Over at Junta 42, Joe Pulizzi has put up a great post on how publishers leverage social media tools to grow their online footprint.  Recommended reading for everyone in the publishing business, as Joe has synthesized a number of different perspective and added his own unique and experiences point of view.

The key issue is defining your goals correctly and aligning your teams around those goal. Says Pulizzi:

If you believe that your core business is publishing, then you are competing with the entire world (we are all publishers today). As a publisher, you need to rethink your business (are you in the business of providing engaging experiences for your niche customers?).

In the post, Joe linked to one of my posts from last July where I laid out a model for content-sharing that we had begun to implement with our regional home design magazines.

We’ve been working this content-sharing approach for close to a year and it’s had measurable impact on our consumer engagement, market presence and revenue opportunities. In this post, I share some of the ways that our top editors have integrated content-sharing into their workflow.

For those who are interested, here’s Joe’s presentation:

The components of residential investment in the fourth quarter GDP report (which is subject to revision, of course) is worth looking at more closely.

Single-family housing, which made up more than 3.5% of GDP at the peak, has declined precipitously, but registered a slight increase in the fourth quarter. Another driver of growth in residential investment was brokers’ commissions, which were sparked by the rapid rate of home sales. These drivers were offset by continued declines as a percentage of GDP in multi-family investment and residential improvements.

What should you read into the numbers? The recovery is in the timing; the new home and resale home market began its decline earlier than other segments of the residential investment economy. Improvements are driven partly by home values and partly by income; multi-family investment is driven by access to credit markets and property valuations.

Sustained improvement in the residential real estate market will help to drive increased investment in home improvements. The dynamic for the multi-family is somewhat more complex, but hinges to a large degree on stability in the employment markets.

Thanks to CalculatedRisk for the chart.

Over the past year, I’ve been excited and energized by the work we’ve done at our company with our traditional magazine franchises. We’ve expanded the digital footprint, re-assessed our workflows, innovated with new marketing products and generally held together our talented teams while teaching them new skills.

The results? Revenue was down more than 45% in the year.

We’re not alone. 2009 was a very bad year for magazines. Here’s the final numbers from PIB, the industry tracking service, for consumer magazines. I’ll share the business-to-business magazine data when it gets released.

As the year winds down, I was curious which posts over the course of the year were the most popular. I was pleased to see that the posts that had resonated the most with all of you were ones that I felt like I’d achieved some clarity around an idea that I’d been working through. (It’s also interesting that these posts are among the most frequently accessed through search.)

The number one post was from March: Social Media Can be A Marketing Platform. This was when we were taking Network Communications into its Project Massive Network, an effort to get every person in the company using social media to broaden and intensify their professional connections.

Through the year, I kept meaning to come back to the concept of Evangelist. The word too easily connotes intense passion, while I believe that the most effective Evangelists are the ones who have completely integrated their nature with their passions, so that they communicate a relaxed enthusiasm that inspires and attracts others. Evangelism is too often associated with a mania and mono-focus that can be off-putting.

The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about migrating our marketing strategy at Apartment Finder to a social media focus. My intent with this post was to demonstrate each of the steps that we had taken to extend our communications with the multi-family marketplace to multiple platforms, and our efforts to modify and adapt our messaging to the unique attributes to the platforms. This effort continues today and deserves a follow-up: the most challenging aspect of the initiative is maintaining continuity and assessing its effectiveness. Despite our intent focus, we have areas of spotty execution with our own program.

The third most-popular post was my first attempt to consolidate the thinking that I’d been doing about how a traditional publishing content workflow needed to adapt to accommodate the inclusion of social media platforms. In Thoughts on Evolving the Content Strategy in Publishing to Leverage Social Media I outlined the Sharing Model of content creation. This model outlined here as served as a framework for developing new processes at our regional home design brands, and in some instances we’ve seen significant impact on audience and enthusiasm. The process is a living work in progress.

The fourth most frequently viewed post is an down-and-dirty analysis of State Farm’s presence on Facebook. This was a period when I was trying to understand the challenges that face traditional marketing departments when implementing social media programs. The post was published in April and is one of the two most-frequently accessed posts through Google search. I recently re-visited the State Farm Facebook sites and little had changed.

In the Spring, I was doing a lot of work to try to quantify the impact of the economic decline on consumer spending, marketing outlays and media allocations. In an early April post, I pointed out the contradiction between industry research showing the effectiveness of TV and magazine advertising and the steep declines in revenue. The point: When marketing budgets shrink, the most expensive media goes first.

