How good is your organization's ?user experience?? In the highly competitive world in which your product lives, you'd better attack yourself from the inside looking out so you can stay ahead of your competition. The depth and excellence of the ?user experience? was a constant theme at last week?s Convergence 2012 from the majority of the speakers.
Rob Curley, who heads the new media division at the Las Vegas Sun and Greenspun Media Group, spoke about the user experience in the digital world of newspapers by talking about relevance -- ?really knowing what matters to your audience? -- and by not only ?building a sense of community? but ?protecting your community?Rob asked the question, ?What if most of what we know about our audience and its needs is wrong?? and I can?t help thinking about that fact as it relates to our radio listeners and what they experience from our brands.Rob also focused on knowing what your audience is passionate about as a way to really know how to ?move the needle? with them. How much time are you spending probing what makes your audience tick? When you undertake listener focus groups, are you probing the hearts of your audience to get specific on what can move the needle? Do you know all of their favorite TV shows, magazines, websites, hobbies, and preferences? In his newspaper world, he uses a combination of readership statistics, Media Audit, and Scarborough to probe those passion points and focus the content on what matters.By developing a keen understanding of the audience DNA he in turn forces his team to develop ?an ability to not trust your instincts."What a key revelation for those of us who have blurted out the notion that we know better by our instinct than our audience! Get close to the metrics that matter much like the ?Money Ball? concepts of baseball management.Day in and day out in radio, we hear about the importance of enhancing the user experience by focusing on our local markets.Curley quickly seized upon the term ?hyper-local? as a way to motivate us to greater heights of deeper content. To him, ?Hyper-local equals just doing our job!?Now take that back to your local market and attack your user experience on every level starting with digital.?We only deploy where we know we move the needle,? according to Rob Curley.Are you deploying the correct tactics for your brand to move the audience needle?Buzz Knight is the Vice President of Program Development for Greater Media and he can be reached at bknight@greatermediaboston.com. Knight was named among ?Best Programmers? by Radio Ink Magazine in 2007 and 2010. He has served on the programming subcommittee of the National Association of Broadcasters(NAB) and is currently a member of the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) COLRAM Committee.
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