We’re excited to announce that our technology news publication Technically Philly was prominently highlighted in a report generated by J-Lab, the journalism innovation think tank based in Washington, D.C, for a number of projects that it was involved with in 2011.

Working with various partners in Philadelphia’s journalism industry through grants funded by J-Lab and the William Penn Foundation, Technically Philly was active in shaping projects that, most notably, accelerated conversation about broadband connectivity and its future and another that researched abandoned properties in Philadelphia.

Broadband2035, as we’ve written in the past, generated close to a dozen reports about the state of broadband access in the region, and how it would be represented in the City of Philadelphia Planning Commission’s citywide strategic planning document, Philadelphia2035, the first comprehensive plan put together in more than 50 years. The partnership and project helped connect the niche communities of Philadelphia’s built environment and technology, introducing an important, yet often under-reported issue.

As the report says:

Technically Philly and PlanPhilly joined forces to report on the status of the city’s broadband adoption and tie it to the city’s issuance of a citywide master plan. The biggest contribution of the project, to date, has been to actively solicit reader recommendations on the conditions of the city’s broadband infrastructure and on city residents’ hopes for the future.

See the full report on Broadband2035 and its impact here.

And working with Philadelphia City Paper and PlanPhilly, Technically Philly helped to envision and create an online tool that visualizes abandoned property in the city. The full report on that project is available here.

It was a strong year for public affairs technology news coverage, including outside of the J-Lab grants. We spent much of the first half of the year working on Transparencity, a six-month project in partnership with the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation, which focused on, among other topics, the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Technology efforts to work with other city agencies to modernize, curate and disseminate data sets and other relevant information for third-party developers and other action. Finally, we finished 2011 by publishing an in-depth report on the state of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in the School District of Philadelphia.

We look forward to future collaborative efforts in Philadelphia and beyond. To read about other successes of the J-Lab Enterprise Reporting Awards in Philly, see the institution’s full report.

We’ve been working hard to increase programming in the Content Strategy Philly meetup group, which we helped launch last year during Philly Tech Week. That’s why we’re excited to announce that along with co-organizers Monica Hays, Vanguard’s content strategist and Kelani Nichole, a freelance content strategist, we’re programming an upcoming event to discuss user experience and content problems on a handful of Philadelphia websites.

At the group’s next meetup on Tuesday, Nov. 29, at the Indy Hall coworking facility in Old City, we’ll work in breakout groups to give some therapy and solutions to these frightening sites. RSVP here.

We’re looking to the to you to nominate Sites that Suck. Tell us your least favorite local web site designs, looking to music venues, government sites, restaurants, museums, entertainment or other. We’ll choose the five best suggestions and break out into smaller groups to try and fix the user experience and content problems. We’ll end with short presentations.

This will be a great way to see how other content strategy experts work on-the-ground, share how you see content on the web, and work together to make results. Add your website suggestions here.

Early nominations from the meetup group members include: Philly.com, Phila.gov, South Philly Food co-op and RealWinWin.

Hope to see you there!

Lately we’ve been experimenting with ways to attract readers to our sites beyond just word of mouth and content partnerships. For the first time ever, we purchased advertisements.

However, our budget is rather limited so we decided to test the advertising platforms of what are arguably the three most important social networks on the web: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Below is the result of a tests conducted over the past 45 days for our technology news site Technically Philly. This test was not scientific, but we hope our experience can help educate your future advertising buys.

1. LinkedIn

Target: Those with “Information Technology” or “Entrepreneur” in job titles.
Geography: Greater Philadelphia Area

Our LinkedIn ad was a simple square that pointed directly to our homepage (see above). Above is the exact report from LinkedIn (click to enlarge). Once you’re done laughing at our .031 percent Click Through Rate, you’ll see that the ad buy was a complete disaster.

Not only did the ad not convert well, there is no LinkedIn “fan page” where we can keep people consuming our content. A $3.00 CTR is way too high for Technically Philly,  a site where we are not selling a direct product.

In other words, if we were selling widgets for $100 we could perhaps justify this ad buy as the occasional $3.00 click would result in $100 in revenue. But Technically Philly needs repeated engagement for it remain profitable.

2. Twitter

We started to explore Twitter’s promoted tweets product, but it turned out that you needed $5,000 minimum. No thanks.

3. Facebook

In its first two years, Technically Philly focused much of its efforts on cultivating a community on Twitter. We’re a tech news site and most of our readers spend their days on Twitter. However after checking our Facebook page and discovering a laughable number of likes earlier in the year, our egos required us to do something.

We implemented Facebook comments and experimented with posting different types of content to our Facebook page in the early part of the summer. After seeing a respectful growth in likes, we decided to explore an advertising buy.

There are many variables to a Facebook ad. Firstly, there are two types of ads:

1. “Sponsored Story” notifies you when your friend interacts with Technically Philly “your friend has liked Technically Philly”

2. Straight ad. You can link to your Facebook page or your website. We chose our Facebook page, as our primary goal here was to increase our “likes.”

