4 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From How Consumers Get Their News

A new study out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project tells us how consumers get their news. No surprise: 92 percent of Americans use multiple platforms (television, newspapers, radio, the Internet) to get news on a typical day. But the real story, of course, is the impact of the Internet and the fundamental ways it is changing consumer behavior.

The Internet is now third in popularity for news, behind only local television and national television news. But here are some key findings that go a lot deeper:

• Most people use between two and five online news sources
• 65 percent say they do not have a single favorite website for news
• 33 percent of cell phone owners access news on their cell phones
• 37 percent of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
• 50 percent of American news consumers say they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know
• More than 80 percent of online news consumers get or share links in emails.
• 70 percent of Americans think “the amount of news and information available from different sources today is overwhelming.”

What can online marketers learn from these statistics?

1.    It appears that the Internet has replaced traditional newspapers and news magazines, but it has also encouraged news-hopping, so to speak. If consumers are using multiple news sources rather than a single source, clearly no one media outlet has garnered their loyalty. Are consumers not getting an objective perspective from a single source? Or do they get different kinds of news from different sites? Maybe consumers are more discriminating than they’re often given credit for and they like a story to be validated by more than one source. Whatever the reason, it means online marketers shouldn’t commit all of their ad dollars to just one online news source.

2.    Consumers will likely rely more and more on their cell phones to get online information and news. As I wrote in a previous post, 2010 could become a banner year for mobile usage, so online marketers need to plan now to get their fair share of this marketplace.

3.    The old news paradigm seems to be crumbling. It used to be that authoritative figures delivered the news via traditional media channels. Newspaper reporters’ stories and columnists’ commentaries carried weight. Television anchors were respected. The news was the news.

The new news paradigm is very different. Professional journalists are being replaced with citizen journalists and bloggers. While amateur journalism may not always be a good thing, it does represent a much broader spectrum of observation and opinion. Media outlets like CNN encourage consumers to send in their video reports. Over a third of consumers are taking a participatory role in the news now, and that’s likely to increase. They’re sharing the news with friends and acquaintances, discussing it online, and not just accepting news at face value. For the most part, online marketers already recognize the consumers’ collaborative power. That’s why they are building in opportunities for social interaction and feedback into their marketing programs.

4.    It may not be surprising that the majority of news consumers are overwhelmed by information. Television channels have proliferated and the Internet has opened up more informational opportunities than any consumer could ever handle. But this may suggest another opportunity: What if an online marketer could help the consumer cut through the clutter? It’s already being done by organizations such as SmartBrief, a media company that hand-picks relevant news, summarizes it, and delivers it with links to the original stories in e-mail newsletters tailored to 25 different industries.

We all recognize that the Internet has fundamentally changed the manner in which people consume information. As marketers, we need to also recognize what each of us can do to help solve information overload – and to become such a vital resource that a consumer will choose the information we provide over someone else’s.