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 August 1998
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By Robbin Schindele
The Sidewalk sites were going to be the quintessential city guides. There was much chatter in the national press as Microsoft went from city to city hiring the best and brightest editors and reporters at huge salaries to create Sidewalk content. Major local newspapers were going to shrivel to op-ed and hard news as their advertisers fled for the on-line wonder market. Local alternative papers like City Pages might as well just pack up their presses and slip away into the night. It didn't quite work out that way.
They leveraged their most significant advantage (advertising in their own papers and over the air) to the max. They've done such a good job the StarTrib has just won national awards for its online efforts, including the marketing campaign for it online edition. The Twin Cities is not alone it's efforts. City guides in one guise or another have been popping up all over as newspaper fight to hold onto their turf. Besides local papers other web players have joined the game. CitySearch, America Online, Yahoo!, Excite and many local TV stations have all launched city guide sites. While analysts are still bullish on the potentials of online advertising none of this has had a significant impact on the $17 billion classified advertising newspapers generate every year.
The year hasn't been without internal strife for Sidewalk either. In the first quarter of this year Microsoft it announced lay offs at many Sidewalk sites. The New York Sidewalk office lost three to five people from both ad sales and technology sides of the room. The Boston office lost seven people, some of them from the content side. The Twin Cities site lost two people/positions. Lisa Dinndorf, General Manager, said, "We lost two positions but actually picked up one headcount. It was really a restructuring, the start-up mode was different than the maintenance mode. We now have a greater headcount than we had at the launch."
So with first year growing pains and the staff and content changes behind them, where is Sidewalk at on their first anniversary. The following interview was made the day after the 1 year birthday party. The day before there had been a piece on the Sidewalk enterprise in the St Paul Pioneer Press. It wasn't favorable. In fact it quoted Michael Wolff, author of "Burn Rate" (www.burnrate.com) a book about the rush to make money on the Internet. Wolff was quoted as saying he thought Sidewalk was, if not dead certainly on it's last legs and stumbling. There was no quote from anyone at Microsoft. Matthew Kursch, Sidewalk's business unit manager did not respond to the reporter's email inquiries. When I went to the Sidewalk office early the morning of the 17th there was still a Happy Birthday sign on the white board by reception. Everyone I saw looked cheerful, none of the evidence of too much celebration you might see in a traditional newspaper newsroom. The Sidewalk office does look like a newsroom with PC festooned tables placed in clusters in a large open bay. There is an intensity on the people's faces though. I didn't warrant many curious looks as I got the tour people just kept right on working. Lisa Dinndorf, General Manager came out of a meeting, introduced herself and took me into a very modern, well appointed conference room. The wall facing the office bay was glass that had been taped over with print outs of recent Sidewalk pages. iBiz: I suppose you read the Pioneer Press article yesterday. Dinndorf: Yes. I think that everyone has their take on what means success to the individual sites. I think because Sidewalk doesn't release a lot of information people can formulate their own opinions versus taking it from existing information. Sidewalk is coming out of a more successful year than we ever could have imagined to be quite honest. We met usage goals by December. We sold out of advertising before we went live. Fiscal year '99 ad sales revenue is just skyrocketing, it's absolutely amazing. We couldn't be more thrilled were we are. So I think the press is disappointing but on the other hand all news is good news. It usually means a ton of traffic. iBiz: Since you don't release much information. What do you want to tell me. Do you want to tell me about your demographics? Where you see your audience. Dinndorf: Our primary audience are what we call Internet socializers. People that are wired so probably the 25 to 49 year old male/female that actually go out and enjoy the Twin Cities. That's who our primary target is. That's who we talk to, Our voice and tone and everything we say is targeted towards that group. People that get out and go to restaurants, go to movies, go to the theater, who participate in activities and sports. All of those type city things. They're both participants and spectators in leisure activities. iBiz: Your primary focus is entertainment? Dinndorf: Um Huh. iBiz: Was that the original intent? Dinndorf: Absolutely. From day 1 it was helping people make decisions about what to do with their leisure time. It's helping them by giving them ideas; by helping them make decisions and then helping them act. Not only do we give people information on the best golf courses in the Twin Cities we tell which ones are the best and then we allow them to make tee times online so they