Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) is getting more serious about its reader community strategy, planning to thread interactivity throughout its sites using tools from Pluck. The publisher will thread the Texas-based software vendor’s SiteLife product throughout Mirror.co.uk, Dailyrecord.co.uk and Trinity’s main regional sites such as Liverpoolecho.co.uk and Wales Online later this year, allowing users to comment on and rate stories, write their own reactions and interact with each other.
Trinity has limited its interaction to hyper-local projects such as Gazette Live, but now social functions are being added to all areas of its biggest sites, in the hope that the company can grow, hang on to and make some out of its audience. Guardian.co.uk, Reuters and Sky News use Pluck to spread interactivity throughout their sites – a strategy Trinity’s decision will now follow.
Trinity’s group head of digital publishing David Black told me in an interview today the deal would allow users to post online comments on every section of the chosen sites and to create their own profiles. But Black doesn’t see the deal as an immediate commercial opportunity: “By doing this, we will build a more engaged audience and we believe a more engaged audience is valuable to advertisers.” Black says Trinity already has commercially successful projects like Gazette Live in Teesside, the local network of postcode-specific sites which has more than 200,000 unique monthly users.
Elsewhere in newspapers communities, The Mirror‘s arch rival The Sun launched its MySun network in October 2006 and Telegraph Media Group came up with its MyTelegraph six months later.
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