As we hinted at when we moved our blog, we’ve been working hard on the business-to-business side of Taproot Publishing over the past few months. It’s time to introduce you to Spotlight, our product that helps an organization pay attention to its community.
Spotlight grew out of our observation that it’s powerful to show the people you serve that you have noticed their efforts, events and successes. It’s the sort of thing that can make people happy to be your members, customers or partners. It can provide useful intelligence for readers as well.
It’s also a lot of work. I’ve been doing this kind of attention-paying for a long time — remember when I used to round up Edmonton blogs and podcasts? — and it can take over your life. I was only able to do that on a regular basis back then because of a rudimentary tool that Mack Male built to make it easier to gather up posts, long before we started Taproot.
Mack has now built more powerful tools, and we can use them for a variety of communities, not just for my particular bent. That early experience also helped us develop a methodology for this kind of thing, which feeds back into the technology that enables it and is grounded in the curatorial expertise that only a skilled human can provide (so far, at least).
After a lot of listening to prospective clients and experiments with our early customers, we’ve developed this product that gives you all of the power of paying attention without having to do any of the work.
Who is Spotlight for?
Spotlight works well if your organization has members or a defined group of partners, stakeholders or clients, and those folks tend to share things on the internet and/or get media coverage for their work. We’re basically harvesting the owned media (blogs, videos, podcasts, social media posts, etc.) and earned media (mentions in the news, guest appearances on podcasts or blogs, any kind of third-party attention) that pertains to the people in your particular community. Then we curate it into a readable summary of the most interesting items.
For some clients, such as the Plant Protein Alliance of Alberta, we put this information into a newsletter and send it on their behalf. For others, such as ATB, we compile the items, and they send them out themselves. Our first international client, SheEO, uses our curation to bolster its regular newsletter and shares some of the items separately on social media. There’s a lot of flexibility.
Why are we doing this?
We saw an opportunity to serve business customers by applying the tools we use for the journalistic side of our work, primarily our roundups. Spotlight is part of a suite of such services — we’ll tell you more about the rest in the coming months.
It’s not unusual for media companies to develop B2B services to diversify their revenue streams beyond subscriptions or advertising. Some do that through sponsored content. Others provide graphic design and marketing services to help local businesses with their digital presence. Still others work with clients to put on events for their customers. There are lots of ideas out there to support the kind of work we do.
We think our particular approach is unique, and it’s a key part of our quest to build a robust, sustainable business that supports local journalism. We also sell memberships and sponsorships, and those are very important. We’ve found that this third leg, so to speak, provides significant stability, and it gives us a stronger chance of fulfilling our mission to inform communities about themselves.
Want to hear more?
If you think your business or organization could benefit from our approach, we’d love to talk. Contact us at hello@taprootpublishing.ca.
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