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Marketers can learn from HuffPo and Drudge

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Nov 22 2009)

  1. Marketers can learn from HuffPo and Drudge

    I recently received an email from the Manager of Sales & Marketing for a leading Clinical Research Organization and HiveFire partner.  She began with the following quote: “I was thinking…that an established, high profile example of what your company [HiveFire] does (without knowing it or not) is The Huffington Post.  Do you agree?”

    We agree and below, I’ll share one particular feature, of information retrieval science, that makes the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report successful attracting million of users daily.  Then, I’ll share how marketing executives can take advantage of these features in their blogs and online communities.

    The Huffington Post and the Drudge Report

    If you’re familiar with American politics, then you may be familiar with these two leading sites: The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.  These properties have risen in the last decade to influence both American news media and American politics.
    According to Wikipedia, “The Huffington Post is an American liberal news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington” and others.  Also, according to Nielsen NetRatings, Huffington Post had 8.9 million unique visitors in February, 2009.  The Huffington Post claims that it has 22 million unique users each month.

    On the other side of the political spectrum is The Drudge Report.  According to Wikipedia, “The Drudge Report is a conservative news aggregation website.  It is run by Matt Drudge with the help of Andrew Breitbart, and the site consists mainly of links to stories from the United States and international mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many columnists.”  According to the same Nielsen NetRatings above, The Drudge Report had a readership of 3.5 million in 2009.

    Precision and Recall in political news

    At HiveFire, we believe that HuffPo and Drudge successfully deliver both high precision and high recall on their websites for liberal and conservative news information.  Precision and recall are popular terms used in the sciences of information retrieval and machine learning.  According to Wikipedia Precision is defined as “the fraction of retrieved documents relevant to the search.”  For example, in the number of Obama and healthcare articles retrieved, what fraction of the documents found had favorable reviews of Obama’s speeches on healthcare?  Recall is defined as fraction of documents retrieved on a search query out of the entire document library.  For example, how many documents with Obama’s speeches on healthcare were retrieved on a general search for "Obama healthcare speeches"?


    Are you still with me?  Both the Drudge Report and Huffington Post excel in their ability to deliver high precision and high recall on a large amount of liberal and conservative news and opinions in American politics.  Both these website actively curate news information that specifically promotes their political viewpoints to their audiences who desire that viewpoint.  Any reader of American political news will be hard-pressed to find websites that deliver comparatively high precision and recall on the constant flow of liberal and political news and views.

    If you recall my prior post on Thought leadership marketing and news media consumption, you should also understand that HuffPo and Drudge leverage the power of readers to consume news that already agreed with their viewpoint.  I believe that high precision and high recall help reinforce certain cognitive behaviors of news consumption identified in the research conducted.  We see the popularity of these sites to keep their specific audiences as evidence of this.

    How can marketing executives get the edge?

    If marketing executives want to build buzz around their online communities and increase the impact of their brand on the industry, take a hint from HuffPo and Drudge. 

    1. Have an opinion about your industry, product, and markets.  Having a specific, direct opinion will attract those who care about your industry, as well as those who may have differing views.  Make it easy for these individuals to blog their views on your property.  These views will increase precision for those viewing your site.

    2. Identify, filter and share relevant news content from your industry to supports the perspective of your corporate blog.  Make it easy for industry professionals to understand their industry landscape from your online presence.  Successful content curating, across thousands of sources, will increase precision and recall for readers.

    3. Allow users to comment both on your blog and the relevant industry news they will consume on your corporate blog or online community.  Both HuffPo and Drudge attract hundreds of thousands of comments, daily, from those consuming their political blog and news content.

    4. Make it easy for readers to search your blog and news content for the connections between articles.  Precision and Recall increase when marketers make it easy for readers to see the relevant relationships in the content.

    5. Maintain a strict fair-use policy and respect the content of the news articles that you share with the industry participants.  Make it easy for content owners to contact you to manage their content on your property. 

    Conclusion

    Regardless of industry size and industry type, HuffPo and Drudge provide powerful lessons for marketing executives to copy and build thought leadership.  Anyone can deliver buzz and activity to their corporate blogs and online communities by increasing the availability of relevant news content and blog content.

    At HiveFire, we’re seeing more companies take the mantle of industry leadership and become the sources of information and influence in their industry.  They’re leveraging news content their blogs, and partner content to deliver highly relevant online resources of their particular industry perspective.

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