You can also have an infinite number of target demographics which is a nightmare for testing. We tested in two rounds.

The first round:

Ad # 1- Sponsored Story

• who live in the United States
• age 18 and older
• who are not already connected to Technically Philly
• whose friends are already connected to Technically Philly

Ad #2 – Straight advertisement

• who live in the United States
• who live in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania or California
• age 18 and older
• who are not already connected to Technically Philly

If you thought the LinkedIn ad buy performed badly, the Facebook straight ad put it to shame with its .009 percent CTR. The sponsored story resulted in more connections, though I suspect that the 42 number is deceiving, as our likes rose by much more than that during the run of the ad.

After seeing the results of the two ads, we placed a third buy focusing on the success of the sponsored story ad buy with a bit more geographical focus:

Ad #3 – Sponsored Story

• who live in the United State
• who live within 25 miles of Philadelphia, Pa
• between the ages of 18 and 30 inclusive
• whose friends are already connected to Technically Philly

As you can see, the ad was seen an average of 18.7 times (!) by each targeted user. However connections doubled with the price of our buy suggesting that each like cost us roughly $1.86.

So, did the ads work?

You’ll see our monthly active users spike when we placed ads on Aug 8th and Sept 11th.

The amazing part is that the interaction held up even after the ad expired which suggests that the effect is cumulative.

Above is a Google Analytics graph that measures weekly Facebook referrals. Google anaytics traffic shows small but sustained spikes when we placed the Faacebook ads, and those spikes do not coincide with general traffic, suggesting that our ads had an effect.

So what to make of all this?

Our takeaways:

• Facebook ads promoting our Facebook page merit additional testing as early data suggest that Facebook advertisements have a cumulative effect that outlast the advertising buy.
• Since the ad buys, our Facebook page has received 289 additional likes.
• Highly-targeted sponsored stories worked best for us on Facebook.
• Twitter is expensive. Though if you have the budget, you should try it. Or, you could always do it grassroots-style.
• LinkedIn’s returns were so bad we stopped the advertising run early. Perhaps our ad could use some improvement, but we likely won’t be using LinkedIn for ad buys.

Technically Media Inc., the online content strategy firm and publisher of Technically Philly, today announced it had joined the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.

TM co-founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink highlighted five reasons they were interested in chamber membership:

• Supporting the local business community of Philadelphia and helping to make it among the most respected in the world.
• Gaining access to networking and connecting relationships, events and opportunities for partnerships and collaboration.
• Access to unique services, like event hosting, business resources, discounts, legislative lobbying and more.
• Introducing the established business community to the vibrant, growing and independent technology-focused, small business and entrepreneurial communities.
• To be seen as a valued and involved member of the Philadelphia business community.

Through the year, we’ve worked with a discretionary grant with Temple’s Institute for Public Affairs to investigate Philadelphia’s open municipal government movement, a project we call Transparencity. We’ve recently submitted a final report on the subject and we’ll be sharing the outputs and outcomes of that grant soon.

In August, in partnership with City Paper and PlanPhilly, Technically Philly helped launch an examination of Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority and the properties it had offloaded for redevelopment. Using relationships pulled together through Technically Philly’s open government hackathons, we were able to put a top notch developer, Tim Wisniewski, on the project to create a map of properties that remain undeveloped after the exchange. The project was funded by a $5,000 award from journalism catalyst J-Lab, paid for by William Penn.

We continue work on our Broadband2035 project, another of partnership between William Penn and J-Lab, and have been recently asked to participate in the organization of a master broadband plan in Philadelphia as a result of our coverage. Our final piece of the series, examining the neighborhood economic and social impact of broadband, is due this fall.

And, before coming on full-time in June, Technically Media co-founder Brian James Kirk wrapped up a six month project at PlanPhilly, which was featured high in William Penn’s annual report. Kirk helped handle the online presentation of an extensive multimedia series investigating a transformed neighborhood in Eastern North Philadelphia reported by former Inquirer city hall reporter Patrick Kerkstra, and talented CityPaper staff photographer Neal Santos.

We needed headshots and team photographs of our three co-founders, so we worked with Philadelphia Photographer Colin M. Lenton.

Lenton, whom we know from our college newspaper days, welcomed us into his rental photo studio in the Frankford section of Northeast Philadelphia. We’re really pleased with the results.

See low res versions of the rest on Facebook here.

My colleague Brian James Kirk and I dropped in on the WHYY and Philadelphia Daily News newsrooms last month to offer a brief overview of data tools for journalists.

For general interest shops with varying degrees of knowledge, it was more an introduction than anything.

We shared this rough document and basically ran through the below presentation.

I highlighted some very basic, existing, local data-driven applications, and Brian suggested how journalists could take it further: perhaps with Google Fusion or other free tools.

When we launched Technically Media with our first property, Technically Philly, in 2009, we knew traditional display advertising was not a realistic means of funding content. So we staked out to try and experiment with a handful of revenue sources. The experiment is still on-going, but we’d like share our results thus far. That is, we’d like to share the sources of the revenue that makes us a profitable business.

