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July 27, 2009
Huffington Post; Taking the Next Step
Five years ago, Arianna Huffington and former PR executive Ken Lerer founded Huffington Post to cover the intersection of politics, business and popular culture. I had lunch on Friday with Eric Hippeau, chief executive officer of the site and a partner at Softbank Capital in the U.S. Eric is returning to his journalistic roots; those of you in technology may recall that he ran Ziff-Davis while it was owned by the Ziff family in the early 90s. It was later sold to Softbank and then went public. Here are some of Eric’s musings:
1) Reporting has a different connotation at Huffington Post. “We expose our community to the best of what’s going on. Our content is what attracts the 20 million unique visitors a month. But what keeps our community coming back is engagement. We get 1.5 million comments per month. People jump onto stories and participate in the debate.”
2) There are 40 people in editorial at the Huffington Post; some of them are reporters, the rest are editors. “We have a unique ability to keep a story going when even mainstream media is silenced. Consider Iran, where after the election, the mainstream media reporters were kicked out of the country. But our citizen contributors communicated with us via Twitter and Facebook and cell phones, allowing Huffington Post to keep the story alive for eight days.” Reporters are also responsive to the “vox populi” by amending story leads or headlines based on feedback from the community.
3) Brands have a big role to play in the future of the site. “Marketing executives need to stop thinking about product campaigns. The question is what is your brand presence? Consumers are considering your brand at all possible times. And corporate reputation has a major influence on brands.”
4) HuffPost is considering some form of social network that allows continuous connection among your public and private conversations. The idea is a network that can be both personal and outward facing. “We see our community as being in the middle of the site, with content on the outside.”
5) Bloggers supply much of the content for the site. “We publish over 200 posts per day. Our community wants to hear from those who are in charge, from government leaders to CEOs. The style should be stream of consciousness with a point of view, not like traditional journalism.”
6) The business model depends on advertising. “I do not see us ever charging for content. We are a particularly efficient ad buy in the influencer category.”
Those of us at Edelman consider the Huffington Post a viable first option for clients. We placed an op-ed piece written by Howard Schultz of Starbucks on the one year anniversary of his return to the CEO position at the company. It generated significant discussion in the community, then later in mainstream media. I am fascinated by the notion that the debate is as important as the reporting and subsequent story. We are truly living in a world of expression.
Posted by Edelman at July 27, 2009 5:58 PM |
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