June 19, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: CincyMoms.com
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our latest installment:
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Gannett will be making it easier for national companies to purchase ads across all of its moms' sites. CincyMoms.com is one of Gannett's sites geared at parents.
Most Innovative Visitor Participation (circulation 250,000 or more): CincyMoms.com – Cincinnati Enquirer
 Entry submitted by:James Jackson
Vice President, New Media and Product Development
The Cincinnati Enquirer
(513) 768-8000
Strategy: CincyMOMS.com is the most successful local moms Web site in the Gannett Company. In January 2007, we developed CincyMoms.com to provide a social networking and information portal for local mothers of children ages 17 and younger. The site is by, for and controlled by moms, who create conversations and connect with others in our local area for help, advice and social networking. The target audience, 280,400 local women ages 25-44 with kids, is a highly desirable demographic for our potential advertisers.
Creativity/Innovation: The key strategic innovation was to turn over control of the site to the audience, with a coordinator acting as moderator, mentor, arbiter, guide and advocatefor participating moms. Users generate almost all of the content and drive the content decision-making process. An example of such “collective control” includes a forum called “CincyMoms – the site” which is for posting suggestions, rants and raves about the site. It is the sixth most read of our 88 chat forums, drawing 132,721 views this year and generating 5,320 comments. Here we float ideas and get suggestions; their direction has played a pivotal role in the site’s success.
Another key strategy is collaboration with our newsroom on breaking news of interest to moms. Moms love to sound off on the latest news; the newsroom routinely embeds link to cincyMOMS discussions in Web stories, while CincyMoms runs headlines promoting discussions and linking back to the newsroom story.
In addition, when developing the site, we created technologies that let moms talk in our forums, from which hot topics are highlighted and promoted in “tag cloud” clusters that help moms quickly see the most popular conversations. We highlight our site coordinator’s blog and our wildly popular reader-submitted photo galleries.
We also developed 10 key core topics to group content and discussions, making all information easy for moms to access. CincyMoms.com users can also use their accounts to post articles, photos and events onto the Cincinnati.com network of Web sites, and these moms have posted many of the 25,289 user-submitted stories, photos and events we published on Cincinnati.com so far in 2007.
Adaptability: The site can be replicated by other newspapers. They must have 1) good readership and market data to define the demographic; 2) a strong editorial and advertising cooperation so both groups know how this audience can and will be sold and how the content will be highlighted; 3) online tools – message boards, tag-cloud software, blogging software and photo gallery tools – which are readily available either in the open source realm or available from vendors. The other key is a site coordinator who becomes the face, voice and advocate for Moms and their needs.
Impact: CincyMoms.com has been an unqualified success. Launched in January, the site has generated 12 million page views year-to-date, and now leads Gannett’s moms’ sites in traffic. The site has rapidly and rabidly developed into a diverse community of moms who feel a deep brand loyalty and a strong sense of ownership. As of October 2007, there were 17,438 conversations that comprise 169,083 posts and 9,502 registered users on CincyMoms. Moms who meet virtually on our site now meet in person weekly (with 68 such gatherings so far). Advertisers are lining up to buy sponsorships and ad positions on the site; we have acquired $344,275 in new business from 55 customers, including $169,786 from 46 new accounts.
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