SOSTAC for Al Jazeera America - Essay Example

SOSTAC Essay for Al Jazeera America (AJAM) Situational Analysis Al Jazeera America (AJAM) is a US based cable and satellite television news network; subsidiary of the Qatar based Al Jazeera Media Network. Launched in August 2013, the well-bankrolled television channel directly competes with a number of American cable/Satellite television providers such as CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and HLN. This part will analyze AJAM situation using the SWOT analysis in order to study the company’s Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to guide our efforts of planning the online existence of AJAM. Furthermore, the situation analysis aims to explain the need behind a strong on-line existence for AJAM as well (Hill and Westbrook, 2007, p.34). SWOT analysis Strengths One of the major strengths of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) is that it is financially supported by the government of Qatar. As a result, the channel has been able to hire some of the best media personalities as well as run news with fewer commercials as compared to its competitors. In addition, the purchase of Current TV allowed AJAM to inherit its millions of potential household audiences (Associated Press., 2013, p.1). Another possible strength of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) is that its mother company, Al Jazeera is well established in the Middle East as it has the largest viewer base among its competitors in the region. Besides, Al Jazeera is praised for its consistent history of featuring stories from all over the world. Finally, Al Jazeera is quality oriented and this is its main focus, which they demonstrate by a distinctive inspective reporting approach. This unique way of approaching stories is what contributed to the success of Al Jazeera in other parts of the world as it offers a unique selling proposition differentiation point for the company (Aljazeera America, 2014). Weaknesses A number of experts suggest that Al Jazeera is fraught to establish a viewer’s database in the U.S. market mainly due to two reasons. First, People are not aware that it is available in the market. Second, Al Jazeera’s perceived image of being Anti-American. According to Alexa.com (2015), the number of visitors and engagements on Al Jazeera’s website has been decreasing as compared to its market rivals such as CNN. This may be attributed to the restrictions on the cable distribution as well as the company’s perceived anti-Americanism (Martin and Ebrary, 2007, p.77). Opportunities One of the potential opportunities for the company is that in the past couple of decades Middle East is the part of the world that is making headlines. Additionally, through monitoring reviews feedback on twitter and Facebook, as well as on news channel websites in the U.S. as Fox and CNN I concluded that the American audience is accusing them of being bias and not showing the full story (Powers, 2012). Lastly, Al Jazeera has an opportunity of delivering the message of the other clusters that their voice is ignored. Threats Already existed news channels are the main threat as they have their viewer base. Besides, the low reach level due to placing it on higher paid TV packages, which limits its visibility and the recognition it gains (Parsons and Robert, 1998, p.56). Objectives Derived from the situation analysis; there is a gap between the desired state of being a leading news outlet in America and the current situation. To overcome this diagnosed gap, clear objectives are needed to guide the action plan. Thus, we will be aiming to increase the traffic to Al Jazeera’s website by 30% within Twelve months. Since there is a lack of awareness, the second objective is to boost awareness by 45% within twelve months. The third objective is to increase engagement on the website by 40% within Twelve months as that’s implied mainly from the earlier highlighted issue that the rate of viewers stay on the website is decreasing, among other reasons from the situational analysis. The campaign will take place from September 1, 2015 till August 31, 2016, which means that it will start two months before the election periods in America. As the elections period is a good opportunity to exhibit AJAM’s propositions. Strategy According to Aljeezira.com (2014), AJAM’s target audience is everyone who wants to know national and international news. The AJAM VP is that they deliver people-centered, impartial, full-story news. The OVP on AJAM website is to keep the audience updated and knowledgeable by providing these stories and making them accessible from anywhere. This is derived from the threats AJAM faces in America as it is placed on higher paid packages which leads to a limited audience reach, so the Website was introduced as another distribution channel. To achieve the objectives, which we’ve stated at the previous section, and by keeping the OVP in mind, the following strategies have been chosen to direct our efforts. As for increasing awareness, we will be focusing on “search engine optimization”, mainly to increase Al Jazeera’s website organic visibility whenever a matter that’s related to it has been searched (Beel and Wilde, 2010, p.176). Our target is to reach the first page of the search results list and to be the first option on it. Furthermore, SEO should lead to our objective of increasing traffic to Al Jazeera’s website as well (Mullen, M. 2008). Moreover, Online Displayed Ads will be utilized