The charts below illustrate revenue earned in 2010 and 2011. The charts were created and compiled by TM co-founder Brian James Kirk for Rowan professor Mark Berkey-Gerard who spent a week at our offices conducting academic research about how we operate. The charts were made to help Mark better understand our business and had the side effect of forcing us to evaluate where we receive our revenue.

Some notes:

• “TM Consulting” is the editorial strategy services that we offer businesses and non-profits. For our clients, we are tasked with building an audience to be converted into supporters, donors or customers. For more information on our consultancy, be sure to read our services page or drop us a line or page through our PowerPoint presentation on the subject.
• Many of the Technically Philly grants expire before the end of 2011, so in future years that slice of the pie may look much different, but we continue to pursue new grant opportunities.
• Technically Philly’s advertising doesn’t pull in much revenue. However, we do not spend nearly as many hours on advertising as we do for events or consulting business development. Advertising is often combined with some other type of sponsorship. Were we to have a dedicated sales person, this chart may look much different.
• Philly Tech Week, a large part of our event revenue income, was in its first year in 2010.

Technically Media is profitable and supports three full-time employees: myself, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink. We’re each co-founders of the business and joined full-time in June 2010, December 2010 and May 2011, respectively.

We view this company as an ongoing experiment, and we are proud of our first two-and-a-half years. We hope that insight into our internal revenue can help inspire or educate other content creators who share our vision of creating sustainable editorial properties.

We’re kinda obsessed with data here at Technically Media.

We’ve helped host a handful of events to harness the power of municipal government data here in Philadelphia — one of the missions of our flagship publication Technically Philly, an online newsmagazine that covers the technology community in our homebase, Philadelphia.

We’ve seen the future folks, and the future is data.

When we’re not busy helping Philadelphia realize the potential of it, we’re getting our hands dirty with data to shape the content and editorial strategies of our clients.

We were smitten when we attended Confab — the first international conference on Content Strategy — when presenters like Claire O’Brien as well as Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare [PDF] shared their techniques for using data to shape strategy.

The takeaway? On the web, we’ve got to look past web analytics to make informed decisions about what users want using any data we can get our hands on.

That includes, as O’Brien shared, search logs, task analysis, market profiles, interviews, surveys, anecdotal inquiries, field studies, focus groups, quantitative/qualitative assessments, usability testing, consumer data. And oh so much more.

It was a familiar tune. Earlier this year, we set out on a mission with our client PlanPhilly, a news site that covers the built environment in Philadelphia, to help imagine a complete strategic overhaul of its web operations.

In April, during Philly Tech Week, we demonstrated a case study of the process at BarCamp NewsInnovation.

It included a step-by-step explanation of how we were able complete a careful examination of the organization that included stakeholder interviews, web analytics, operations budgets evaluations, user surveys, qualitative mission assessment, and more.

So, how did we do it?

With the help of PlanPhilly’s internal team, we ripped open the site’s web analytics tool, Google Analytics, with a dissertation-length list of questions we were seeking answers to. We wanted to know how the organization could streamline its budget, retain more visitors, create more engaging content, and learn which users were its most faithful.

From 30,000 feet, we analyzed traffic growth and budget spending over four years. We tracked the storyline of the website and its growth, and where the organization’s content was straying from mission.

We also got micro. By choosing sample days across strong and weak months, we were able to look at metrics on a per-day and per-hour basis to understand how users were navigating the site, when they were doing it and why. We mashed up surveys with the data to understand how the user felt about it all.

It was a content audit to the next level. Phew. So, a dozen spreadsheets later, what were the results?

After a series of recommendations, PlanPhilly has been able to cut the cost of its content creation while increasing capacity to focus on growth, mission, partnerships and more. We’re even exploring how the organization can develop revenue from its content.

That’s business value you can count.

The 2010 Muse Awards on Flickr. Photo by lidjawma

We’re happy to announce that Constitution Daily took home the bronze Muse Award in the “Digital Communities” category at the American Association of Museums conference in Houston, Texas.

The Muse Awards identify innovative media and technology initiatives in the museum industry.

“The jury found that this conversational platform focusing on the US Constitution facilitated a wonderful online dialogue,” wrote the judges. “We liked that the site serves as a ‘switchboard’ for information, blog posts, social media outlets and relevant external links that keep the user tied to the site and engaged with the content while providing easy outlets to take action.”

We didn’t get a chance to make it down to Houston to accept the award, but a huge thanks to our friends at Happy Cog for the site’s design. Of course, Constitution Daily would not be possible without the hard work from the dedicated staff at the National Constitution Center. The folks at the Center are the most passionate in the museum business and earn every accolade they receive.

As we wrote in our case study post, our primary goal with Constitution Daily was fostering online discussion so we’re very proud to take home the bronze. Hopefully, we’ll be in Minneapolis next year to accept a gold.