social channels were managed out
of the US, in the same way all the
digital content was managed out of
the US. We now have a European
edition of our website and we’re
soon to launch an Asia edition
followed by other regions next year.
We're building more and more
regional content. The same thing is
true of social media. We now
manage the @business Twitter
handle from the region during our
working day. We just hired an
audience development and social
media lead who is managing that
and our other social media
platforms. It’s our next step.
When you're an international
news and media organisation with
lots of stories and you want to
publish onto a global platform like
Facebook, you do need to manage
these things carefully. That’s the
challenge – you don't want 25
different Facebook pages because
you've got the Turkish TV page and
the European website page and the
Asian TV page. You need to
aggregate them which takes some
coordination.
It is worth noting that
Bloomberg Business Europe is not a
business site about Europe, it's a
global business news site for
Europeans. The Bloomberg
proposition as epitomized by the
Terminal is to help people make
investment decisions that allow
them to grow their portfolios and
grow their businesses. What we’re
doing in media is helping business
professionals make smarter, faster
decisions. I haven’t really seen
another media that's part of the
industry. We’re here to help
businesses grow. We're not just
reporting on it.
That perspective gives us a fresh
view on things. And I think gives
us quite a nice challenge for the
positioning of the brand. We are
lucky that we have had historic
investment in multiple channels
from TV to digital to print at a
regional and global scale. And as
media is globalizing and becoming
very much about the cross-platform
story, Bloomberg has a unique
advantage in that it has invested in
all these channels already.
Are you aiming to broaden the
appeal of Bloomberg to the
average man in the street?
Our stated aim is to reach a broader
set of business professionals. By the
very nature of what we do we will
pick up audiences digitally that are
interested in business stories
whether they’re in business or not.
We have done a lot of work
researching the modern business
professional and we’ve segmented
them into six audiences. It starts
with the financial services
professional because they are the
Terminal subscriber.
The digital assets particularly,
and to a certain extent TV, do allow
us to talk to a broader business
community. We want to build
audiences with the rest of the
boardroom and the C-suite. We
want people who work in the
media and tech to read our stories.
We want people in the intersection
between politics and public sector.
We've got quite an ambitious
goal. This is a growth plan. In
Europe, we think we have about
one in four of the business leaders
that we would like to read
Bloomberg content currently
engaging with our content. We still
have to attract three out of four of
THE CHANNEL
|
IN CoNVERSATIoN
Rightly, they need to be super-
served.
Since John Micklethwait joined
us from
The Economist
earlier this
year as editor-in-chief of Bloomberg
News, we’ve established channel
experts in the media department
who work hand-in-hand with the
industry, company and sector
experts that exist in Bloomberg
News. The channel experts are
commissioning in and out of the
building, saying, “This is what I
need and when I need it by. Here’s
the top five stories from this
morning. Here’s what we need to
react to. What’s moved on in these
stories?”
We don't intend to differentiate
by social platform, we essentially
focus on the Terminal and then on
the web, making sure that the
audience knows we're updating the
stories in all our channels at the
same time. If you’re watching us on
TV, you know that you can go to
the website and read more about
the story. Then we're amplifying
that through Twitter, and starting
to use platforms like Facebook and
LinkedIn.
The video clips on Facebook seem
to be mostly US based material?
This is again one of the global-local
opportunities. Historically, all our
”
Our
advertising
sales
teams are
integrated
so they sell
audiences,
not
channels
“
18
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ISSUE 2 2015
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