Engage

More and more, business find that switching to digital is all about engaging the user. For UK daily The Guardian, that includes a wide variety of ways of interacting.

"We have over a million comments a month on guardian.co.uk," says Liz Butler, international group head with Guardian Commercial. "The journalist’s job is changing slightly. In the olden days, the journalist would write an article, it would be published, maybe a couple people would write a letter to the newspaper, however, you probably had a slim chance of your letter being published. It would probably only be published if you were a professor or senior lecturer.

"But now, anyone can comment on an article. So the journalists have to work a lot harder to constantly supervise that content and to continue the debate," she says.

But engaging the user and turning that engagement into a revenue stream is far more than comments on articles.

"We have had to find a lot of different revenue streams because the amount of money we make in digital is still not as large as the amount we make in print. As we diversify and have to offer our content in a lot of different ways, we need to find these revenue streams to keep sustainable as a business," Butler says.

The process of finding ways of engaging with users that work both in content and as a revenue stream is a process of trial and error with success stories as well as failures.

"Soulmates (dating.guardian.co.uk) works fantastically well, it has over 130 000 users a month and over 300 people a month apparently make their match on Soulmates. We charge a 25 pounds subscription fee for the service," Butler says.

"There are ideas that we have tried that haven’t worked. We had G24, which was all the updated stories, updated every 5 minutes. You could print it out on an A4 sheet of paper and as you were going to a meeting, in a bus or on the tube, you could take that with you. We thought it would be great for advertisers to sponsor the G24 and we thought users would really like it. But that didn’t work, people didn’t want to print it out," she says.

"Another idea we tried that didn’t work was the travel auction site. We thought, because we have so many users and we had such good relations with our travel advertisers, that they would be able to sell their excess beds near the departure date of the holiday, and then we would be able to get the users to bid, kind of like ebay really. But that didn’t work, there was no interest," Butler says.

Going mobile
With widespread use of the iPhone and the introduction of Android-based smart phones, mobile phones have become increasingly interesting for e-business and e-marketing.
Virtual coupons, promotional SMSs and the like have been around for a while, but the mobile marketing space is changing rapidly.

In his presentation on the evolution of digital advertising, Hrabren Suknaić, regional manager Adriatics & Bulgaria with Google Croatia, said the mobile revolution of 2009 was driven by applications. From Kraft Foods’ iFood assistant (a recipe application for your mobile phone) to Pizza Hut’s application that lets users compose and order custom pizzas, producers are finding new ways of interacting with their audiences, while driving demand and sales.