion that’s just getting good.

I was asked recently for advice on how to run a daily CiL show, so here’s how we roll:

  • We have two people run it each morning: a host, @georgeayoub, who is our senior columnist and me. I act as the ‘gatekeeper’ although I jump in and promote things, answer questions, provide links to stories we’re discussing, and a bunch of other things.
  • We schedule guests as often as we can. We scored a bit of a coup when the mayor of Grand Island agreed to be a bi-weekly guest on the show and she’s been a real firecracker :) Other guests have included City Council members, educators, various board members, the Governor, a couple of state senators, and our own reporters. This week is Education Week on the show and we kicked it off with our education reporter as Monday’s guests, then we have three teachers for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from different grades and schools, and we’ll end the week with the Mayor.
  • When you have a guest, take advantage of Cover it Live’s ‘Queue’ function. We spend the first 30 minutes of the show building up questions in the queue so they will be ready for the guest who arrives at 10am and answers them for 30 minutes. The final 30 minutes we will either carry on the discussion, or resume one that may have started before the guest arrived. We’ve discovered that very often, the guest will stay longer than the allotted 30 minutes and answer more questions. We love when that happens :)
  • Our host will usually ask the guest the first question and ask them to tell us about themselves. Then we allow one question through at a time, allowing the guest time to answer thoughtfully. Sometimes this creates ‘dead air’ if the guest types slowly. But we fill in by letting the readers know some topics of upcoming questions, or reminding them of other things we’re promoting.
  • When we don’t have a guest scheduled,  we try to have  a specific newsy topic to go over, but sometimes we do end up with a sort of free-for-all discussion on several topics. But that’s okay. Great discussions and good information can come out of that. So don’t be afraid of free-form days now and then.
  • We do our best to keep our readers on topic. We’ve had several readers try to change the topic in mid-discussion by throwing out a ‘How about those Cubs’ type of comment. Of course, I don’t mean they want to talk about the Cubs, but often a reader has many trains of thought leaving the station at the same time and they try and drive all of them into our discussion at once. This is where gate-keeping and private messaging abilities built into Cover it Live comes in handy. Many times I will just send a quick private message to a reader asking them to try and stay on topic or tell them politely that we’ll move on to another topic if time permits.
  • What about readers who get… worked up on a hot topic? Well, just put your jackboots on and moderate them. Try and let them know privately that personal attacks etc will get them nowhere, and failing that, simply ignore them. Try to keep your cool – not always easy to do – and be as polite as possible. Use your best judgment if you think a reader is getting out of hand.
  • If a topic warrants, run a quick poll. Example: When the awesome John Hughes passed away unexpectedly, it came up in the show. So we ran a ‘name your favourite Hughes film’ poll which generated some nice, nostalgic discussion.
  • Finally, archive, archive, archive. So many times we’ve wanted to go back and check something and our archive has been invaluable. Cover it Live offers an enterprise archiving system that you can use, but we had already set up amgishow.com. I just chucked up a WordPress site, used some plugins for the calendar/upcoming guests and I post each day’s show on there. We have learned that people who cannot be with us in the mornings will read the replay almost daily and it is much appreciated.

So what are we doing to generate revenue? Here’s where it gets a bit sticky. We want to have sponsors. Our numbers are better than when we started, and we’ve got street cred, and respect as being a good source of information. Feedback on it as been phenomenal and we are appreciated in the community. But our viewer numbers are slow to grow and I think it’s down to the time of day we’re on. Weekday mornings when most people are working isn’t conducive to growing a large audience. I don’t know how daytime TV does it. So it’s hard to “sell” us for sponsorship. We average over 800 viewers per week and some weeks are better than others.

Right now, we’re running a huge treasure hunt and giving away prizes each morning on the show using trivia and it has produced a spike in our numbers. So I’m wondering if we offer drop-in ads through a show for a lower price than say, a banner ad, and the sponsor also offers a gift card. I wonder if that would fly when the treasure hunt is over… Hard to say.

I think if this format was done in a larger market (and maybe it is, I’m not sure) than viewer numbers would be higher and sponsorships more likely.

People have told me that there is no time to do this sort of thing. An hour and a half out of a reporter’s day can be a lifetime. I don’t know what to say about that. We’re lucky to have someone like George on our staff. He’s well-known in our community, and we’ve got a small Online department that I live in so I can run the technical stuff. It’s a squeeze on our schedules, but somehow, we just made it a part of our day and it works.

