• The Seminar presented the following topics:“Technology Platforms & Decision Criteria”.  The presentation outlined the key decisions involved in selecting and maintaining web platforms.  The presenter discussed the pros and cons of in-house versus outsourced development as well as proprietary versus open source software.  Detailed decision criteria are recommended.  Because of the importance of the Content Management System, the presentation closes with a comparison of the three open source CMS platforms – Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Platforms; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Product Management Roles and Responsibilities”.  The presentation focused on the role of product management as a ‘translator’ between the needs of users and technology’s ability to deliver web products to meet these needs.  In particular, the seminar outlined key elements in a business plan and product specification.  Examples of online and software products used to support the product development and bug tracking processes are also included.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Product Management; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Opportunities in Online Advertising”.  The presenter detailed the elements of online advertising standards including pixel dimensions, file size and other graphic requirements.  The discussion outlined new trends in online advertising targeting including behavioral and contextual targeting.  The rapid emergence of real-time bidding or programmatic buying and its key components is also introduced with specific examples and a summary of companies working in the Russian/Ukrainian market.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Advertising; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Development Metrics: Measuring Your Site for Improvement”.  This section presented a model for online metrics including examples of data sources and calculations.  Three types of metrics are discussed.  Foundation metrics provide basic audience behavior (visits, page views) and audience descriptions (location, gender, etc.). Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are discussed in terms of developing measures that assist in making business and content decisions to optimize websites for traffic or revenue.  Finally, tactical measures like A/B testing and heat maps are introduced as techniques to acquire specific information to make tactical decisions about a website.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Metrics; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Website Hosting Fundamentals”.  The Seminar presented the key types of hosting, their different uses and recommended criteria for selecting hosting methods and vendors.

The Seminar aimed to provide media managers with decision-making and management techniques for working with technology including content management, advertising and ad serving, and metrics systems.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 9 – 10 October 2013

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Technology, Product and Commercial Managers

The seminar presented the following topics:

• “Market Overview”. This section provided an overview of the online classifieds market with special focus on recent developments in the Russian and Ukrainian markets. The overview also discussed current trends in global online classified and directory development and presented strategic models for local media to participate in the online classified market.
•  “Business Models: Classified and Directory”. This section presented the common technical and design features common to most online classified sites and then presented a staged approach to building revenue models.
• “Listings and Sales”. A discussion of techniques needed to build the listings volume for an online classified site.
• “Audience/Marketing”. A discussion of SEO and other techniques to generate audience to an online classified site.

The goal of the seminar was to create a base of understanding of the trends in the online classified market and the potential impacts on attendee’s existing classified business as well as provide some tools and techniques to help build listings volume and audience for attendees’ existing classified sites.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 1 -2 April 2013

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian media executives

There were thousands of local people monitoring the election, in addition to the 3700 foreign observers sent to ensure that the election was free and fair. Ordinary Ukrainians were also posting reports via social media networks, email and their mobile phones.

By learning how to monitor these updates, knowing key social media sources and being aware of new methods of monitoring elections that have become common not only in Ukraine but around the world, you can help use your journalists’ time most effectively.

Monitoring events via Twitter lists 

While the micro-blogging platform Twitter is not used as widely as social networks like vKontatke in Ukraine, it was still a valuable means of communication for people monitoring the elections and also a valuable source of information for journalists.

There are two key ways to follow events on Twitter. Before an event, it is useful to create a list of Twitter accounts that are covering that event. Just like with a traditional source, this gives you a chance to develop a sense of the quality of information from each source and a sense of the point of view for that account. Is the Tweeter relatively neutral, or do they support the government or opposition parties? Is the account connected to official efforts to observe the election?

For instance, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which sent observers to the election, has a Twitter account. It mostly posts links to press releases and job openings, but it’s still worth adding official accounts to a list when you are following election updates.

Creating lists on Twitter allows you to easily focus on updates from a select group of accounts that you have been able to develop sourcing information about. You don’t have to separately follow the accounts that you have added to a List, so you can keep the number of accounts that you follow on a general basis manageable.

To create a list and add Twitter accounts to it, you can follow this guide that Twitter has provided.

To create a new list, click on the gear logo between the search box and the update button.

Clicking on the link will take you to the profile page for your account showing you the list options. It will either show the lists you have already created if you have any, or give you the option to create your first new list. Here you can see the lists that I have created. In the upper right hand corner, there is a button marked “Create list” which will allow you to create a new list.

When you click on the button to create a list, you will be asked to give your list a name, and you can also give it a brief description. Adding a description will make it easier to find your list by search. You will also see that you have the option to make your list public or private. You might want to keep your list private if you feel that the list is sensitive in some way, such as it might tip off an official that you are following their updates. However, if the list isn’t sensitive, then consider keeping it public. Why? Just as you can follow individual accounts on Twitter, you can also follow lists. This is useful for newsrooms because you can create a list once and then allow all of your journalists to follow it.

