Headquartered in Erie, Pennsylvania, Lilly Broadcasting is a privately held TV broadcasting company that currently owns and operates 6 stations throughout the US and the Caribbean. Markets include Honolulu, Hawaii, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. With well over 1.3 million monthly visitors to the collective websites, Chris Mead, Corporate Digital Lead, is always on the lookout for automated solutions supporting his efforts to continually increase visitor engagement on Lilly’s digital properties.
Working at Lilly Broadcasting for nearly 10 years, Chris’ focus is to create and implement the digital and emerging technology strategies. Currently, he manages five websites representing six stations. In addition to KITV, ABC’s Honolulu affiliate serving nearly half a million households, Chris oversees WENY in New York, WICU and WSEE in Erie, Pennsylvania, and OCTV, serving all islands in the Caribbean since 2008.
The Wild West
In 2016, Chris set out to include social media on Lilly’s digital sites. As the news staffs in each of the four markets excel at covering local stories, Chris was interested in enhancing Lilly’s content strategy by bringing both national and international news via social media content to website visitors. An added bonus of using social posts to enhance website content, is to improve reader engagement through trending news. Crowdynews customers have found that deploying a social media stream will keep readers on site longer, decrease bounce rates, and improve conversions (e.g., signing up for a newsletter).
At the time, Chris likened using social media to supplement local news as a bit like the “wild west.” He found a lot of solutions that were promising big results but no one was delivering the “gold.” Through an exhaustive search process, Chris enlisted Crowdynews to discover, curate, and display safe, relevant, and real-time content.
“Crowdynews mines original content from social media and brings it back to the publisher’s website. We’ve found that social media makes our original content more interesting and meaningful for our readers,” said Chris Mead, Digital Strategist for Lilly Broadcasting.
Currently, Lilly Broadcasting uses social media to keep people on their websites longer engaging with advertiser content, driving increased revenue. What Chris likes best about the Crowdynews platform is its ability to curate content from all major social media channels, not a select few as other options he was considering did.
Using advanced filtering, including white and black listing and profanity blocking, posts deemed offensive are automatically excluded. In addition, Chris can manually reject posts, for example to exclude fuzzy pictures, or items that don’t fully represent the story. Crowdynews’ predictive moderation module monitors this curation behavior and learns – the next time a similar post is processed, the system will auto- moderate it out of the stream.
According to Chris, “Crowdynews automatically curates the social eco-system in a way that I can manage & customize original content for my websites” said Chris. “It’s like playing with Legos. I see the results of my efforts immediately, with the ability to easily refine the results, providing the best content for each market.”
Next Steps for Lilly Broadcasting
Looking to the future, Chris is contemplating branding opportunities through local event sponsorships. Advertising events such as 10K races or festivals through a special media campaign will enhance the event’s advertising spend by driving engagement for both the event and Lilly stations.