Technically Speaking, March 7, 2008

By Tom Croteau

First Published: March 2008

It’s time we aligned newspapers’ business models with the 21st century!
Beyond CRM and CMS, what newspapers need is a CIEM!

The media task forces, business researchers, industry seers and prognosticators all agree: to thrive in the new digital age, newspapers must expand their traditional role and transform themselves into the font of information and social networking for their communities, then serve it all up however audiences demand.

Put another way, each news media company must become its community’s:

• (Virtual) front porch
• Digital information kiosk
• Town crier
• Citypedia-style information bank, and
• eMainStreet.com marketplace for businesses and buyers.

That's the thrust of the NewspaperNext 2.0 report (N2) from the American Press Institute. Call it an X-treme makeover, news media edition.

In the news media future it describes, customers (readers/audiences) will tell you what information they want delivered, in what format they want it and on what platform. The flow of information will be the inverse of the way newspapers operate now, and progressive papers will adopt the new business model with all due speed.

Making all this happen will take an infrastructure more powerful than what we now have. Nonetheless, it’s doable. Strong content management systems (CMS) and flexible customer relationship management software (CRM) already are out there. Some newspapers already use one or both.

However, we are missing one thing: the piece that will make the package work. I call it CIEM or Customer Information Experience Manager. It’s the interactive system that will put our customers in the driver’s seat.

The ideal CIEM will give each customer control over what they see (or hear) and will let them tell you:

1. What kind of information they want (ads, articles, school menus, bus schedules)
2. When they want it delivered (time of day, day of week, emergencies-only)
3. How they want to receive it (computer, mobile phone, PDA, RSS feed)

As our companies’ production technology experts, we’ll have a central role in establishing such a system. Ideally, it will:

1. Store the record of information interests a customer specifies (car offers, stock quotations, vacation cruises, high school sports, breaking news)
2. Query the CMS — and scrape exterior databases — to retrieve the requested information (ads, articles, scores)
3. Deliver the information based on frequency and preferred platform (laptop in the morning, cell phone while commuting, video at home at night)

Here's a basic visual of a CIEM.

A CIEM will put news media companies into a different kind of “driver's seat” — one that benefits its advertisers and its own bottom line.

With a finely-tuned customer relationship management system (CRM) to analyze what customers want (stored in the CIEM, fed by the CMS), newspapers can determine which, and how many, customers are shopping for a new car or a vacation home or anything else.

Armed with this information, news media companies can sell online advertisers something they've never had before: tailored access to customers who shop in the local market and who are already known to want the advertiser's specific product or service.

We need to find and implement that CIEM. With it we can transform ourselves and build audience, increase income and monetize new technologies. In the process, we'll strengthen our ties to our communities and more dynamically meet their needs.