Portfolio
Crain’s New York
Problem
In January 2007 Crain’s New York had a problem. Despite a great brand, and excellent relevant content, they simply weren’t reaching their potential audience. Garcia Interactive quickly identified one of their key problems as “bounce”: plenty of users were finding the site from searches, email alerts and links but far too many were reading a single story and “bouncing” off. Even visitors to the homepage were trampolining away from it, faced with an overwhelming amount of options and data.
Process
We spent several visits over a period of weeks discussing what the site needed to be and what it was going to stand for. Like many print publications, when we arrived it wasn’t a website, it was a repository for whatever content the print product threw up online. It lacked its own personality, and lacked any sense of purpose. Why would a user come here other than to read something that was in the print version? The site failed to exploit the opportunities of the web for a highly credible brand like Crain’s New York Business.
At the end of this process Garcia Interactive and Crain’s NY had a clear ambition for what the new site would be. We agreed this had to be a site that was essential to people doing business in New York. Once we got to this vision, the way the site needed to be transformed was clear. The audience of this site wanted news and information about people like them, people doing business in New York. A concerted effort would have to be made to create a fertile ground on which a community could spring up. And there would have to be a direct line to the resources these people needed - white papers, newsletters, directories.
Now the content inventory made sense. We could look at it and organize the material in a way that made sense if you wanted to be essential to doing business in New York.
This project also threw up another common issue. Crain’s NY is a weekly print publication. But it needed a credible daily presence on the web. How would that be possible within the existing resource constraints?
Crain’s New York and Garcia Interactive achieved this by looking hard at how the newsroom was organized and committing to a change of emphasis. This required a lot of dialogue with the print team. But over a period of time we were able to convince the staff of Crains NY that they were a news operation rather than a newspaper operation and that the hard work of learning to think differently was vital and achievable in delivering on the exciting promise of being an essential New York business news source.
The issue of bounce was dealt with by looking at how the article page worked. The problem was obvious. The team were thinking about article pages as if they were islands. And that is how users used them. Newspapers take browsing for granted. A newspaper reader has the product in its entirety in front of them and tends to move easily from article to headline to article. Online, readers are promiscuous. They find an article, read it and, if they aren’t captivated by the environment, they leave and move on to the next story, the next search.
We approached the article page from the point of view of the reader. We wanted to create a page that created more opportunity for users to be exposed to the content most relevant to them on the website. The idea is that the user would be enticed to spend more time with the site and over time develop a sense of how essential it was.
Outcome
Crain’s was delighted with the results. The slide below is from Crain’s own presentation.
