Today’s Redefining Engagement guest is Rianna Roggema, Founder of Practic and a remarkable entrepreneur! From spearheading tech startups and founding her own online marketing agency, Rianne’s journey is nothing short of impressive.
If you’re curious about audience engagement within the media industry through the lens of a marketing first approach, this episode is for you!
If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is a slightly edited transcript that you can browse through at your convenience:
Francesca
Hi, Rianne. Thank you so much for joining and being willing to have a conversation around engagement. I’m really excited about talking about this with you specifically because your experience is potentially very different to a lot of other people that we’ve spoken to. And I think you’ll have some amazing insights around what that is. Just to start off, would you like to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your career, please?
Rianne
Yeah, sure. So my name is Rianne Roggema and a majority of my career actually was in Myanmar. I’m from the Netherlands, but I spent most of my working career in Asia. And I came there at the beginning of 2014 when the internet just started. My initial experience is in tech startups for Rocket Internet.
That is my original sort of first working experience. I then started an online marketing agency, Irie Digital, also in Myanmar. And so there I got a little bit more in -depth experience in how actual online marketing campaigns work. And that experience I took then into becoming the CEO of the largest local media brand for the younger generation, which was Duwun. I sold my business to that brand.
Then we integrated the agency into the media brand. And so my experience with engagement is on the side of marketing, on the side of tech platforms, I would say, and then also on the side of media.
Francesca (02:08)
I feel like you’re going to have such amazing insights being on the marketing side as well as having experience in the editorial side. So my first question really is, what would you define as audience engagement? What does that mean to you?
Rianne (02:15)
The first and the easiest that comes to mind, I think, when I had my marketing agency from 2017 to 2020, I think engagement then, was all about likes and shares and clicks and comments. That was the easiest definition of engagement on social media.
For me, that is very shallow because you can actually quite push this. And I think when you buy advertisements on Facebook and you optimise for likes, they will just send it to people that are just clicking like on everything. So whether you can then really say that we have so much engagement, I’m not sure.
I do think within media, it gives some sort of indication because I think in media when you publish your articles, or at least the links of your articles on social media, you will see a difference, right? So maybe as an absolute number, it’s not so relevant but you will see, this is a topic that people are commenting on and that people really care about.
There, I think you can get some indication of what people care about. But then, I think it could be more the topic, right? For example, Kim Kardashian is getting a divorce. People may have an opinion about this, rather than people are per se interacting with your brand as such.
Francesca (04:10)
So you’re massively linking that engagement piece with relevance, and the way that you saw it in the past was potentially more based on social. That was my next question – how has your definition changed? Maybe my question now is, what do you think it’s going to look like in the future? If the past was social, now it’s about relevance, comments, actual engagements in terms of two -way conversation, what is the future of that?
Rianne (04:15)
So my experience changed a little bit because being in media in Myanmar, in Myanmar Facebook is the internet. So even as a media brand you might have a website, realistically 99 % of people that read your content were on social media and even then, it was quite common practice to just post an entire article on Facebook.
Which obviously is wildly different from where we are in Europe. And also this is four years ago and we are already four years further again in Europe.
For media brands now it’s much more important to capture their own audience, right? So it’s not so much as like who’s responding to you on other platforms, but it’s how many people are actually within your own brand logged in and are actually engaging on your platform. And then I think the comment section in your brand is a much better indicator than the comment section on a Facebook page. If people really are logged in on your platform and engaging there, that is engagement.
I would mention one thing also, which is very offline and not a sort of sexy engagement metric. But when I joined Duwun, I wanted to know what people really think of the brand. So we did a very in -depth qualitative study where we had round tables, where we had interview sessions, where we did group sessions with our readers and also with non -readers to really understand what their real engagement was with the brand, and what kind of place does your brand play in their lives.
And this I found super interesting because then you get really even with relatively small groups quite quickly you get to hear how people really engage with your brand, or not engage with your brand at all, which you don’t want to hear but you will hear it often. So I quite like that in -depth study on what users think of your brand as well.
Francesca (06:36)
I love the idea of sexy engagement metrics. That’s quite a funny way of wording it.
Rianne (07:00)
It’s not, it’s not. You bring 10 people in the room and you ask them. So like, we have 10 million plus engagement rather than just put 10 people in a room and ask them what they thought of my brand. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s super helpful.
