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FROM THE FRONTLINES :: STEVE SMITH
What’s Martha Doing Online?
 The following is excerpted from the just-published State of Digital Media (click to buy). min Digital Media Editor Steve Smith writes a chapter that profiles what leading media companies are doing online or plan to do. Here, a look at Martha Stewart Living:Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Principal Web Sites: MarthaStewart.com Key Digital Executives: Holly Brown, president, Internet; Beth-Ann Eason, SVP, Internet Revenue: MarthaStewart.com is home to both content and commerce, although the model in 2006 shifted markedly to content. According to earnings statements, MSO’s Internet business generated $5.4 million in Q4 2006, up 24% over same period last year. Ad revenue online for all of 2006 was $8.4 million, up from $2.4 million in 2005. Digital Universe: MarthaStewart.com serves as the portal onto all TV, print and radio media involving Stewart herself and the company. It receives about 3.5 million unique users a month and between 35 million and 40 million page views. The five print magazines (Martha Stewart, Everyday Food, Blueprint, etc.) each has a dedicated sub-hub off of the portal hosted by the editor. The site has three weekly e-newsletters and then occasional e-letters for specific programming or seasons. All of the MSO media, radio, TV and print, lead to the main site, with TV being one of the major traffic drivers. Year-over-year, overall traffic has been up about 30%. MSO also has a prominent place on the Yahoo Food channel. Its partnership with Kodak cross-markets Kodak’s EasyShare online site with MarthaStwewart.com, and MSO provides greeting card and other digital designs for purchase at the EasyShare digital photography store. There has been some distribution via search, but Brown admits that until the recent relaunch, the MSO site had not been friendly enough to search spiders. There is also a new and growing relationship with Google to help distribute video. Brand loyalty and name recognition are the site’s strongest lures, however, since most traffic is coming in at the front door through types in URLs or bookmarks Infrastructure: Editorially, MSO has a dedicated team for the Web, and cross-platform meetings try to align content among radio, print and TV with the Web. With TV seen as a key drive for traffic, the front page of MarthaStweart.com usually is in synch with the daily broadcast, giving users access to clips and detailed information on the show’s content at the main portal page. The team also understands that Ms. Stewart’s overall visibility across multiple media venues drives people to the site, so the front page of the site will also be synchronized with appearances on the Today Show, for instance. The Web team has editors dedicated to managing the Web content in tandem with the radio, print and Web so that Web content reflects what the brand is doing on these other platforms and is ready to deliver relevant material to the incoming traffic. Brown has focused on building an experienced Web team, many of whom like her come from successful portals and dotcoms. Business Plan: Growing from 20 staffers at the end of 2005 to about 60 at the beginning of 2007, MSO is in the midst of a major reorientation of its digital strategy that culminated in the re-launch of MarthaStewart.com in April 2007. Until the end of 2005, MSO’s online presence essentially supported the online catalog business. At the beginning of 2006 and with the hire of Brown, MSO decided to make a major investment in online content and bring more of the print and video library online. Catalog and online sales will be less of a focus than ad sales into the content. A dedicate sales team handles most digital packages but Brown says the relatively small size of MSO allows for easier partnerships across media and integrated selling. Pre-roll video inventory is doing very well and will be a priority this year. Video plays directly on the home page so it gets persistent exposure. Content Wins: With Martha Stewart present on all media, the site is learning how consumers move from offline media online. While many TV viewers want to re-view clips of the show they may have missed or need reiterated, Brown also finds that “text can be as important as video.” Users want those instructions and those recipes often more than they want the TV on demand. Contests and sweepstakes have also been effective drivers of traffic from offline MSO venues to online. The site became much more aggressive in posting video in 2006 and parsing it into smaller clips users could drop into and out of quickly. Most shows are cut up into six segments, but each recipe plays in a video window and has a tab to the recipe ingredients as well. The magazines represent an enormous archive of recipes and crafts and decorating ideas that MSO is trying to bring to the surface. In the redesign, users have multiple ways of getting to recipes, via the food channel or from one of the relevant print brands. With the Blueprint Magazine section of the site, MSO is experimenting with new print/Web initiatives. It leads with “stuff that wouldn’t fit in the issue,” suggesting that the Web site serves as a kind of DVD edition of the print book. Its new “Bluelines” section brands the magazine’s blog as a standalone entity with its own navigation and sub-sections for DIY, Food and Entertaining, etc. Many of the magazine editors are posting lengthy pieces on the various topics and so this blog represents a collaboration of print and digital in the company and a testing ground for new concepts. 2007 and Beyond The main MSO site and the e-letters will enjoy greater personalization, says Brown. She identifies as a key challenge for the site making evergreen content like crafts and recipes more visible so users can find them quickly. On the other hand, how doe site become more than a database. “How do you make it a site consumers want to come to not just for recipes but other content?” she asks. The re-launched site was rebuilt on a different content management system from the ground up so that it could be more nimble to execute different projects and could more directly include more editorial and design staff in the organization. The push in 2007 will be around personalization. A key challenge for MSO is surfacing the deep archive of print and video content. The site will use personalization tools and e-letters to let regular users save material and get content recommendations to help identify what they like and bring more of it out of the library. Search will become more integral to the site experience. In engaging community, Brown want to use the niche groups and blog communities online to help fill the holes in MSO content. Hobbies like knitting are not well covered by the archive, yet there are many blogs and thousands of devotees online that MSO wants to bring into the fold. MSO will also enhance its partnerships with commercial and content sites online to increase distribution. Brown says the newly relaunched platform allows for great flexibility in sharing content and in gaining visibility on search. Brown expects the Internet ad revenue for the brand to double in 2007. The preceding was excerpted from the just-published State of Digital Media (click to buy). More Steve Smith
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