Supercharge Your Site With Syndicated Content

by Michael P. Voelker

"If you build it, they will come." Whether that's ever been true in the life of a Web site, where millions of other offerings compete for worldwide attention, is debatable. But what's unarguably true is that even if users come, there's no guarantee that they're going to stay and, most important, do business.

To make Web sites "stickier," companies are looking not only to leverage their own content but also enrich their sites with syndicated content. Licensed stock tickers, investment-related charts and news headlines aren't just for high-profile business-to-consumer sites, they're now common elements for corporate sites and portals across many enterprises.

Commercial syndicators perform the heavy lifting of "normalizing" content: creating one data format from many different content feeds. ScreamingMedia of New York, for example, takes in content from more than 3,000 sources and then converts that content to XML. Typically, syndicators also apply hierarchical taxonomy to content in order to support filtering.

Companies can take this syndicated content completely as it stands — incorporating a running ticker that covers the entire market, for example. Alternatively, companies can use only targeted elements of syndicated content.

"We have capabilities to put filters against the data," says William Staib, executive vice president of technology and product at ScreamingMedia. That could allow a business to receive only content that meets certain criteria and "have a consistent view of content regardless of the source."

Additional filters can reside at the customer end to further refine and target the selection. Businesses could choose to include all of a relevant content feed (a complete listing of news headlines, for instance), while excluding or highlighting other parts, such as articles that mention particular companies or locations.

Vendors claim (and the businesses we spoke to confirm) that aggregating commercially syndicated content should put no more strain on an adequately scaled content management system than your own content.

But does more content equal increased traffic, stickier sites and more revenue? We talked to three organizations, one in financial services, one in insurance and one in government, to explore syndicated content's value.

U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray Adds a 'Wall Street' Look

Hoping to make the most of market research developed by its analysts, three years ago U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray of Minneapolis launched www.gotoanalysts.com. Offered primarily as a free site, www.gotoanalysts.com is aimed at enhancing relationships with Piper Jaffray customers. But the firm also looks to the site to grow its customer base. Its content strategy reflects this goal.

"Companies get judged by their Web site, and if their site doesn't look good, it's a bad experience from the start," explains Brent Otto, Piper Jaffray's vice president of interactive marketing. "The site is not only a value-added service for our clients, but an online marketing tool — a way for [prospects] to get a taste of what we do and then to decide to become a client."

To make the site "stickier," Piper Jaffray tapped into syndicated content from Stockpoint, a unit of New York-based ScreamingMedia, one of the leaders in providing syndicated Web content. Deciding exactly what Stockpoint content to offer was a cost-benefit balancing act.

"The challenge is, what's the best information for our customers?" says Otto. "What do they want, especially from our free site, and then how much money do we have to spend to purchase that information?"

These cost vs. value considerations, as well as site design goals, determined the final selections, which include a stock ticker, news and financial tools.

"The scrolling ticker is more of a design play to give users the feel and energy of the market," says Otto. "The charts, news and quotes emulate the look and feel of a brokerage."

About 15 percent of the content on www .gotoanalysts.com is from Stockpoint. The rest includes Piper Jaffray analyst research reports, bios and internally created market reports, news and other information pulled from repositories across the enterprise. Many reports aren't accessible unless you register at the site, and the more timely and in-depth reports are offered at a small fee.

"We primarily want to highlight and sell our own content, so we keep third-party content to a minimum," Otto says.

The research highlighted on the site represents only about two percent of the 30 to 50 reports per day created by Piper Jaffray analysts. Analysts themselves decide which reports to include, and they communicate those choices to the four-person Web team, which publishes site content. Piper Jaffray hasn't invested in an automated Web content management system, in part, Otto says, because it has a once-daily update schedule and in part because the Stockpoint syndicated content is called directly from a ScreamingMedia host.

"We work in frames and simply pull in [Stockpoint] pages to the frameset," Otto explains. "We cover about 500 companies. If we double that to 1,000 or double our senior analysts from 40 to 80, that's when we would have to really evaluate [bringing in a content management platform]."

Piper Jaffray wouldn't discuss the cost of the Stockpoint content, but pricing is based on the number of hits per month as well as the type of content being provided. Piper Jaffray has been using Stockpoint since the site was launched, and Otto reports no major technical issues with the delivery in that time. "They promise 99.9 percent uptime, and they deliver," he says.

"It's hard to pull any kind of numbers" on the benefit of using syndicated content, says Otto, because it has been part of the site since the beginning. Therefore, a before/after comparison of customers and traffic is impossible. Based on anecdotal evidence, however, Otto believes the investment in syndicated content has paid off.

"The traffic and feedback have been very good," he says, adding that the site is meeting a number of performance goals.

Site traffic has increased an average of 45 percent over the last three years, Otto reports, reaching 110,000 visitors per month. Additionally, more than 1,500 individual and institutional clients are now registered for the site's password-protected client resources. Online reservations for conferences submitted through the site have also increased, with 80 percent of reservations now occurring online. And the six newsletters available through the site have as many as 17,000 subscribers each.