I’m kind of proud that a self-serving post doesn’t show up until the number 6 spot. Over a period of 6 months, we radically shifted our traffic strategy at ApartmentFinder.com in order to leverage what we percieved as our core strengths. This shift was rewarded in April when Comscore reported ApartmentFinder was solidly in the top 5 destinations for apartment shoppers on the Internet. Our work put us solidly in the consideration set for online-only marketing in the multi-family industry, and we did it despite being heavily outspent on search engine marketing traffic by our competitors.

The seventh most-popular post, from July, demonstrates how powerful social media can be. I described a disappointing customer service experience with American Express. A couple of days later, I heard from the Chairman’s Office. It doesn’t match Jarvis’ Dell experience, but it was an instructive moment in the new age of marketing and media.

A May post reporting on research that shows how effective print advertising is in driving web traffic came in at number 8. Despite multiple instances of independent research like this, many people insist of maintaing a very simplistic “Print Is Dead” position. At this point, I just shake my head and wonder why the concept of using multiple platforms to intersect with consumers to drive business activity is so hard to accept. [I very accepting of marketers who say they don't have the money to invest in premium marketing choices, whether they are online or offline. Then we can have a conversation about how to leverage their marketing resources to build their business. Just sitting around arguing about living or dead media gets old very fast.]

An October post made the top 10 and is a big search favorite: The Current State of the Economy in 5 Pictures. I realized doing this analysis that I should update the post in January to reflect the fourth quarter results. Lesson: People like pictures.

The number 10 position is taken by a post where I ranged outside of my limited sphere of knowledge to speculate about how social media platforms would change the way that people searched for information. The premise was that “human search” would develop through the filtering of content by overlapping social graphs. This is happening on Twitter and is expressed by many as crowd-sourcing. I had fun thinking about the problem and putting together the schematics. The post attracted a broad readership and started many conversations. I’m sure that those followers soon dropped off as I returned to my more mundane noodling about business models, business processing and marketing approaches.

Last week in Denver, we held a product design meeting with a group of publishers, editors and designers from our regional Home Design magazines.

The team brought an experienced perspective into the meeting about the kind of impact integrating interactive and social media tools into their business process can have. Over the past 9 months, this group of regional magazines have increased their web distribution by more than 100%, have grown interactive revenues from less than 5% to about 20% of overall advertising revenue and have developed interactive footprints that are close to the size of their print distribution base by growing Fan Pages, building Twitter followings and working their blogs. (I’ve written about some of the success we’ve experienced in posts about the content-sharing paradigm.)

The focus of the meeting was to review some basic wireframes and page designs for our new interactive publishing platform. We’ve made the decision to leverage open source software — Drupal and WordPress — to create highly flexible and content-driven presences for the brands.

The conversation was really exciting. I could see the leaders of each brand thinking in concrete and practical terms about what they needed in the new tools and how they were going to deploy them in order to continue to grow their interaction with consumers and the value they delivered to advertisers.

As we described how implementing better developed tagging systems would allow us to present associated content that would be interesting to the consumer, and to serve up advertising that would be tightly related to the content, a number of questions arose.

The first question was about editorial independence. Will we have to tag articles to benefit certain advertisers? Will we have to write about the advertisers? Does this functionality blur the line between editorial and advertising?

An easy way to explain this functionality was to point to Google’s natural search and paid search results. The online consumer is trained to recognized one set as paid and one set as unpaid. The same goes for this kind of relationship. The advertising units will be clearly identified as advertising, and will be in a different format than the text; the ad queue will simply serve up ads in relation to the editorial tagging.

Another clarifying realization for the team was that less than 20% of the visits to their sites came through the home. The most important page design was the “landing page,” and more than 90% of the time that landing page was a specific blog post or article or professional directory page. A second clarifying realization was that each landing page needed to be simple and direct, and that we needed to reduce the number of options that we gave the consumer, so that we could help them find the the facets of our content library that would be most valuable to them.

If you want to build traffic, we concluded, you need to distribute pieces of content frequently and continuously. A piece of content could be marketed through your social graph a number of times over a month, and in several different ways.

A good example we developed was using the web distribution to promote a specific feature in the next issue of the magazine. Over the period of four weeks, you could share as many as 10 pieces of content from the feature. How? Share different photographs from the photo shoot. Share some tidbits you discover while researching the topic. Share some interesting quotes from an interview that you do. Share the direction that you are taking while you’re writing the draft. Share some of the comments you get from your editor. Then, when the issue goes to press, share what you really like about the finished piece.

