Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, just celebrated its 150 year anniversary. Check out this great interactive graphic for a fun way to ask readers to post their opinions and suggest improvements.
Reader engagement is usually among the most important qualities of successful media companies. Loyal readers not only come back to your products on a daily basis; they also are eager to help you make it even better.
But what is the best way to ask for your readers’ help? One suggestion is to make it fun to participate.
Here is an innovative effort from my own employer Aftenposten: A circle cloud! Readers are asked to contribute suggestions for how Aftenposten can improve either in print, on the web, on the mobile phones or in other areas. Suggestions are then put up for vote among other readers. Each circle illustrates one of the suggestions – and the size indicates how many have voted for it so far. By clicking on one of the moving circles your can read the proposal – and then decide if you want to give it your vote.
The tool has been developed by three of my smartest colleagues: Anette Mellbye, who is head of editorial development, and multimedia journalists Atle Brunvoll and Eirik Wallem Fossan.
Actually Aftenposten has worked hard to make more active use of social media recently. One good example is Aftenposten’s Facebook page. The number of followers have increased significantly over the last few weeks and now stands at around 13.600. Today the Facebook page is being used on an daily basis to communicate with readers. And the readers do respond!
Two examples:
- Travel reporter Simmi Kaur will spend this summer writing about her own country as travel destination. But where should she go? The question was asked on the Facebook page – and she received more than 60 suggestions from readers. In addition many readers offered suggestions on Aftenposten’s Facebook page for travel information.
- How to improve Aftenposten? The same questions that is asked in the circle cloud presented in this blog post was also published on the Facebook page. And lots of high quality suggestions are pouring in.
