Samantha Santa Maria: Know your audience
By Sonya Senkowsky and Shellie Branco
Samantha Santa Maria
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"Globalization doesn’t mean that much to me,” opened journalist Samantha Santa Maria. “It just means a bigger footprint.”
While editor of GetAsia in 2002, Santa Maria was charged with implementing “CitySearch” for Asia — in effect creating a network of referral sites on topics ranging from sports to music. By the end of 2002, the network’s reach extended into Singapore, Kuala Lampur, Asia, parts of Tokyo and Hong Kong and other sites, and employed 62 journalists. But extending into these countries wasn’t a simple matter.
“It wasn’t globalization; it was fragmentation,” she said.
Santa Maria and other editors had to consider how to target the Asian countries they wanted to reach. Each country had special needs, calling for tailored content and delivery platforms. There was no magic bullet to cover the diversity between countries. In Singapore, movies, music and sports coverage was popular. In Hong Kong, Cantonese pop music and horse racing were the rage. In the Philippines, poetry and political commentary in early forms of blogging did well.
Because some countries were less ready for multimedia content than others, the site also delved into different delivery platforms. Thailand, for example, still had very slow Web access, on broadband and dial-up. “We had to figure out for each market what was going to work.”
GetAsia sold its movie reviews through syndication to Yahoo and other outlets, and sent content to cell phones and PDAs. It also provided content to airlines so that city information and events could be broadcast on in-flight TV before tourists touched down in a locale.
“Although we crashed and burned magnificently,” noted Santa Maria, there were tremendous lessons we learned,” and which can also translate to the United States market. What happened in Asia three to five years ago is happening now in the U.S. in terms of technology, she said. The strategies of GetAsia could now translate to American newsrooms, especially in a period of declining readership and elusive 18-to-34-year-old consumers.
Rather than thinking of the 18-34 market as a “magic bullet,” she said, content providers need to be looking at needs and concerns of specific markets, from city to city and state to state. The high penetration of cell phones today also parallels what was happening in Asia several years ago, and can be expected to become a very important medium for distributing timely information — from train and movie schedules to news delivery.
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