So there you go. Next time someone asks me how we do this thang, I will be able to point to this post. Thanks for reading!

12
27
Mar

Finding our feet: Daily News Chatting

I was skeptical about the plan to hold a daily news chat (using the amazing, excellent, can’t say enough good things about it Cover it Live software) on our site every weekday for an hour and a half, hosted by our senior writer, George.

My main reservation – and forgive me George and Jack (semi-co-host) who may or may not read this – was the fact that we killed a daily newscast because it took too much time to do. For those two, a daily 90 minute chat would be even more of a time suck than our newscast ever was. But bless their cotton socks, they still wanted to try this.

My other reservation was the Troll Factor. The fellas have high hopes of our endeavour being a place for good discussion on the news topics of the day. A sort of coffeehouse conversation that the town mayor, or city council member may stop in to from time to time. As the longtime (and often long-suffering) admin of our forums and moderator of our story comments, I also know that the town crank might also show up and get everyone all riled up.

So it was with some trepidation that I got on board with the plan.

I’m happy to say that we’ve been doing the chat for two weeks now and it’s exceeded even my curmudgeonly expectations. We have had a troll or two, but because of Cover it Live’s method of previewing comments before they go live, we’re able to respond to them or squash them if we need to. But for the most part, the discussion topics have ranged from downtown improvement (a hot topic actually, requiring a couple days devoted to it), wind energy, the big State Fair move and other local stuff. It’s turning out to be exactly what George and Jack hoped for.

There’s been a learning curve though. Some things we’ve learned:

  • Don’t have a bunch of staff in the chat talking to each other if you can help it. It can put people off from joining in.
  • If you have do have a couple staffers in there keeping the flow of conversation going, try to coordinate your comments, either by yelling across the newsroom, or using the private message function in CiL. This will prevent them from making the same comment or asking the same question at the same time :)
  • You should have someone acting as the ‘Gatekeeper/Greeter’. At the Indy, this is my job. I watch incoming comments and allow them through, watch for trolls, and also for regulars who have returned. The regulars get to post without moderation. If you’re new, I may have you wait for that privilege until I can be sure you’re not going to spout obscenities or drag the conversation off topic. I also try to welcome new people as they come in and make it feel comfortable for them to join the conversation (I know it can be intimidating for some people.)
  • I also throw an ad into the chat every 20 minutes or so :) Right now we just have house ads, but we’re working on selling ads/sponsorship for this.
  • Today, we had our first guests in to talk. I learned the best way to handle that is to not do any ‘allow posting without moderation’. Everyone had to be moderated first because 1. The font colour/format helps the guests see a new comment 2. allows me to let the guest(s) answer each question before seeing the chat flooded with other questions and 3. puts the kibosh on the trolls.
  • Find a spot somewhere to archive all of the chats. For this case, I set up a quick and dirty WordPress blog to house them: http://grandislandblogs.com/amgi. This way, anyone – a regular perhaps – who missed it can go see the replay.
  • Use the quick polls, twitter feeds, scoreboards, newsflash options, video feeds – all the bells and whistles Cover it Live offers because I’m telling you, they’re freaking awesome.
  • If the discussion is on a topic in the paper that day, make sure you link to it in the chat a time or two. But also, don’t be afraid to “link out” of your paper’s site as well. It’s okay ;)
  • Try to keep each chat session to one or two topics, but it is okay to let the conversation flow naturally as well. No need to be a Topic Nazi.
  • Set realistic goals for it, not lofty ones. Otherwise you set yourself up for disappointment. For example, don’t say, “Let’s aim for 300 unique readers by the second month.” Instead, aim for getting one guest in a week.
  • Don’t be discouraged by slow days. Not every chat is going to fly. Persevere.

Our numbers have astonished us. For a small paper, we’re averaging about 75 unique readers a day, with 75% of them sticking around longer than a minute. Replays are growing each day as well.

Our newsroom is watching the chat every day as well. We learned that discussion generated in the chat led to some story ideas for reporters when they were in a budget meeting.

We also learned that our session on the local Downtown Business Improvement District issue caused one councilman to cast a ‘No’ vote on the issue after seeing the discussion.

Those two reasons alone make me reverse my position on the whole thing. I’m excited about it, all the way now :) Next week we will have a Senator in to discuss renewable energy and Nebraska’s Safe Haven law, and in April, we managed to get the governor to agree to join us. Very exciting!