What kind of Online Editor are you?

Whilst many newsrooms continue to experiment with their content to increase and retain readership, Folio Magazine has a story about one company that have developed a simple strategy to maximize their online efficiency.

They profile B2B publisher Questex Media, who have defined the key areas that editors are good at, and get their team to try and learn from each others’ successes.

Says Manager of Search Alison McPartland (pictured): "We want to show the particular strength or weakness in each editor.

"There are different ways to focus on how they're preparing content online and we want to highlight those differences. If someone is our top Optimization Editor, what is he or she doing that you could be doing?"

The team has developed four benchmark classifications for online editors which, in a nutshell, are as follows:

Acquisition Expert: Being particularly strong at drawing in an audience to their stories.

Optimization Editor: Driving the most traffic via organic search, using Search Engine Optimization.

Retention Writer: Having a high quality level of interaction with their reader, getting them to come back to their stories.

Engagement Enhancer: Innovating in the way readers interact with a story, providing RSS Feeds, blogs, comments and the like.

The article highlights how this feedback can prompt editors to raise their game, as well as engage in a little friendly competition.

One publication to benefit from this, Questex Media’s HotelWorld Network, is clear that it doesn’t use the data to set job titles but to identify what the readers engage with and why.

"By creating these different ‘categories' of editor, it's easier for us to see why a particular story or author performs well month over month," says Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Ricca.

"We don't use these categories as specific descriptors—meaning, we don't say things like, ‘Stephanie is the Acquisition Expert because she does X and Y and Chris is the Optimization Editor because he does B and C;' instead we use Alison's reports to get better at all aspects of what gets a reader to our site and keeps them there."

(Via Martin Stabe)