As news of AOL's purchasing of The Huffington Post leaked out, the world got very excited. There's no one that I know of who thinks of it as a bad move and everyone I know of is very supportive of the Huffington Post. AOL takes a backseat to the Huffington Post in this as far as the voices I hear go. As a friend mentioned on a link I posted on Facebook:
Shows you what can happen when you have a vision and execute it. I love the Huffington Post.
And, of course, my friend is right. While there are people who don't like The Huffington Post's alleged editorial lean (as opposed to its actual editorial lean), there is a group of people who have found that the Huffington Post worthwhile. The latter have made The Huffington Post profitable by participating. This is not a simple website. In just 5 years, The Huffington Post is a cultural icon for social media and journalism. It represents the Holy Grail of so many aspiring businesses. But it didn't get there by mistake.
It got there by good content, careful evolution the technology of the site itself, beating readers over the head to invite friends to the site (can you stop now already?) and giving people the most flexibility possible with the content. You can follow not only contributors to the site - you can stalk your own friends on the site through watching where they comment or even simply what they read. Somewhere behind the curtains of the Huffington Post is a large pool of data of what is popular and what is not. Branding, viral marketing and strategy could be given credit for all of this - but the real trick about The Huffington Post's success is that it caters to people.
And this lead to a meeting that seems right out of a good Hollywood script, as Arianna Huffington wrote:
"...Around the same time, I got an email from Tim Armstrong (AOL Chairman and CEO), saying he had something he wanted to discuss with me, and asking when we could meet. We arranged to have lunch at my home in LA later that week. The day before the lunch, Tim emailed and asked if it would be okay if he brought Artie Minson, AOL's CFO, with him. I told him of course and asked if there was anything they didn't eat. "I'll eat anything but mushrooms," he said.
The next day, he and Artie arrived, and, before the first course was served -- with an energy and enthusiasm I'd soon come to know is his default operating position -- Tim said he wanted to buy The Huffington Post and put all of AOL's content under a newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, with me as its president and editor-in-chief..."
To me, this is deserving, though I'm waiting to hear 'offline' from a few contributors to the Huffington Post that I know. It might not all be good and right throughout The Huffington Post - time will tell - but a 5 year old company being bought for $315 million seems like a partial sign on bonus for Arianna Huffington as well. It's clear that AOL wants her bad enough to create a Media Group to put her in charge of. It's a dream of almost every entrepeneur out there.
Even more telling is what she writes of what Tim Armstrong (AOL Chairman and CEO) spoke of with regard to AOL's present status (ibid):
"...At some point during the discussion, while Tim was talking about his plans for turning AOL around, he said that the challenge lay in the fact that AOL had off-the-charts brand awareness, and off-the-charts user trust and loyalty, but almost no brand identity. I was immediately struck by his clear-eyed assessment of his company's strengths and weaknesses, and his willingness to be so up front about them..."
In this age where it seems that there are more social media pundits than businesses, one recipe for success was seen in The Huffington Post by all of us even before the AOL deal. Many of us saw it for the value it added to our media experience. Did it make journalism a profitable venture in this time? It's hard to say. Did it make content users wanted more visible to the individual users? Definitely so. Yet the success of the Huffington Post also made AOL look at its own weaknesses - as we all should be doing.
Make no mistake - Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post did a lot to get where they are, through providing good content and service of the content to individual users. I imagine a few media moghuls are kicking themselves right now for not having done what AOL did. As little as it means alone, I offer congratulations to everyone involved and hope that they keep that recipe.
It isn't about marketing. It's about giving people what they want in a way that they want it. That recipe shifts as technology, creativity, business models and what people want changes and is different for every business. Agility, flexibility, interaction.
The success of the Huffington Post wouldn't have been made possible without those silent partners: People. Community. Society. Us.
Who are the people who will make your company a success?
Image at top right courtesy Sue Clark (perpetualplum), made available by a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