Francesca (07:16)
And in your experience, what about, what should your audience engagement strategy deliver on? What are the aims behind engagement in your opinion? Especially for news brands.
Rianne (07:31)
Yeah, I have the idea but this is based on people that I’ve talked to and not first -hand experience, because I’ve never worked for a media brand that actually has a subscription model, not directly, indirectly but not directly, that real engagement with the brand is a good predictor of if people are willing to pay.
When we talk about implementing hard paywalls, so not reading any articles if you don’t pay, they work mostly with people that are very engaged with the brand.
Rianne (08:16)
And what engagement then means I think, it’s about how often you visit the website so the frequency, but also from what I understand, comments is a very good driver for logins and subscriptions. So if you talk about the future, I don’t know if that’s the future, it’s kind of the now, I think brands need to think about this.
Francesca (08:18)
And continuing on that point of measurement, so you’ve talked about, okay, to measure if we’re doing it properly or not, we’re measuring frequency, we’re measuring comments. Is there anything else that you have experienced or you think that we should be measuring or that we measure to see what this engagement looks like?
Rianne (09:02)
I think these are the most standard ones.
Taking into account that obviously it makes a big difference if you measure on your own platforms, what type of engagement there is, versus if you take a proper random sample of your target audience.
Let’s say we had, first was the young generation between 18 to 30. And then, if you take a random sample of people and just ask them about their news consumption.
Obviously you get very different answers than when you take the people that are already on your platform or liking on your Facebook page. Those will be very different types of numbers. So I think you at least need these two – what happens on your own platforms, but also a check of an independent reference group. You need those both.
Francesca (09:56)
I don’t think that’s necessarily happening as much as we’d like.
Rianne (10:02)
No, I think media companies are really bad at this. This is my marketing background.
Francesca Dumas (10:06)
I would agree. In my opinion, at least to add to that, I feel within a lot of media brands, you have the marketing team (if you have one) on the brand team on one side, and then the editorial team, that sits on a different side. And they’re measuring completely different things, but they’re playing the same game. They have the same North star. They have the same thing that they’re trying to achieve, but that definition of engagement, this is why it’s so interesting to talk to you, is quite different. And I think that there needs to be more of a way that those two merge. I don’t know if you’ve got anything to add to that.
Rianne (10:37)
I definitely agree with you. I think if media brands have a marketing team, which is already an if. If they do, I think nowadays they’re often focused, they are performance marketing teams. So they’re focused on subscriptions, on data, page views, this type of stuff. If you think about a brand, like what does the brand stand for?
What do people think of your newspaper as a brand? I think very few newspapers think of that in a marketing type of way. The newsroom and the journalists will think of that in a content type of way.
But often in a brand way there is no such thing, and this is why when I started at the media company that I was CEO of, the first thing I did was do a proper brand study which was, I really had to explain it because everybody was like why this is unnecessary, we don’t have to do this, but I thought it was very important and yeah, we realised that people really didn’t love us as much as we were hoping.
But it’s better that you know, right? You don’t want to hear it, but it’s better you know so you can do something about it, because it gives you super insightful action points as well, when you hear from your customers, why they like you or why they don’t like you.
This is what we could work on, or this is what we should be working towards. It’s very helpful.
Francesca (12:23)
What would you say are the biggest hurdles? What’s stopping brands from engaging more and better?
Rianne (12:39)
Culture, I think newspapers from the print era are very much used to Making something and sending it out and having this attitude that like, we know what’s good for people, this is why we are media makers. We make what people want. We know this.
Of course, and a lot of journalists have very good ideas, have this magical sparkle, where they know like this is something that you know we need to go after.
But I also think there is not a single industry where companies can be like this.
Like, I just make something because I know what people want. Every other company, when you make a product or a plate or a cup or I don’t know, you have to engage with your audience and think of, they don’t like the cup because the handle is too big or too small or it breaks too easy, or things like this. But in media, we’re not really used to that, from our historical background, and so I think culture is the biggest issue when it comes to accepting that it’s a two -way street with your audience and it’s not just a one -way direction of sending information and news and media.
Francesca Dumas (14:03)
I couldn’t agree more at all. And what about, let’s talk a bit about strategies, best practice. What strategies have proven most effective in engaging audiences in your experience?
Rianne (14:28)
When it comes to that more superficial type of engagement, I think it’s a thin balance. The media brand I was working for, was a very popular media brand in the sense of, it was mostly sports, entertainment and this kind of thing. And I find when it’s about the right people, when it’s about the right celebrities, whatever, then you know that people will be very active with it.
