Thursday, November 01, 2007
The Arc of a Story
It's been interesting today watching how a big story develops on line. One of my clients has had a story viral enough to be interesting to watch as it developed hour by hour: Former Dentsu Creative Sues Over Trips to Brothel, Bathhouse, Sharapova Shoot, and and The Dirty Details of the Dentsu Suit.
This gets me to the analytics issue: Individual page reporting on HBX Analytics screens is limited to day-level. Fortunately, the custom Report Builder allows me to report hourly, and the reports are delivered in Excel format. This gives us the ability to visualize how the story is building an audience. With this information, the editorial staff is better able to apply resources to follow-up articles and to position emails.
The capabilities of analytics enable publishers to listen to their audiences and implement a rapid response to stories that break big. The trick is to keep an eye out for these stories, and to ask how we can better communicate with our audience when a story doesn't pick up the audience we think it deserves.
Labels: online publishing, web analytics
