AppCheck: KHOU for iPad

Social Embed Makes Houston News Stickier

Belo's KHOU in Houston has embedded Facebook and Twitter features into its iPad news app, giving users a full mobile social media experience and enticing them to stay with the app much longer than the average three-minute visit.
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To the shopworn adage, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Houston’s Belo-owned KHOU has added an interesting twist when it comes to social media: If you can’t beat ’em, embed ’em.

KHOU’s iPad app, which was designed by Minneapolis-based DoApp and released last August, seems to have anticipated a Nielsen report on social media that came out the following month and delivered sobering, if unsurprising, news to the online media business: Americans are spending 22.5% of their time online visiting social networks and blogs as opposed to just 2.6% of their time on sites for current events and global news.

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And so right on the KHOU app’s homepage, which is comprised of a clean series of category blocks that the user can navigate by vertically scrolling, one will find blocks for Facebook and Twitter. And these aren’t just shortcuts to share a story, but rather the full mobile experience for social.

“It’s like having the Facebook app inside your news app,” said DoApp CEO Wade Beavers. “We’re making more and more of that social integration with the news. It’s just a requirement.”

KHOU+uses+geotargeting+to+deliver+weather+reports.
KHOU uses geotargeting to deliver weather reports.

Beavers said that essentially bringing social media apps inside news apps — letting Twitter feeds and Facebook comments ticker across in real time — is likely to increase the time users spend with the app. For Belo, whose 15 television stations are all using the iPad app, the social embed is an essential part of the plan.

“The social media integration was part of the larger strategy for these apps,” said Belo’s Gary Love, senior manager for emerging products. He said that given the lean-back, evening-oriented usage patterns of tablets, “as much as possible we try to bring in that external content that users are looking for at that time of day.”

An essential additional feature to the app is geotargeting, Love said, which paired with Belo’s strong weather brand is also geared to holding on to users for longer than the typical three-minute visit. “Being able to have the interactive radar maps within the app is important to us,” Love said. “The ability to display the current weather conditions geolocated for any location, and the ability to have a page with our weather video as well as our textual descriptions of the forecast is very helpful.”

And geotracking has also been useful on the business side, as ads are served on the site based on the user’s location. “The geotargeting has been a great addition to our sales targeting,” Love said. “Just being able to narrow down into a particular neighborhood or just the downtown core gives our sales folks more flexibility.”

That flexibility extends to the app’s back end driver’s seat, said KHOU’s Christine Di Stadio, director of digital media. “The interface is extremely easy for anyone at the station level to use,” she said. “For example, any time there’s a community event that KHOU sponsors, I can build a custom section almost immediately like I can build a section on our website, so that enables us to have branding across all our touch points.”

DoApp’s Beavers said that it’s easy for stations to manage categories and subcategories for news on the fly with a back end that allows content hierarchies to change constantly.

“We want them to decide what’s important,” he said.

Beavers added that the app will be ever evolving, with a view to adding Flipboard-like news aggregating functionality in the near future (though with a feature to filter out competitors’ content for local stations). And in Houston, one of those evolutionary steps has also been to add live streaming of newscasts, Di Stadio said.

“We’re going to continue to keep building it out each week and each month,” she said, “and as things are introduced in the marketplace, we’re going to be quick to test them out on our iPad app.”

Vital Stats:

Vendor: DoApp

Launched: August 2011

Cost to consumers: Free

Compatible devices: iPad

White label version: Yes

Number of downloads: N/A

Revenue streams: Display and interstitial ads

Key characteristics: Vertical browsing bar for key categories that can be easily reorganized from the newsroom; expansive radar section in weather; embedded social media integration for Facebook and Twitter; live streaming newscasts and easily browsable video

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