To add users to your list, you can do a search for the topic you’re interested in. For instance, if you search #ukrainevotes filter:verified, this will return accounts using one of the common hashtags, which we will discuss in a minute, and that have been verified. Twitter verifies accounts of celebrities, political leaders and other well-known figures. That doesn’t mean that the information being posted has been verified but only that Twitter has verified that the account belongs to the person or group listed in the short biography or description of the account. Verified accounts have a small blue check mark next to the account name.

To add the account to your list, click on the gear next to the follow button. This will show you the option to add or remove this account to a list. This will bring up a list of all of your lists. Simply click on the box in front of the account name to check or uncheck, add or remove, that account from your list.

The value of lists is that, unlike Twitter searches where you may or may not know much about the accounts shown in the search, you have been able to do some basic research on these accounts and made an editorial choice to add them to the list. This will also give you much more focused results than a general search.

Monitoring events via Twitter hashtags

Another useful way to follow an event on Twitter is via the hashtag. As often happens with elections and other major events, Ukrainian Twitter users adopted hashtags,  keywords preceded by the hash symbol #, to organise all of their updates about the elections. The two most common hashtags were #вибори2012 and #UkraineVotes, according to Kyiv Post. Journalists covering elections will want to identify the most common hashtags and monitor these for reports of voting issues. Clicking on a hashtag on Twitter will automatically launch a search that will allow you to quickly and easily see all of the updates with that tag.

There is no centralised way that Twitter hashtags are determined, although if you have created a list, most likely it will be clear from the accounts that you have chosen what the most common hashtag is related to your event. Individuals are free to create hashtags, simply by adding them to their tweets.

There are sites that track hashtags, such as Hashtags.org, and of course, you will often see popular hashtags in the Trends section in Twitter which is currently on the left hand side of the main page you see when you log into Twitter.com. Twitter has introduced its tailored trends service, which shows you trends not only based on your location but also based on who you follow. If you don’t want to use tailored trends, you can also select to focus by one of 35 countries where Twitter is used the most. In the case of the elections in Ukraine, it isn’t one of the 35 countries Twitter allows you monitor for trending topics so you’ll have to use other methods. Tailored trends should show you the most used hashtags where you are, and related to your event. If it doesn’t, do a general search, in this case Ukraine elections, to find the most commonly used hashtags. You can also filter your search by location by adding advanced search options to the keywords you’re looking for. For instance, by adding near:Kiev within:25km to your search, you will filter the results by only looking for updates that have been posted within 25 km of Kiev. The location is either determined by the location in a user’s profile or by the location they added using a smartphone.

Monitor other sites monitoring the event

Of course, Twitter is just one social media service, and it isn’t used widely everywhere. The Ukrainian elections also demonstrate other ways of efficiently and effectively monitoring social media.

With the rise of social media editors at many major news organisations, it is not difficult to find news coverage that highlights social media in North America, the UK and many areas in Western Europe. However, there are a number of sites that have long focused on covering major news events, and even highlighting stories that fly below the radar of many news organisations. One of the oldest of such sites is Global Voices.

With respect to the Ukrainian elections, Global Voices pointed out a blog post by a British writer who is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, on a site called Odessablogger. He pointed out that people were auctioning off their votes to the highest bidder on the social network vKontakte.

Global Voices also highlighted no fewer than four crowd-sourced election-monitoring sites that were developed to monitor the elections.

Maidan.org.ua, described by Global Voices as an online citizen activism hub and which refers to itself as the “pulse of non-violent civic resistance of Ukraine” according to the Kyiv Post, used the crowdsourced reporting platform Ushahidi to collect reports from across the country. The group attempted to verify the reports it received before posting them online. Reports of irregularities included the stopgap closure of some polling stations in Odessa because of issues with the ballot marking pens. Maidan claimed that “magic markers” with disappearing ink were being used at the stations, the KyivPost reported. Maidan also created a project for “election commission members and ordinary voters to submit electronic photographs of the final voting protocols,” Tetyana Bohdanova said in her post on Global Voices.

Civic network OPORA used a hybrid approach with their election monitoring site. They collected reports from 3,800 professional observers and posted violations on their map. They also took reports from the public and posted them on the site after they had been verified.

The projects weren’t just taken on by civic organisations. Internews-Ukraine launched ElectUA, which the group said used “smart crowdsourcing”, which meant that like other groups, they verified reports before posting them online. “The project has grown from the previously successful Twitter-broadcasts of the 2009 and 2010 elections that contributed significantly to the promotion of crowdsourcing technology and Twitter in Ukraine,” said Bohdanova.

With such intense domestic and international attention on the election, Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior also created its own crowdsourced election map to record reports of election violations using Ushahidi.

Many news organisations are embracing crowdsourcing techniques to help report major stories, but one thing to consider in contentious elections like the one in Ukraine is that such sites often become targets for online attacks. Global Voices reported that the three non-government election monitoring sites in Ukraine all suffered DDOS, distributed denial of service, attacks. The sites were flooded with requests from attackers so that they were unavailable at times to be able to accept election reports.

