5 Ways for Publishers to Gain Revenue and Customer Loyalty

By Eleanor Haas

"Navigating Search” was the title the SIIA gave yesterday’s Brown Bag Lunch, moderated by Diane Burley, a digital media consultant and advisor to Nstein Technologies.  We learned about new directions being pioneered by global publishers with millions of assets.  “New Ways to Deliver Meaning – not Just Online Content” might more accurately have described the program.  The payoff for publishers is significant.  It’s all about revenue and customer loyalty.

1.     Focus on the visitor first and only then on the information and how it is presented.  Understand visitor needs, interests and learning styles. Respect three key stages through which the visitor passes - first, processing the information, then making decisions about it and then executing decisions based on it.  Understand how sensory clues can be used to guide the visitor and how the visitor’s memory and inferences can support the information-gathering process

2.     Use wayfinding principles to organize digital space.  Wayfinding, a process used for centuries by navigators, and more recently by architects and other designers, describes how people intuitively orient themselves to a space and navigate from place to place. In general, people focus on a destination and follow what appears to them to be the best path.  Architects and other designers assess wayfinding options as a basis for improving the functionality of a particular environment and making the space more comfortable for visitors.

Paths, edges, nodes, landmarks and districts – the terms used by designers to describe spatial features for this purpose – were first coined by Kevin Lynch in his book "Image of the City" (1960) to help designers describe and think about how people experience space.   The same concepts are relevant to locating online content so that users can avoid the avalanche of irrelevant information delivered by keyword search, discover what they want and move on.

3.     Think beyond the home page to treat each website page as the potential landing page it is.  Google drives more and more traffic to pages beyond the home page, and these pages have too often been neglected in the past and therefore failed to deliver a superior visitor experience by reason of their design. 

4.     Connect multiple databases in ways that speed comprehensive search.  Enable visitors to come up with closer to 100 percent of the information needed for a decision, not just the usual 40 percent to 60 percent.  This can require smart connectors that enable a federated search across 6,000 databases, for example – using technology such as that offered by MuseGlobal.  Smart connectors add value for the publisher as well as the visitor.  For the publisher, they can increase revenue by an order of magnitude by speeding time to market for new products and significantly reducing the cost of support.

5.     Use text mining to organize and categorize vast amounts of both structured and unstructured information.  This permits publishers to cross-promote use of their content by enabling people interested in Topic A to quickly find related Topic B – with the help of technology such as that offered by Nstein technologies.  Content maps, which are beginning to replace traditional site maps, facilitate this by displaying the taxonomy of concepts within each subject or theme area.  The goal is to make it easy for visitors to infer additional knowledge about a piece of initial information – an inference that, in turn, becomes a new piece of information. 

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Comments

[Larry Donahue]

Great article!

Just a quick note about your 4th bullet above: I'm not aware of any MuseGlobal implementations that have many simultaneous databases, let alone in the thousands.

One feature that is often overlooked by most federated search providers is "incremental results," which greatly increases the speed and satisfaction of searching many databases.

For an example, check out one of websites, such as www.scitopia.org or www.biznar.com. Would love feedback.

I'm with Deep Web Technologies (www.deepwebtech.com) and have been doing federated search for many years.

Take care! Larry.

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