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In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we're going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is available advertising inventory that meets the advertisers' needs.

That inventory comes from audience, from reach (unique users) multiplied by frequency (pageviews per user).

And while the reach numbers may look good, the frequency numbers suck.

It's even worse than the raw pageview-driven ad inventory would suggest. An effective advertising campaign requires repetition of the message until you really, really understand that Geico is so easy even a caveman can do it. There's an old ad-biz rule of thumb that a message has to be repeated seven times to be understood. If your average user visits your site twice a month, how can you possibly deliver effective ad campaigns?

We know that the tools of social networking -- connections, activities, notifications -- are powerful tools for driving frequency. But they're effective only among the minority of users who use them.

That's not enough.

There is no single solution to this problem. So we need to be looking for a broader toolkit of partial solutions, social networking being just one part of that toolkit.

What else works -- measurably?

Some obvious possibilities:

• Frequent news updating. Works for news junkies; ineffective for everybody else.
• RSS feeds that are limited to headlines and summaries. Works for people who want to read the rest of the story; can work against you with people who only want an overview.
• Newsletters that promote and link back to the site. I get one of these every day from NBC, but for some reason it's hard to get journalists to write them. Maybe we need to cut news staffs and hire marketers so we can get people to read the news?
• Games and promotions that require repeat visitation. Maybe our websites need to take a hint from the Brit papers, with their Wingo and such.
• Applications embedded in other social networks (i.e. Facebook). So far what I'm hearing is that these deliver very limited payback. Are they worth it?

I'm looking for success stories here -- even partial success stories. But failure stories would be useful, too.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter asks some worthwhile questions about newspapers losing the battle for audience retention despite doing some things right. He says the decline in stickiness is "puzzling in light of the energy most publishers in the last year have put into building traffic with such features as 24-hour news, video, blogs, podcasts, slide shows, interactive commentary and user-generated, hyper-local content."

It's all based on Nielsen audience rating data, so a couple of words of caution would be in order.

Nielsen data (and data from other sample and survey-based ratings services) often displays a spooky disconnect with hard measures the publishers themselves can examine, such as on-site analytic software.

The other is that measures such as "unique users" and "time on site" are all tangled up with each other. A news event that generates a sudden rush of pageviews may tank your derived numbers for pages/unique and time/unique.

This effect is especially strong if the news event brings in large numbers of outsiders who have no general and continuing interest in the local market.

That said, there are some oddities that stand out. What happened at the Miami Herald that led to a simultaneous 31.3% drop in audience and 54.7% drop in stickiness, October 2007 vs. 2006? Ouch.

Overall, I like the argument that says an explosion of choices is simply outracing us. I think that's the harsh big truth behind the decline of print journalism as well. And it's not just about news choices.

I believe most news consumption historically has been driven by a desire to be entertained, not informed.

That continues to be true today; how else can you explain the audiences for cable TV news? It's barely news and mostly infotainment.

When serious journalism has to compete not only with televised sitcoms but also the entire Internet, of course we're going to see erosion.

A post by Mike Smith at the Readership Institute includes a remark that "Web use of news sites peaks at noon, creating a perfect bell curve." This prompted me to take a look at a typical weekday's composite daily usage curve for Morris websites, which I hadn't done in awhile. It looks like this:

It's not the bell curve that Smith describes, and notably the usage in the late afternoon and at-home evening hours is stronger than I've seen on many newspaper sites over the years. Although I don't have really good tools at my disposal to analyze shifts in the types of content that engage users across the hours, my suspicion is that the effective use of community interaction tools (including Spotted®) is boosting usage later in the day.

When I was at Cox Interactive in 1999-2000, I saw two radically different pictures.

Newspaper sites then had two pronounced peaks: first thing in the morning and at noon. Usage dropped radically in the afternoon and pretty much evaporated in the evening.

On the other hand, Cox broadband cable markets had the opposite picture, with very low daytime usage and very intense evening, at-home usage.

Brands are powerful, and regardless of how hard the newspaper markets worked to develop non-newspaper content, they were saddled with a consumer perception that the sites were largely built out of yesterday's news, updated in the morning. And no matter how hard the local cable studios worked (usually with offline media partners) to build morning news fodder, they were swimming against the current.

Poynter's Rick Edmonds, in a rambling review of the ten-trends sort, says "Measurement is easy" and adds "Actionable measurement is tougher."

I'll go way beyond that: Measurement is outright hard, and it can be dangerously misleading.

A good metrics system is a boon to any site -- for sales purposes.

But for analysis, beware. We don't know what we don't know, and serving up a bunch of dazzling charts, graphs and heatmaps is a good way to be led astray.

Some examples:

• You set a goal of increasing pageviews in a component of your site. You redesign. Pageviews increase. Is that a good thing? Not necessarily. This happened to me several years ago when I was at Cox Interactive. Users thought they were going for on-site content when they clicked on web directory links. When they suddenly found themselves on some Geocities abomination they were angry and confused. The pageview analysis misled us. It couldn't tell us what we learned in one afternoon with a few usability test subjects.
• You want to grow your reach -- your unique user count. And you discover it's rising. You feel great. But be careful -- who are those users? Last year I discovered that one of the most popular pages on BlufftonToday.com was an informative blog posting about how to get dog pee stains out of carpeting. Visitors were coming from all over the planet. Big numbers, yes. Good for the locally based business model, no. Pageviews and unique-user counts make for pretty charts and may impress the boss, but what you need to grow is the "I love this site" audience that is aligned with your business plan. That's hard to count.
• You need to understand the man that wasn't there. The biggest problem newspapers have is failure to connect with a widening segment of the local community. The best registration system, metrics system and thoughtful analyst will not be able to measure users who never visit. If you draw general conclusions about 24-year-olds based on 24-year-olds who use your website, you're making a mistake.