This kind of content sharing model could generate 500 to 1000 visits to the web site, in advance of the production of the article itself. When the article is published you have group of readers who are waiting for it, and who will probably consume it online and in print.

Mid-way through the session, we stopped and asked everyone to write the question that was at the top of their minds on a piece of paper.

Here is a sampling of some of the questions:

• Who will have time to create all of this great content?
• How will we get it all done?
• What is the single most important thing we can do on a daily basis to head in this new direction?
• Are editors to redirect their thinking for magazine content so the content will provide rich links and tags?
• How will the magazine team work together to accomplish this in a manner that is organized and cohesive?

I explained a basic tenet: We don’t have anymore time in the month. So, if we want to do something different, we have to eliminate something that we are doing now.

How does that translate to the new content workflow?

Calculate how many hours it is going to take to execute the content-sharing plan that you develop for your team. Then, calculate how many hours it takes to produce an editorial page from scratch. In order to find the time for content-sharing, we will have to figure out how to take work that is produced from our social graph and use it to create interesting content in the print magazine.

Won’t that cannibalize the print product?

To answer that question, we were able to point to the tracking each team had of how many people access a specific article or post on the web: rarely did that number exceed 100, even when the overall traffic to the site was over 15,000 unique users.

The editor of At Home in Arkansas, who has had the benefit of several discussions around this approach, outlined to the staff how her team had replaced two pages in the magazine with content that was created as part of their content-sharing process.

I was  impressed. This group of ‘traditional’ editors and publisher had taken the leap into the world of social media and were experiencing the energy and engagement that the new world provided. Those incremental experiences gave them the context to imagine entirely new workflows that created different kinds of value for the market. They were making the shift from thinking about content in a linear process to thinking about knowledge as an asset that could be distributed in multiple forms and through multiple channels. They didn’t feel daunted and they didn’t feel like they need to reinvent the world. They knew they needed to learn some new things, and that it was going to come in fits and starts, but as I listened to them, I could see an entirely new approach to their market developing. It was exciting.

Over the past few months, I’ve been traveling around the country giving a presentation on how small and mid-sized local businesses can leverage social media tools to improve the effectiveness of their Internet marketing efforts.

This past week I spoke to a group of about 100 home design professionals at the Denver Design Center. The event was hosted by our magazines, Colorado Home & Lifestyles and Mountain Living.

Internet marketing is a tough nut to crack for local businesses. Build a web site, and then what? While the opportunity is seemingly infinite, the reality is more spare. Your web site will get a natural amount of traffic from people who are searching specifically for your company name, but options are fairly limited beyond that.

Google? You’ll get decent traffic if you are one of the first 3 paid search results, or one of the first 10 natural search results. Each of those take expertise and effort, and the success of both in terms of building your business depends on how well your web site is designed to convert visitors into leads.

Paid listings on local directories? You’ll pick up some amount of traffic, and have the advantage of knowing that your phone number is typically a key element of the business profile. But the traffic isn’t overwhelming.

So, in the end, most local businesses — even those run by younger, techno-savvy entrepreneurs — look at the web as a place that should offer more value to their business than it does.

Social media tools can change that dynamic, I argue in these presentations. With a little bit of effort, and, usually, a change in mindset, a local business can connect with its customers, embed itself in a web of social networks, and create more valuable traffic to their web site by sharing content about things that they are interested in.

You can see a copy of the presentation here. My focus is on placing the challenges of internet marketing in the context of building their business and on showing how they can use social media tools to change the productivity of their internet marketing.

At the Denver Design Center, I got two interesting questions.

The first wondered about the value of having a Facebook Fan Page. The question was posed by a woman who provides services to an upscale clientele with refined aesthetic sensibilities. “I look at what people are talking about on Facebook. ‘I just had a bran muffin,’ they’ll post. That’s not my customer! Why should I be spending my time on them?”

In my response, I tried to address a common misperception about the activity on a social networking platform like Facebook. Some of us, when we follow the mundane details of some of our ‘friends,” wonder their efforts to make the trivial important.

As an acquaintance, that may influence my opinion about the individual. As a marketer, I shouldn’t care. After all, I don’t follow the customers of my business around when they are at the mall, watching to see what they eat at the Food Court, or what kind of things they are buying at Victoria’s Secret. I just want to be sure that my business is top of mind when they think about buying the service that I offer.

The Facebook Fan page is like a storefront in the biggest town square in the world. Facebook has become, for many people, the operating system of their life, where they do e-mail, chat, plan, share, interact….and search, even. As a marketer, you want to be on that town square.

