“The right content to the right people at the right time”
Meet our new Product Strategist, Gonnie
Meet our new colleague Gonnie Spijkstra. Gonnie joined Nine Connections as a Product Strategist at the beginning of the year. We waited till she settled in before we asked her a few questions about her role, the company and what makes her tick.
What was your first impression of Nine Connections?
“My boss at Telegraaf Media Groep, who was the Head of Digital, introduced me to Lucien Burm, the co-founder of Nine Connections, three years ago. During our first meeting, I think I understood only half of what he told me. However, I loved his conceptual and technical viewpoints on social media. I didn’t see an opportunity to collaborate right away, but we’d meet up for coffee every once in awhile to talk about publishing and social media. When I was working on improving @telegraaf on Twitter, I thought about Nine Connections’ expertise in predicting the future engagement of content and gave Lucien a call.”
So you were once a client of Nine Connections?
“Yup. While at Telegraaf, we were looking for solutions to select the most optimum articles for Twitter. De Telegraaf published as many as 400 a day, so tweeting them all was not an option. Neither was manually selecting and tweeting the articles. In the digital news business, every second counts. So I asked Lucien to build something that would help us select the articles to tweet so we could get the most possible interaction from our followers. And of course, breaking news articles must be tweeted right away.
And so Lucien did. The product Nine Connection built, AITO, made the selection of articles and picked the best time for us to send them out through Twitter. We discovered that we could tweet a lot more than we thought, without losing any relative engagement. We did a lot of social optimisation of the content on our part, like adding titles optimized for social media and looking up relevant hashtags. With all these changes, we quadrupled our traffic from Twitter and surprisingly, the pageviews per session increased significantly as well.”
What were the biggest challenges you faced at De Telegraaf?
“News consumption is quite a fragmented enterprise. At Telegraaf, we were following our audience on every platform possible. There was a constant pressure to improve our social distribution every day so we could get more impact per article. We were quite good at that though; De Telegraaf has the biggest social reach in The Netherlands.
But then I found myself wondering: what is the actual value of all this social reach? Given that most social platforms are devising ways of keeping news articles and their users within their platform, and are urging us to publish natively, how do publishers benefit?
I realised that every publisher needs a solid content strategy and every piece of content needs to reflect the values of the publisher. There are a few solid questions that every publisher should answer: ‘Why do we do what we do, what do we believe in, how does our content add value to our readers’ lives?’ With the answers, I developed and implemented a content strategy.
If you produce every piece of content with your brand values in mind, the content is recognisable wherever it is read, whether on Snapchat Discover or in an Instant Article. Content produced this way, potentially becomes a necessary part of people’s lives. This translates to more app downloads and more direct traffic, the most valuable kind of traffic a publisher can get.
Which is why Nine Connections really speaks to me. Nine Connections distributes content to the right place and at the right time. So publishers can spend more time doing what they are really good at: producing the right content — which we can distribute to a new audience and so on.”
What are your plans with the product in the coming 100 days?
“With AITO, we facilitate publishers to make better decisions on what content to post at what time. Right now we are focusing on making the predictions and the recommendations for Facebook faster and more accurate. For example, we are collecting more and more data, and by doing that we will discover more variables that predict engagement. This is an ongoing process, as our artificial neural network algorithm is self-learning.
We are also improving our iOS app, that sends notifications to the social editor when AITO detects a promising article. So when the editor is having a meeting or is busy doing other things than posting, he or she won’t miss any engaging article for the Facebook page. In order to keep the publisher’s reach on a continuous high level, we added some insightful graphs in the web app design. And we are planning several rounds of testing to finetune the timings. Basically, we want to crack the Facebook algorithm black box, as we believe that optimal spreading of journalist content makes a better world.”
Enough about work. What is your idea of a fun weekend?
“I’m really bad at making my brain stop thinking, so mostly I keep making work-related notes during the weekend. To relax, I force myself to go to Bikram Yoga. It is so intense but after the practice, I feel great. I spend most of my time with my 2-year-old daughter Jente. She loves to swim and to watch videos of herself, haha. For me, it’s important that a weekend be about spontaneity. Not about making too much plans, but seeing what the weekend brings.”
If you want to know more about our predictive products, Gonnie is happy to speak to you via:
Twitter: @gonniespijkstra, e-mail: gonnie@nineconnections.com,
or Skype: gonniespijkstra