But I think the main thing for us was to talk to people. Make sure that you actually get your audience in a room.
And I know there have been experiments of a colleague of mine, which I really liked, of building an audience panel. So we did it the official way, with a research agency and stuff like this. But I think you can also do it a little bit more informal, where you just have a hundred or two hundred people that are your readers that you can ask regularly for feedback. A colleague of mine did this and I thought this was a brilliant idea. So that would be another good option.
Francesca (15:46)
I’m aware of a brand in the Netherlands as well, who have a 50,000 people audience panel, and they engage with them every day.
Rianne (15:55)
Yeah, it’s cool. Yeah, I think this is very smart. And you have the technology, right? I mean, you can send them quick surveys or you can bring 10 of them every month, bring 10 of them into a lunchroom and just talk to them. That’s a very good idea.
Francesca (16:18)
And in your opinion, at what point of the process should we be considering audience engagement? When we’re creating our content, where does it kind of sit?
Let’s say in the news, we’re creating content today. Do you see it as something that happens before we start writing the article, or the content? Is it something that happens after? Like where, where does this engagement piece sit?
Rianne (16:36)
I would say it’s important before. An old colleague of mine has the user needs model, which I really like, where he talks a little bit about, it’s not per se the topic that you send out. We could all agree that it’s important to write about Gaza right now. But people might want to have a different user need, meaning sometimes you just want to be informed about facts. Sometimes you might want to have a backstory. Sometimes you might want something that inspires you about someone who has done something phenomenal. So I think journalists need to think about this a little more.
The topic, of course, the journalist knows really well what’s an important topic to deliver. And that’s also not always what everybody wants, right? Because journalism is not just about giving people what they want, it’s also about addressing certain issues that you think are important to be talked about.
But you can then still choose how you deliver it. Do you address the topic with a background story? Do you address the topic with just a quick update and information? What is the nicest way for people to receive it? And I think you need to think of this in advance. And after, of course, I think it is a continuous loop, because after you will get feedback and people will tell you what they don’t like. And then after you will see whether you got it right or wrong.
I mean journalism is not a black and white situation. You also don’t know a hundred percent even if you listen to everyone.
Something people need to get better at is this targeting of different content to different people and a unique layout of the newspaper for everyone. I think that’s a very important thing as well.
Francesca (18:59)
So in your opinion, what do you think the biggest pitfalls are in terms of engagement? The challenges that we’re looking at when we start these initiatives?
Rianne (19:21)
One of the things that came to mind when I was thinking about this before we were talking is that, one of the main issues for media brands in this age of AI and social media and everybody being able to create content, but also an era in which the media is being attacked is unreliable and biassed, is for media brands to create trust.
And I’ve seen some media brands do some very successful things, I think, where they engage with the audience, where they talk to the audience about, like, how do we do this? How did we make this story? Why do we come up with this story? A personal message from the editor or personal message from the editor -in -chief. And I think that is really interesting because I think that can go both ways. Right? I think that if done well, that creates trust.
And I don’t know if it’s the right way to say if done well, but when you do that, even with the best intentions, it can still fall both ways in terms of, is it going to create trust or is it going to actually fall, sit not right with people.
This is an interesting experiment that you would have to talk to an editor in chief or so that does this on a regular basis to see what their experience is with, is it working or not? I would be quite curious as well. But I find that quite a nice step, this openness and this transparency about journalism and the approach.
Francesca (20:58)
And then from one to 10, if you were going to rate how important journal engagement is, one being the lowest, 10 being the highest in terms of what we’re doing day to day in the media, where would you say that sits?
Rianne (21:08)
Let me say a seven.
I think it’s super important to talk to your users and to know what their desires are and what they like but I’m saying a seven because I also think, if Ford would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
And journalism is a little bit like this. Journalists are also really good at making the agenda and not following demand, right? So yes, engagement is really important, but also I think one of the core things of media and journalism is to set the agenda. So sometimes you’re going to give people something they didn’t ask for and I think that’s really good.
Francesca Dumas (22:11)
They didn’t even know they wanted it.
Rianne (22:13)
They didn’t know they wanted it. And maybe they didn’t want it in the end, but that doesn’t mean it was bad journalism. It could still be very good journalism.
Francesca (22:22)
I absolutely love that. Well, Rianne thank you so much for your time!