Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Elizabeth Spiers on Digital Mistakes


Q: How do traditional mainstream get digital products wrong?
A: (I gave a talk about this a couple of weeks ago, so from my notes:) They don't understand their audiences because they're not used to using data aggressively.
They view their sites as mere brand extensions and fail to treat them as stand-alone media properties.
They don't understand usability and make their sites pretty but impossible to navigate, and then naively think they'll educate their users to find their content.
They don't understand Web metabolism and produce content that's stale.
They think Web content is inherently inferior when it's merely different, and create inferior Web products as a result then wonder why they're not succeeding.
They fail to monetize their products properly, then underpay talent and wonder why they can't recruit good writers.