Met today with Richard Anderson of Village Soup, who gave us an overview of the integrated print/online content management system they’ve developed to run their own sites and are now trying to spread to other news organizations.
The CMS is interesting (there’s an open-source version and an enterprise version they’re selling), but what really impresses me is how successful they’ve been in getting local businesses and organizations involved in their online communities. Through what they call the bizMember Program, they give local businesses what amount to directory profile pages that double as blogs. Then they publish the business posts prominently on their home page, in a kind of a ticker box that gets equal billing with their own staff content. It seems to set up a self-reinforcing situation where businesses are driven to participate to stay on top (and visible), which not incidentally gives the sites a lot of fresh and locally useful information.
bizBriefs next to staff content at Village Soup site.
The Village Soup group also runs four print weeklies, but they claim to get 21 percent of their revenue from online. Impressive.
No Comments.