Welcome to the new blog created just for people who have attended Media Management Center’s Digital Strategies for Media Executives seminar! We’ve created this at your request as a means to continuing the great sharing of ideas among sharp people that started at the conference. To get the most out of the blog, I urge you to click the button on the right to set this up as an RSS feed, so you’ll know whenever there’s something new on the blog.

I thought we’d start off with what I promised to give you --- your group “to do list.” It’s quite a compendium! I hope it serves as a great tickler list for you of ways you can take what you learned and make change at home. What do you think about the list? Do you have anything to add? Anything you’d like to comment on? The group would love to hear from you, about this or any other subject raised by our time together!

DIGITAL STRATEGIES CONFERENCE
GROUP “TO DO” LIST

• Finish the reading.

• Set up a Facebook account.

• Sit down with the people who work for me and with my boss and discuss where I ought to be spending my time.

• Develop more database stuff -- a map that overlays crime stats, real estate prices, school information, etc.

• Go on Online News Association site and see some of the best things others are doing that we could copy.

• Work collaboratively as a group to develop a list of really good information sources about what’s happening with media and technology and about various topics (like mobile). Then make sure that at least someone on my team takes time to read them and think about them.

• Clean up your bookmarks; do a psychic cleansing of the inbox. Clear out the duplication so you can focus on the really useful information. You only need 5 or 6 good ones.

• Have an e-mail group at the news organization where anyone can send an e-mail on a new site, a possible opportunity for us, an idea, coverage or technology or an idea we should steal.

• Every day, identify one story in the paper we could do differently digitally and break that down and meet with the appropriate people to get that kind of thinking going.

• Do better in customer service; check our touch points with the public so that there is a central place for funneling their ideas, complaints and criticisms so that we’re responding quickly and making it easier for the public to get the answers they want.

• Find ways to really listen to people who e-mail us and tell us about their problems and find ways to try to fix them. Develop ways to monitor and keep track of contacts from people who have problems with our sites. Learn from what they’re asking.

• Sit down with the publisher and come to understand our strategy for digital. His message isn’t getting thru to where can be implemented. Fairly confident he has something in mind but it isn’t trickling down.

• Get in there and find out what we know about our customers and what additional research we need. Do market research – understand our current customer base and community trends.

• Do a competitive analysis – understand our current competition.

• Review the notes; don’t just leave them in a folder.

• Allocate resources to people who gather information to build pages that are actually functional to user. Not reporting per se, but a new level of information on, for example, neighborhood. Give people info they need to better manage their own lives.

• Go back and share what I’ve gained here, focusing on Running While the Earth Shakes. Also share a new appreciation for what we’re already doing.

• Try to do more things like One Vote Under God, a new way of storytelling.

• Work to change our culture to be open to bringing in content from other areas. We really have a new palette to use to tell stories. 80 inches online won’t take us to the next level.

• Figure out how to deliver one piece of high-impact journalism every day that really moves and inspires people. To do this, we need to just say no to a lot of predictable, routine stuff so we can do that kind of kick butt journalism.

• Maybe hire a community journalist or freelancer.

• Study the availability of resources and plan staffing (core team and flex staff).

• Look for potential acquisitions.

• Look for easy me-too opportunities.

• Assess current ideas in our innovations initiative for potential development.

• Understand our current asset management status/methods/future plans.

• Build an advisory group(s).

• Seek training; develop and acquire more skills.

• Look for ways to expand partnerships with other organizations.

• Pursue connections with groups such as the Online News Association.

• Look for ways to collaborate with and learn from colleagues and to advocate for more internal training.

• Share what I learn with our constituents.

• Find more connective tissue (from online) to the mother ship; I need to strengthen the brand I’m associated with, not just be successful in digital.

• Act on the idea that operational excellence is not a strategy; become a lot more strategic and a lot more useful.

• Avoid becoming too technology focused. We can get too fascinated, and pretend that is a strategy. … to chase after a new application.

• Find ways to encourage all our staff to explore the possibilities of technology and what we can do on the Web. We’re sending our staff the wrong message when our desktops are locked down where people can’t just surf off and explore things.

--Vivian Vahlberg