- The biggest thing across the board: Although everyone thinks there is something there, we need to come up with a clear and coherent response to the question "what does this do for the news organization?" Why should they want to adopt this/put energy, time, money into this? Beyond the fact that our demographic is largely untapped ... why would they find this appealing. In terms of answering the question of "who will staff this," one of our professors came up with a great response. It's people like us -- who are graduating with the multimedia skills to support sites like these -- that would be a perfect fit for such a staffing opening. It's what we're trained in. And the whole concept behind the Incubator project.
- The question of what groups are acceptable and who decides this. In our explanation of "applying" to the site admin for a public group, the question was raised regarding where the line was drawn, particularly in the political groups. And our marketing prof raised a good point: what's good in one community might not be in another depending on where they fall on the liberal/conservative scale. We can't lose the privacy/security feature, but need a solution to what is allowed and what's not (I guess a methodical way of deciding what flies...)
- A suggestion: why not strengthen the laptop feature (and tie in more video components) by having video headlines automatically begin when the locker is accessed. This way more news is getting delivered, without a choice on the user's part. Also would also for more Internet safety PSAs to be fused in. This particular prof. said we needed to make it so more news "had" to be seen.
- Another thing across the board: how is this different from Facebook. This is a question that was asked to us, and I babbled off a long explanation to which he replied "right that down." The point being, it is different, and for good reasons. We just need to reiterate that at the beginning of our presentation because some of these news orgs aren't as familiar with social networking sites as we are, and there's the potential that they could see this as familiar if it's not clearly stated how it's not.
- Clarify the problem. And offer Locker Talker as the solution. And what other solutions have tried, unsuccessfully, to do what we're doing. We can look back at all those middle school girl sites we tackled the first two weeks back from Ithaca as to what we saw wrong and how we're better.
- Play the generation card. Again, this is a demographic that we're not all that detached from, but our audience is. Use that to our advantage. Two suggestions: one, really play up the hypothetical locker idea of "Kathryn's locker" (and maybe a male example) and keep that consistent, actually referring to the person, throughout the entire presentation. Another suggestion was to begin the presentation by asking the news organization "Do you want to create a citizen?" because that's what our product has the potential to do. Obviously not a marketing thing we would use to the users, however.
- Really strengthen the part about Project Sharing. This is a great feature of the site that we came up with at the end and subsequently, it's stuck at the end of our presentation. It really encompasses the whole citizen journalism aspect. Also, if people want to turn their diary entries into stories to be shared (through the site admin), allow it to be possible. Encourage writing because it's encouraging cit journalism. They though the tie in to local groups and the community was a strong part of this project however.
There were also some general presentation concepts that our Chair and another veteran prof shared with us after that were really helpful. One was to storyboard the presentation. Start with front of the locker and work your way through in order. Really play the generation card and the hypothetical students. Start the beginning of the presentation with the problem, the failed solution, and how this is the solution and how it is distinctly different from existing social networking sites, because it is.
We're also going to look into combining our PowerPoint and Mockups presentation into one. Consolidate the PowerPoint, with the above info at the beginning, and then move into the mockups with the product explanation.
The good news was they all felt this was practical and could be implemented by a news organization, as long as we came up with the answer to the first question I posted. I have an email into the Free Press multimedia guy regarding a couple questions he raised.
Let me know if any of this doesn't make sense...
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