The Quiet Company Makes Noise Online

While Northwestern Mutual, the Milwaukee-based insurer, isn't in the content business per se, the company does consider content to be a distinct competitive advantage.

For example, while most life insurers' Web sites contain some financial calculators, www.northwesternmutual.com offers more than a dozen calculators, each proprietary and developed by the insurer itself.

When the company launched the Northwestern Mutual Financial Network (www.nmfn.com) in 2001, the company looked beyond its own content to support the more than 7,500 company financial representatives the site is designed to serve. Syndicated stock market information from Minneapolis-based www.bigcharts.com, a unit of CBS MarketWatch, added valuable content Northwestern Mutual would have been hard pressed to develop on its own.

Northwestern Mutual manages syndicated content in a manner similar to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, consuming the content as a subscription-type utility. For example, the BigCharts component on the www.nmfn.com homepage is implemented by a URL link within the page's HTML. When the site loads to the user's browser, a call is made to the MarketWatch Web site, loading the component directly from the service's Web host to the end user.

Www.nfmn.com also serves as a parent site for thousands of individual, personalized sites for each of Northwestern's financial representatives.

"Customers can go to a representative's site, see [the representative's] address and photos and plug into the richness of our complete corporate site," says Sarah Schneider, director of Internet for Northwestern Mutual.

Northwestern Mutual implemented a TeamSite Web content management system from Interwoven, Sunnyvale, CA, when it launched www.northwesternmutual.com. TeamSite also handles the complexity of managing separate content for internal and external users of www.nmfn.com.

In evaluating the www.nmfn.com site, Northwestern is tracking site usage statistics and evaluating correlations between Internet activity and offline business results.

"Our main goal of the site was not to replace the sales force, but to enhance the customer relationship by giving people useful information," thereby increasing use of the site and driving revenue gains indirectly, Schneider says.

Given the positive feedback on current www.nmfn.com content, Northwestern Mutual is considering adding more syndicated content. "As the financial reps begin to leverage the sites, we're exploring additional third-party content such as newsletters," Schneider says.

Syndicated content has even found its way onto the company's intranet, which offers a "commuter corner" section with news, weather, and other information for its employees obtained from sources including www.weather.com, the Milwaukee County Transit System and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

North Carolina Portal Taps Yahoo! Content

For business, syndicated content is usually part of a strategy for driving new customers online. For government agencies, syndication can be a faster, more affordable route to e-government.

When the state of North Carolina undertook its portal initiative in 2000, its intent was to create a site that would, first, organize content according to the objectives of site visitors and, second, help meet the state's statutory requirement to provide electronic access to government information and services.

"Our whole methodology is based on attention space," says Wendy Kuhn, special assistant to the CIO, "[The question is] 'what is it that I want to do,' rather than 'what agency do I want to see.'"

The state entered into a partnership with Accenture to build a state site at www.ncgov.com. The integrator was quick to suggest a quicker route to the Web. Accenture "recommended we not reinvent the wheel, but ... partner with Yahoo! and use [its] established tools, methodologies and approaches," Kuhn explains. The strategy helped the state launch its public portal in just six weeks.

While much of the portal structure was developed by Yahoo!, site developers looked to provide added value with continuously updated syndicated content relevant to North Carolina residents and visitors — weather on the main page, business headlines and news on the "business" page and state sports scores on the "citizen" page, for example. Because the state was working with Yahoo! on the portal's development, it made sense to select Yahoo! for the delivery of syndicated content, Kuhn says.

Each time a visitor loads a page at www.ncgov.com, a unique subscription call is made to Yahoo! and a data feed is received. A Yahoo!-provided parser (custom-coded for each of these pages) selects the content displayed.

"The hard parts of putting [the site] together were not technical," says Kuhn. "The challenges were the timeline, getting state government agencies to buy into it and breaking down silos."

Since the site is designed as a portal, www.ncgov.com content primarily consists of links and some bridging content to hold the site together, most of which is stored in a SQL server database hosted by Bell South. Links take site users to content held in repositories at various state agencies and third-party hosting services.

Thus far the portal team's technical staff has been able to migrate changes to the site directly rather than using a Web content management system. "Content liaisons" from the portal team work with each state agency to determine the content to be included and highlighted.

Normally, government contracts are open to the public. However, the www.ncgov.com was fully self-funded via private transaction fees paid by vendors who use the site for e-procurement; therefore, site costs, including the cost of the Yahoo! content feeds, couldn't be released.

To determine its return on investment, the state measures several usage factors. When the site was first launched, traffic averaged about 200,000 visitors per week. Today that figure is more than 600,000 visitors per week. The portal was also designed to provide self-service capabilities to rural citizens, and the increase in usage by that demographic has met expectations.

"The national and state recognition we've received is also part of our measure, and a couple of other states have imitated our approach," Kuhn says. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Michael P. Voelker (mvoelker@goequinox.com) is principal of Equinox Communications, Cleveland, WI.