While news organisations would not want to run these reports without ensuring that they meet their own editorial standards, such projects can help editors focus the efforts of editorial staff and might uncover interesting leads to follow up. Monitoring social media and crowdsourcing projects like the election maps can help you use your editorial resources most efficiently to cover major events.

To take advantage of this growth in internet advertising, we explore how to organise and motivate your sales team. Advertising sales is fundamentally about solving problems for your advertisers by providing them with products and an audience, at prices they are willing to pay.

In the next presentation we look at key sales concepts including:
• Calculating your potential advertising market.
• Identifying sales channels.
• Strategies for making money in print (or broadcast) and online.
• Motivating your sales force.
• Organising digital sales.

After looking at how to organise and motivate your sales teams, we look at two types of digital advertising: ad networks and classifieds. As we wrote about recently in the August Digital Briefing, ad networks can be an important source of early income as you grow traffic to your site.

Although a couple of large ad networks get the lion’s share of the attention, there are more than 300 ad networks out there, with some focused on specific platforms or technology such as mobile or video ad networks, some focused on specific geographical areas, others focused on specific themes or types of content such as the Active Youth Network and even others focused on audience behaviour online.

Ad networks help address a number of issues facing advertisers such as the large choice of publisher sites leading to an over-supply of ad space, and the difficulty of identifying high-quality content.

In the next presentation, we look at different ad network pricing models and how to choose the right ad network.

We look at classified advertising, beginning with a cautionary tale about the collapse of online classifieds as a revenue source for newspapers in the US. New online classified players such as Craigslist, Monster.com and HotJobs.com all helped to shift classified advertising from newspapers to new digital players. We look at how to develop your digital classifieds offering to prepare to defend yourself against new digital competitors.

Online classifieds include not only the “Big Three” of classified advertising – recruitment (jobs), real estates/rentals and auto – but also directories, free classifieds and calendars. Specialist classified providers that focus on dating, education or other types of products and services have also sprung up. Online classified advertising is in the early stages of development, but it still represents a potentially large market and has already attracted a number of large, international players.

We then cover several different strategies for developing your online classifieds business, including:
• Go it alone: building, selling and marketing your own classified advertising site.
• Build a network with other local media.
• Partner with a national site, which provides the technology and perhaps marketing and sales service, leaving you to focus on local marketing and sales.
• Enter into a traffic partnership, which means that you sell a traffic sponsorship deal to a national partner.

We look at examples of these strategies and how to organise your business to achieve success using one of these strategies.

Of course, digital advertising is a fast moving sector, so we also look at new developments and the future of the online classifieds.

In the final presentation, we look at how news organisations are using social media to generate revenue, either indirectly by using it to grow audiences and gain more data about their audiences, or directly by selling social media advertising.

The Seminar presented the following topics:

• “Online Advertising Market Overview”.  An overview of the dynamics of the Russian and Ukrainian online advertising market including market size and growth. The training focused on presenting the standards for online display advertising as well as an overview of standard pricing models.  A short discussion of ad serving systems was also included.
• “Sales Teams Organization and Motivation”.  A discussion of different approaches to sales organization and motivation as well as a discussion of integrated, independent, and hybrid online sales teams.
• “Advertising Networks”.  Training provided an overview of the structure of advertising networks as well as a discussion of the pros and cons of participating in advertising networks like Yandex Direct and Google AdSense.
• “Measuring Success – Google Analytics”.  An overview of the fundamentals of using Google Analytics to measure traffic growth and understand basic audience demographics and behavior.
• “Online Classifieds – Local Opportunities”.  Online classifieds often represent the largest category of traditional local media advertising and are often the first category to move online.  The training focused on the elements of the online classified market and techniques of managing the transition from print to online classifieds.

The goal of the seminar was to provide a common base of knowledge about the opportunities in online advertising both display and classifieds.  The seminar also encouraged discussion among participants about the pros and cons of different online advertising techniques and the potential impact on the traditional advertising business.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 27 – 28 September 2012

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Media Advertising Sales and Marketing Executives

The seminar presented the following topics:

• “Trends in Online Business Development”. An overview of new international online media developments with a focus on online products and services, which specifically deliver local audiences and markets. In particular, the seminar looked at specialized directories, local aggregation and specialized social media developments as opportunities for new online product development.
• “Search Engine Optimization”. An overview of the fundamentals of SEO for both Google and Yandex.
• “Social Media Marketing”. An overview of the fundamentals of leading social media platforms Twitter and Facebook including step-by-step instructions around how to establish a social media profile, how to post to the profile and a discussion of the benefits of social media to traffic growth.
• “Measuring Success – Google Analytics”. An overview of the fundamentals of using Google Analytics to measure traffic growth and understand basic audience demographics and behavior.
• “Planning & Financing Your Business”. A discussion of the key inputs to a business plan including estimating audience, revenue and expenses.

The goal of the seminar was to provide senior executives and media managers with the fundamentals to understand the opportunities available and the techniques required to capture the local online media opportunity.

Location: Moscow, Russia
Dates: 19-20 March 2012
Attending: Russian and Ukrainian media executives