People are the key to Metro’s success.
Metro is only as good as the stories it publishes and the stories are only as good as the people who create them.
No matter what Metro’s ambition is, we need more love between the people that matter the most. Engaged customers, staff and clients all fuel each other.
We want to make sure that the love is being shared… a health check… a love-o-meter…
Audience
It’s our users who our brand partners want to connect with.
The loyalty funnel outlines how much users love Metro. The rows are: first-time visitors, second-time visitors, direct home/channel visitors. (Per week).
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(Direct visits get 3 times more views per visit than second-time visitors).
Brand partners
It’s the clients who provide our revenue and it’s the revenue that enables the Metro team to do great work.
Love-o-meter: revenue.
The number one thing our clients judge us on is number of UK page views.
The big shift at the moment is moving towards sponsored content (aka native advertising) which is much more aligned with the interests of users.
Metro’s team
It’s the team that creates the stories and it’s the stories that attracts users.
Love-o-meter: how much people love working at Metro.
Retention is the standard measure but it’s flawed. For example, Amazon offer all customer staff $1000 to leave the company. “In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company”.
I’ll blog separately about finding a better metric, for now consider this: Not so long ago we had a content team of around 25 people and 6 of them left to work at competitors… in the space of 6 months. That’s 25% of the team!
In the last few months we’ve reversed the trend, with around 4 people joining from competitors. What has changed? One major change is that we now have a much more compelling editorial vision.
Talent and passion
Passion used to be one of our corporate values emblazoned on the wall. As with creativity (discussed in the previous post), passion is hard to action. It needs the right environment to thrive. Experts have found that there are three key factors (assuming people are paid a fair wage):
- Purpose. Discussed in part 1.
- Mastery. Mentioned in the previous post.
- Autonomy. This is another element of the “agile” mindset mentioned in the previous post. We’ll discuss autonomy some more in part 3.