for the sake of increasing awareness as well. As shown by study Beel, J.,Wilde (2010) this strategy has proven to be effective in increasing research attempts about the advertised subject, enhanced recall rate and boosted awareness of the brand. Considering this makes it a suitable strategy for the objective of increasing awareness and driving more traffic to Al-Jazeera’s website eventually. Additionally, content co-creation (UGC) and news-live streaming content strategies will be used to increase engagement. As for the UGC, it is now witnessed that people are constantly generating new content with all the social media trends and platforms facilitating this. According to a study Ipsos (2014), User Generated Content is 50% further trusted by people than the content created by institutes. Besides, this hopefully will create associations in the mind of the consumer that AJAM gives a stage for people to reach the world. News-livestreaming content strategy is critical in the case of AJAM mainly to overcome the obstacle it is facing of being listed on higher paid TV packages as mentioned in the SWOT analysis part; which leads to a limited audience reach. Moreover, it is now more challenging to keep up to the consumer’s demand; since with the growing Internet capabilities people are now consuming news on the go; as podcasts, live-streaming, blogs from wherever the consumer is (Lam, 2014, p.1). Tactics This part is to feature the details of the strategies that are going to be used to achieve the three above-mentioned objectives. As mentioned earlier, we aim at Increasing brand awareness and website traffic by deploying the strategies of search engine optimization and online displayed ads. Firstly, SEO is mainly about managing some factors to effect the ranking of a website on a search engine generated list. To improve AJAM ranking position it will first conduct a “keyphrase analysis” in which AJAM will find the popular key phrases via Google Keyword Tool. Then experts will assess how the company is currently performing for these critical phrases via http://bit.ly/smartranking. Afterwards, AJAM can set its goals and identify phrases that have a huge prospective if improved, so it will select the key-phrases it wants itself to be visible for. Towards further SEO and by having the ‘Keyphrase Analysis’ as a departure base, AJAM will focus on utilizing the following four common factors that affect the search engines results as per SEOMoz (www.moz.com). First, ‘on-page optimization’, where AJAM will assess its own website in terms of the frequency of critical phrases’ appearing in it, the phrases associated to the visual content on its website and its pages Meta data as it plays a critical role in defining the website search position. Moreover, AJAM will look at ‘off-site optimization’ because the material in the pages that are linking to AJAM’s website controls its place in the search engine’s results list too. Although companies have little control on this, AJAM will act proactively and influence it. Here AJAM will focus on the quality and quantity of the content they are providing with a goal of making it appealing to the users so it would encourage them to share and participate. A content co-creation strategy that will be introduced later in the plan supports AJAM’s off-site optimization (Beel and Wilde, 2010). Furthermore, AJAM will work on its ‘internal link structure’. It will first assess the links on its website via Google Webmaster Tool. Then it will further work on increasing the hyperlinks leading to the page that it is planned to advance its ranking position. The fourth factor is the ‘user behavior signals’. Here, users engagement level has a critical effect. To affect this, AJAM will work to make the user stay longer on its website, bookmark pages and share more which will enhance the off-site linking structure as well. This will be enhanced by a content co-creation initiative that is introduced later in the plan. AJAM will invest in reaching the audience through placing advertisements on the Internet. ‘Online Display Ads’ had proved usefulness and effectiveness in both raising awareness and generating a response (Moe, 2013). These ads will carry a message of AJAM online value proposition besides focusing on AJAM’s unique approach of dealing with the news, as it is objective, people-centered and showing the full story. Likewise, a link with a call to action will appear in the ad saying something like ‘know more, visit Al Jazeera America website’. These Online Ads will be placed using two placement types as it is suggested by a study conducted by ComScore (2010) that the use of more than a placement type improves the effectiveness of the campaign. One type is “Contextual Targeting” which is going to target websites with related content as Newspapers web pages. The other Ads placement type is “Retargeting”, as per the study, this technique is pinpointed on people who has landed on the AJAM website before. “Retargeting” will be used to overcome the issue of declining repeated visits to the AJAM website as it was shown in the study that it had a great impact on increasing website visits and brand search attempts. After driving people to the website, we aim to make it engaging. While it is all about the content in news related websites – or else it isn’t a news website- firstly, and as we previously mentioned the benefits of it, we will focus on UGC. Yet, how are we going to encourage people to share content with AJAM? As per