can go out and enjoy what they've read about on Sidewalk. It's a full experience. You can order food online now at over 60 restaurants in the Twin Cities. Consumer feedback is they love it and they use it and it's effective. You can have a dinner party at home that d'Amico catered, that you plan at work the day before. It's amazing. The Internet is only going to continue to work better and work faster and smarter. We love the Internet. iBiz: Are you an outer and abouter? Dinndorf: Absolutely. As much as you can be with two children four years and eight months old. I think for me, because my leisure time is so narrow, so little and so far between I have to make the most of it. How I use Sidewalk is if my husband and I are actually going out without the kids. I want to make sure I know when the movie is playing or what I want to go see at the theater and what restaurant's close so I can get home before the baby-sitter turns into a pumpkin. I really need to make my time away from the family and out of the office count. That's why I use Sidewalk. iBiz: Do the other Sidewalk sites look a lot like the Twin Cities site? Dinndorf: They all. . . all of the sites use the same navigation features. So the way you search for things, the way the home page kind of looks and feels is the same. Although each of them has their own flavor based on the city. Based on the actual nitty-gritty to the design, colors, the actual layout. Every city has the freedom to do what they think works the most efficiently for their city. That's based on how people use the product. But all of them have a home page. All of them carry restaurants, sports, movies. Ours is different in that we have community and traffic. Those are two features we have that other cities don't have. iBiz: How much interaction do you have with Microsoft? Is Sidewalk just another corporate division? How does it fit? Dinndorf: It's a normal division within their interactive properties. Sidewalk is one of the properties like CarPoint, Expedia, New Home Advisor. All of those properties help people use the Internet to do something. Whether it be to buy, to sell, to get ideas and to actually act. All of the interactive properties do that. Sidewalk, Arts and Entertainment, is one vertical in their pillars of what this IMG group is. The beauty of Sidewalk is the resources that we have through Redmond. We have wonderful technical support. We have incredible support for PR and advertising. We use top notch agencies to buy online. We have all those resources that other typical, smaller sites would not have the opportunity to use. What Microsoft offers us is a ton of resources and the opportunity to hire a ton of smart people locally to create a very compelling site for users. iBiz: How large is your staff? Dinndorf: Our staff is about twenty-five between full and contingent staff. Contingent staff can fluctuate depending on seasonal needs. iBiz: How many of those are content providers versus the tech side? Dinndorf: We actually only have one tech support person here. Where the break-up is, is between production, actually getting the images, getting the photos, getting the art heads and putting all those pieces together the same as any other publication would do. So there's the production side and there's the marketing side. The people who actually drive people to the site. iBiz: How do you advertise locally? Dinndorf: We've had very good luck with traditional media mix and grassroots marketing. We've spent a lot of time and energy working on grass roots marketing. Trying to get word of mouth. Trying to get people to refer friends. Trying to get people to send the URL for the movie they want to go to, to the people they want to go to the movie with. Instead of just looking for where the movie's playing, I go to Sidewalk, find out where the movie's playing and then send the URL to my five friends so they can get directions to the theater and to local restaurants. They can get all of that right there. So we're really trying to drive word of mouth. We're also partnering with local corporations to drive distribution of our community content. So we're partnering, at the end of this month, we're partnering with Pillsbury, General Mills and Medtronic to do a community event that encourages all of their employees to log online to find ways to volunteer in the community. So we've found wonderful successes with the local corporations. It's good for them. It's good for us. Minneapolis and St Paul are so driven by volunteerism that the content in the category Community has about 5,00 volunteer opportunities online. So it just makes complete sense to partner with those kinds of folks. iBiz: You have 5,000 volunteer opportunities online. That's a lot of content, are all those pages made up here" Dinndorf: We have a. . . Microsoft has developed a proprietary tool that we enter content into and then it goes through a work flow process. Off of that one software package we can put the content in. We can do the art heads. We can do all of that and it gets sent ready for publishing. It does all of that so the process is extremely streamlined. iBiz: So you have someone entering text? Dinndorf: Someone entering text and then we have different levels. We have assistant editors who enter in all of the text. And then we have actual producers that are the ones who disseminate through all the information to say