Interview with Second Street Media Solutions Co-owners Matt Coen and Doug Villhard to learn more about their fastest growing product, Upickem, which is an online contesting platform.

RI - Simply publishing content on a website is not enough.  How does Upickem bring news sites into the internet paradigm?
MC - By virtue of the way contests work, ie. participation, we make newspaper news sites much more interactive with their target community.

RI - How do you drive user engagement? How do you build communities?
MC - The contests engage a passionate community. “cutest dog contest” for example generated 4.5 million pageviews, 6800 dog photo submissions, over 1million votes, and 15,000 registered users for The Minneapolis Star Tribune.  The users who register to participate in the contest provide the paper with their email info that can be used to drive participation in future contests.

RI - How have advertisers reacted to the contests?
MC - Now advertisers have a premium platform for lead generation. News sites absent this context have had little incentive to advertise on a news website.  The newspapers using Upickem have been selling out of ad space almost as soon as it becomes available.

RI - How have newspapers reacted to the contests?
MC - Robin Gray from the OC Register and Julie Foley from the Statesboro Herald are both here and both using Upickem.  Everyone is raving how well Upickem works, how high the ROI is, I encourage you to seek them out and ask them yourself.
RI - I’ll do that. (and I did, see below)
DV - We have a new feature coming out called E-Blast Engine.   The engine slices and dices the data newspapers have collected to establish email and text blasts for the purpose of promoting new features and really anything. Think of this as “spiral marketing”.

RI – Is it just a website application?
DV – No we have an iPhone application that will allow people to vote and participate when on the move.   We see mobile as a growing platform for engaging users, personally speaking I’m constantly on my iPhone and it just made sense.  Newspapers love it too because it solves a difficult problem they are having with how to monetize their mobile presence.

RI - If you were me, what should I be asking you right now?
DV - How can newspapers overcome their current challenges?  Newspapers have challenges and they are reacting by cutting costs and saving money. This is important, but we have an opportunity for them to make money. Upickem has real tangible value and introduces new revenue to publishers of any size.
MC - Borrell sees online promotion growing 3x in the next few years. This is the opportunity to get newspapers to fill the needs of local readers and advertisers.

RI - Thank you both, where can people learn more?
MC - Visit the Upickem page on our site where you can learn all about features, revenue generation, and pricing.  Thank you.

Borrell Associates Webinar on “promotional advertising”:

Related:

UPICKEM was featured for about half of the Tuesday 2:45 panel called Link, Search and Play.  Robin Gray from the OC Register and Julie Foley from the Statesboro Herald presented their successes with online contests over the past year. Follow the preceding links to see real contests those newspapers have run.  I liveblogged the event on twitter at twitter.com/metaprinter and used the hashtag #naamxc09 if want to dig through that feed.  May I suggest hashtags.org.

After the session, I spoke with Julie and she reiterated that the revenue her contests are generating is new money and not cannibalizing ROP advertising.  She cannot speak highly enough about the ROI from Upickem and also mentioned that the Statesboro Herald can never have too many contests.