Ikäheimo (2009), People have a need for recognition from other parties in the community, thus by sharing their content a brand is boosting engagement and encouraging people to continue sharing. Plus, AJAM already has established social accounts on Twitter and Facebook where they will announce about the initiative under the hashtag #BeTheReporter. A link will be shared on all its social media accounts and will be added to its bio; the link will lead to a page on AJAM website where people can easily share their stories with AJAM, videos or any type of news. Then this content will be exhibited by AJAM in a distribution channel that suits that particular piece of content. As soon as this initiative starts, an automatic informative message will start popping-up whenever someone lands on any page of the website. The message will show a brief description of the initiative and display a ‘learn more’ link leading to the initiative’s page. At last, we come to the news live-streaming content strategy. Mainly to achieve the objective of increasing engagement, which in its turn will positively impact the time users spend on the website. As it was found by using (Alexa.com, 2015), the time spent by users on Al Jazeera’s America website is in decline, on the other hand, users spend more time on rival’s websites. Plus, as we mentioned earlier, the higher the engagement rate, the best the SEO results. So, in a first step, AJAM will need to decide what to live stream. This will be decided using a poll that will be embedded in the front page to measure people’s preferences and by conducting an analysis of the watching rates of each show. After deciding on the content, a page should be created on the website for the live streaming and launch it. AJAM will need to announce the launch of its new page using a banner placed on its web site’s front-page and create a distinctive tap that can be titled ‘AJAM Live’. It will also be announced on AJAM social accounts to create awareness among its followers. By skimming through the comments and mentions of AJAM on social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) I came across many welcoming mentions and re-tweets dating back to the time when AJAM had just been launched. Then, many comments followed as well, but this time people were calling AJAM to find other means to be reachable, as many TV cables are not listing it (Moe, 2013). Also, people were asking for real content. Therefore, this live streaming is to cater to these wants. After the streaming is done, it will be filed and categorized on the website to form a ‘visuals library’ for people to get to it whenever they need to. Just like all the content on the website this will be injected with the social media share bottoms, email, and comment space, to serve the SEO and traffic building. Actions With regard to actions, a professional SEO company will be contracted to analyze and improve our situation as planned. This company will be working closely with AJAM IT and Marketing departments to ensure consistency. A budget will be allocated to purchase online ad spots. Besides, the marketing and corporate communication departments will be working on delivering the ad designs and get approvals on them in 1 months. AJAM will outsource the designing of the live-stream page to the company that designed its website. They are expected to deliver it in 2 months after testing it. Furthermore, AJAM will designate two of its corporate communications department’s staff to handle the comments and mentions it receives on its website and social media as to foster the content co-creation and communication. Although the budget is not an obstacle for AJAM as the founders are extensively supporting it, yet a budgeting allocation will be planned according to estimations and quotations to ensure the best project planning. Control Now it is time to know if AJAM is on the right track towards its objectives. They will consistently measure the work they’ve done to ensure that tactics are working or take an action to put things on the right place. First, AJAM will measure the awareness level by using surveys. This will be conducted every 4 months as well as a one time before the start of the campaign to know where they are standing. If improvements didn’t happen, an analysis of the ads will be conducted to decide on what’s to be altered. Furthermore, ‘SEOMoz’ toolset (.moz.com, 2015) will be used every 4 months to monitor the SEO situation and take further actions where needed. Engagement is the second objective to be measured. ‘Google Analytics’ will be used to generate reports every 3 months to monitor how customers spend their time on the website. Besides, an analysis report of the shares, likes and comments will be generated to measure any changes. If the required improvement didn’t occur, then as per Cartelleriri et al. (1997) recommendations interactive ads could be introduced to grab the attention of the audience and increase website traffic. In addition, Linossi (2011, p.2) suggests that additional interaction and personalization criteria could be added to the design of the website to foster engagement). Besides, the actual content’s attractiveness will be further examined. References Alexa.com. 2015. How popular is Al Jazeera America website? Available at Aljazeera America (2014). Official website. Available at Associated Press. 2013. Al-Jazeera buys Al Gores Current TV. Available at Beel, J.,Wilde, E. (2010). 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