I think these things, these events, this activity, this sporting activity, this music, is of most interest to my readers and it's going to be enhanced. It's going to be featured. We're going to talk more about it. We're going to go and actually do specific reviews. Those type things. iBiz: Do you have daily story meetings? Dinndorf: You know we typically have weekly meetings. As far as what the key things for each category are going to be. And then daily our producers will meet with our executive producer and talk through issues they have regarding the individual daily line up. iBiz: What is that like? Dinndorf: I think it gets really heated because I think people here are really passionate about what they do. So things that some people think are the best event of the week might not be what someone else thinks. I think that's what makes us good. I think that kind of diversity of opinion is what makes us a trusted resource. iBiz: How much traffic do you have? If you don't want to give actual numbers where do you think you rank among your competitors? Dinndorf: I think we are a member . . . we are one of the top four most used Internet sites in the Twin Cities. Regardless of content. If we talked just about entertainment city guides we are number one. If you talk about all sites we're in the top four. iBiz: How far do you reach? You have a travel section, do you reach out state? Dinndorf: We're much more about things for Twin Citians to do in Minnesota. We have every golf course in Minnesota. We have every state park. We have get away to Albert Lea for the weekend, that kind of thing. You can come online and see, if I was going to Albert Lea, what could I do there that weekend. We also though provide it so that if you're in Baudette and you want to come down to the cities for the weekend, it's an easy resource to use to find out what's happening here. So do we market out there? Probably not, but are we easy to find and do we hope word gets around, probably yeah. iBiz: What do you have coming in the future? What's the big news? Dinndorf: I think there are going to be expansions of Sidewalk that are big and exciting. We're going to be covering more cities. We're going to continue to be deeper and wider in what we offer in product. We are going to develop and produce and distribute top notch editorial about things that Twin Cities people care about most. Lot's of good things are coming. iBiz: (Laughter) Yeah like what? Dinndorf: (More laughter) I'm trying to think about something I can divulge. I think. . . um. . .there's nothing I can tell you specifically. We will continue to help people get ideas and make decisions about what to do in the Twin Cities. Whatever they do, Sidewalk will do that. Will help people find what's happening in town and act on the information. In fact they might be as good at it as anybody. It's probably just a question about what flavor of guide you like. If you're loyal to the hometown boys, then you'll use the StarTrib site or Pioneer Planet, or any of the other local sites. If, for you, the web is a new playing ground and a level one, you may use Sidewalk. There's some evidence to
suggest that Sidewalk has helped everyone in the city guide competition
with their massive marketing/advertising campaign. All the press they get,
all their billboards and promotions are driving more people to the web
to find entertainment information. Mike Richards co-founder of SF Station,
an 18 month old San Francisco city guide alternative says, "Microsoft has
helped stimulate interest in city guides. But just because they're here
doesn't mean anyone else can survive." In the Twin Cities all the
big players (StarTribune, Pioneer Planet and Channel 4000) are all surviving.
In fact, if you ask them, they're all thriving. Like I said, it's simply
a matter of, who ya gonna call?
Microsoft Sidewalk- twincities.sidewalk.com PioneerPlanet Just Go- www.justgo.com/twincities Star Tribune Free Time- www.startribune.com/freetime Channel 4000- www.channel4000.com Twin Cities Digital City- AOL Keyword: Digital City Twin Cities Yahoo!- minn.yahoo.com Twin Cities Dive-In- www.diveintwincities.com iBiz |
A
year ago last Thursday (July 16, 1998) Microsoft launched Twin Cities Sidewalk
(
Sidewalk
came on strong with saturation billboard advertising and an extensive print
campaign. So did the papers. Both the Minneapolis StarTrib (
In
fact newspapers are so dedicated to their market the giant Knight-Ridder
has joined the parade with Just Go local entertainment sites affiliated
with their newspapers in 11 cities. One of K-R's most interesting strategies
is to play on the anti-Microsoft sympathies of so many Web users. The prestigious
New York Times just joined in with the recent launch of their city guide
New York Today. In the race to provide people the information they need
to fill their leisure hours Microsoft isn't the only giant on the track.
There
have also been changes in the content. The reviews and articles have shortened
noticeably since the early days. Sidewalk now focuses on quick hits and
services such as ticket sales or the meal ordering/delivery service recently
launched on the Twin Cities site. "We learned pretty quickly that long
doesn't make it on the Web," says Janice Brand former restaurant editor
at Boston Sidewalk. "We had to rethink content entirely."
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