Discover's Search Of The Curious Webizen

by Steve Smith
Who discovers DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM amid all the science and tech news already out there? "Very curious people," says Discover marketing director Tricia Gately. "Teachers, doctors, community members" are the types who love the book's broad range and tend to pass along the "Did you know?" science content to others. In a rolling relaunch over the past few months, DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM is trying to gauge its readership, reach out to new partners, and become more of a hub for the relentlessly curious.

Core to the Discover strategy online is embracing the blogosphere. The company pulled into its orbit Phil Platt's popular Bad Astronomy blog, which quickly became one of the site’s most popular draws. Following a smart example set by ATLANTIC.COM's absorption of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog last year, Discover management is lending a print brand's prestige to a blogger and enjoying the traffic and stickiness that comes from grassroots loyalty. Rather than simply annexing someone else's traffic, the partnership is helping to expand Discover's appeal to a broader audience. "We are seeing slow and building crossover from his readers to the content at Discover," says Web editor Amos Kenigsberg.

Also taking a page from Web trends is the 80beats blog, which aggregates the top five or six science stories of the day. "It's pulling in a lot of the eyeballs," says Kenigsberg. Loath as some traditional publisher may be to admit it, aggregation is one of the key components in building a Web brand in a linked world. Becoming a resource, a nicely manicured one-stop shop for the core constituency, acknowledges the reality of information-gathering on the Web. Most users hit four or five sites related to their passion. If any one of these landing zones proves themselves most adept at gathering the most relevant links for that audience, the users will reward them with loyalty.

Clearly, DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM is learning to leverage the user base in encouraging blog interactivity and engaging their existing communities. But my favorite innovation here is the user-submitted video. The company is not ramped up yet for its own video production, but it creatively programs user-generated content (UGC) in things like the Science in Two Minutes or Less series. Users are asked to record themselves presenting complex science in under 120 seconds.

The results are both entertaining and instructive. Discover executives recruited Columbia University physicist Brian Greene to judge the winner among seven finalists from 50 entries. The winner, String Ducky, was a homemade but polished and playful use of a yellow rubber ducky to explain the concept. Curiously, readers preferred an entry from the Watson family in which all of the kids participated in giving us a two-minute science lesson.

Although nascent compared with SCIAM.COM/WIRED.COM, DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM is an interesting example of how a team of just four dedicated staffers can magnify its footprint online. Finding ways to take a magazine's core branded media and then blend and enhance it with UGC and the blogosphere will be the equation all print media has to solve online.

Steve Smith (popeyesmith@comcast.net) is Digital Media editor for min/min’s b2b/minonline.com. He posts regularly on The Minsider blog and directs the min Webinars. Smith also co-chairs the annual min Day Summit and consults for a number of publishers in the digital space.
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