It was great to have the opportunity to listen to Trei Brundrett (@clockwerks) during Texas State’s Mass Communications Week (@txstatemcweek). He was there to discuss the interesting things happening with Vox Media’s multiple platforms and give us a bit of information about the magic that runs behind the scenes through their Chorus media platform. When speaking with Trei, I mentioned the Gawker media (Gizmodo, i09, Kotaku) formula of community engagement and mentioned how I saw Chorus as a particularly more developed management system.
Trei stressed that Chorus manages more than just content, and also includes:
- Content Distribution
- Advertising, Sponsorship & Monetization
- Community Moderation & Social Interactivity
- Content Publishing
- Structured Data
- Demand, Production, Social & Traffic Metrics
- Brand Management
We also discussed ideal methods of pushing content from across the different platforms, and if this was ideal for users as much as it might be for the content creators or advertisers. Gawker will insert articles from other “news” sources into the feeds of their other products which sometimes can lead to users like myself feeling as if I’m just being sold to, and especially if I’m not interested in the linked material.
He briefly spoke with me about writers from Gawker outlets, especially like individuals such as ex-editor-in-chief for Kotaku, Brian Cresente, who now writes for Polygon. It made me think that a lot of the writers and people I’ve tend to respect the most have all made some kind of shift over to Polygon/Vox to some degree.
There was one aspect of our discussion though that leaves me feeling like they are still working on discovering the right mix as a solution. I had brought up the idea of “content redundancy“, meaning with all the social media platforms available to any kind of journalistic endeavour, how do you go about providing your content through that medium to where it doesn’t just become a carbon copy of the website. Also, what methods should be implemented that keep engagement (as well as traffic) on the main site instead of these third-party social venues.
Trei found this to be a good question, and his longer pause made me understand this was a difficult area for anyone in his line of work. There is no magic formula that has been handed down over the ages. People like Trei ARE the wizards that will have to come up with the crazy, complicated incantations that will deliver a new type of media coverage on social.
We can’t just copy strategies and aspects of one from the other, cause then we are left with two similar products and a divided community. After looking at some of the content on the social platforms for products like Polygon, I still believe that we haven’t found the sweet spot just yet. Facebook and Twitter really are just aggregators of our content with us doing the best we can to derive click-throughs and bring hopefully a larger and more vocal community to our websites, but still, people just sometimes prefer the simple “click-to-like” or commenting opportunities provided by the mammoth social platforms: places where community already exists.
However, maybe with Vox Media thinking outside of the box and working hard on developing a more complete solution, this will be something that gets refined and new answers will be discovered as the months and years go on.