Out With A Bang

In amidst all the noise and thunder that surrounds Murdoch’s epic struggle to get Google’s nose out of his trough, this post from the WAN gathering in India last week got rather less attention than, IMHO, it deserved.

It also found me, briefly, sticking little pins into LongShanks1980 for revealing a little trait that is becoming more and more apparent of late; this great divide between the way that the London mediarrati (?) view the world and the way that, say, Mike Rawlins at PitsNPots.co.uk might.

It is a walk that Sarah Hartley walked the other week… and with considerable aplomb to boot. It’s not easy to keep everyone sweet.

But as you read the reaction to Matt Kelly’s piece, evidence of this digital ‘disconnect’ between those who have been hanging around the comment boards of MediaGuardian for the last ten years and the real world is – for me – painfully clear.

That some of those comments don’t ‘get’ what Matt is on about at all.

The Mirror is trying to re-connect with its core readership.

And succeeding. By giving them what they’ve always liked in the print edition of The Daily Mirror – celebrity gossip and footie.

Right, give them that online and – surprise, surprise – the punters come.

And they come via their mobile phones; their FaceBook pages. And word of mouth.

They don’t come thanks to SEO.

This is the line that, for me, stood out…

“Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience.

“Counter to our expectation, audience on Mirror.co.uk has also continued to grow, meaning that across our portfolio of websites in the last three months our audience has increased by three million…

And this is the thing for me – a big thing. Making the web work ain’t rocket science.

Give people what they want, where they want it, when they want it. Simple.

And that goes straight back to Mr Shirky. All people ever want is a good read.

It is no more complicated than that. I’ve never paid a penny to an SEO house. We’ve got, what, 25,000-30,000 loyal readers to www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity More than the average nightly sales figures of the Evening News.

And how have we got there? Not by SEO. But by word of mouth. By message-board link and recommendations… by text. On a phone.

‘Seen wht tw*t Waghorn wrttn now?’

‘No. Where…?’

etc, etc.

My core readership has always been traditional, provincial city evening newspaper readers who – gradually, bit by bit – are drifting online. But they do it their way; slowly. With the odd stumble; the odd: ‘Twitter, wtf?’

But they get there. And they’re getting ‘it’.

And they don’t need SEO to do that. And my readership and that of the Mirror’s is probably exactly the same. Middle, provincial England.

Locals.

Cue the great disconnect between London Mediaratti and us ‘locals’; those of us who have always been working the streets of Norwich, Ipswich, Leicester, Liverpool, etc, etc… and not the coffee shops of York Way.

So here comes LongStreet…

‘The problem the Mirror will have is that their content (be it on the Daily Mirror, Mirror Football or 3am) is NOT unique. As a football fan I am not going to be paying for archive TV footage, I am more interested in contemporary stories and there is nothing in 3am that Perez Hilton doesn’t do, and better, already…’

So are you the Mirror’s target audience? Er, no.

Is their content designed for you? Er, no.

How many of the Mirror’s ‘core’ readership that Matt Kelly is driving at have heard of Perez Hilton? Heard of Paris… Perez? Nah, who she? That’s up-your-own-a*se London talking, to be frank.

That’s the disconnect; the fracture; the difference.

No, much of the Mirror content is not unique. What is? But there are whole swathes of traditional Mirror and provincial evening newspaper readers – and, note, traditional provincial evening newspaper advertisers - who are now following their favourite writers and brands online.

And what’s wrong with them sticking to who and what they know? Gradually, they’ll unearth new writers; fresh content; different sites. But for now they’ll go with what they know and trust.

And that’s what the Mirror are doing – going back to the audience that they know and trust will always be there for them.

They’re going back to their roots; keeping it simple. Giving people a good read. When and where they want it.

Simple.

And as the world and his wife race to suddenly to be all ‘hyper-local’, it is a simple lesson in the reality of provincial life that manages to pass some of us by…