A second question came from a woman who articulated a frustration that is common among businesses that expand their touch points to the consumer.

Illustration by Ton Zijlstra

“When I do some of this kind of marketing,” she said, “I get a lot of responses from people who have a lot of questions. I start to think that they are just looking for free advice, and that they never intend to become customers.”

A number of people in the audience looked surprised at the question. After all, isn’t the point to talk to as many people as you can so that you can find more clients and build your business?

But, for many people who have built a business around a tight network of referrals and a highly-targeted marketing program, the idea of opening up their sphere of influence to include a much wider range of people is discomforting. The time spent answering the inquiries doesn’t feel like it pays off.

The reality is that even if you want to keep your sphere of influence tight, leveraging social media can impact your business. In this instance, I suggested to the woman that she can keep her network of connections very limited, reaching out to key customers and peers in the market on a platform like Facebook. She can use a blog to share content or images that are consistent with the psychographics of her customer base. She can limit the number of ways that people can contact her, driving them primarily to e-mail,for instance. And, those inquiries that she feels are completely unqualified, she can ignore.

If I’m suggesting that she put multiple barriers up around her social system, then when would I encourage her to do it at all? Because the value of connecting with customers and peers that she values will expand the intensity and engagement of her sphere of influence. She’ll experience more qualified leads from her social sphere. And, the people who are included in her community will understand the exclusivity of the inclusion, lending prestige and value to her personal brand.

The American Institute of Architects released their Design Trends study earlier this week. The survey was done this Spring with responses from more than 500 architecture firms.

One area of focus was on the trending of demand for different job types — a clear indicator of which segments of the market are strengthening and which are weakening.

Over all, AIA concludes, the market was showing signs of stabilizing.

The extended slowdown in the housing market is showing signs of stabilizing with the residential billings index increasing almost 20 points over the past two quarters. The national billings index was 38 for the second quarter (any score below 50 indicates a decline in activity), up from the low mark of 24 the previous quarter. Inquiries for new projects also increased to a mark of 47 following a score of 35 in the first quarter of 2009.

Clearly, the strength in the market is in existing remodeling jobs, with improvement in first-time buyer work. The high-end of the market — luxury homes and second homes — has actually worsened over the past year.

The implications of this shift are significant for design professionals. With smaller jobs taking the place of larger jobs, professionals need to shift their focus to increasing their volume of work, and need to shift their sales approach to interacting more effectively with more cost-conscious consumers.

You can find the highlights from the survey at  http://www.aia.org/press/releases/AIAB081318.

CNBC reported on new trends in what consumers are looking for in new homes. [Watch the clip to the third segment.]

The American Institute of Architects Design Trends study shows a distinct shift in the way that consumers are thinking about the functionality of their home, with the focus on creating more use and more efficiency out of the space.

See highlights from the report here.

I was invited last week to give a presentation about social media outside Boston to a group of design professionals.  The event was sponsored by New England Home and Kitchen Views.

My goal was to give a basic primer on social media and to outline for the designers, architects and other design professionals in the audience how they could get started.

It took me a week to work through some audio glitches, but I’ve finally been able to get the graphics and audio merged together.  (Of course, I got a cold in the week, so I sound a little strange.)

A couple of themes emerge through the presentation that are particularly relevant to the design community. First, social media tools give you an opportunity to enhance your image with your voice. Good marketing combines image and voice to give consumers an clear sense of what the experience and benefit of interacting with you or your product may be. Social media tools — like blogs and photo sharing services — give design professionals an easy and convenient way to share their aesthetic.

As you build your voice, you’ll build your footprint on the social web and Google will notice. The outcome will be more natural search traffic to all of your web assets. That will convert to more activity and ultimately, more business.

The final, natural extension of building your voice is the expansion and solidification of your network. Using social media helps to create many more connections of knowledge and recognition. For any business, this activity creates a path to success.

Here is the timing breakdown of the different sections of the presentation:

Introduction 00:46

Part 1 — A Look at Changes on the Web 3:33

Part 2 — How Social Media Effects Marketing 12:25

Part 3 — Using the Social Web to Build Your Voice 19:42

Part 4 — A Look at Today’s Web Marketing for a Design Professional 22:04

Part 5 — A Case Study of Social Media Marketing by a Design Professional 24:59

Part 6 — Easy Steps to Get Started 32:54

Conclusion — 43:00

Hope you enjoy it.

I’m heading up to Boston this week to see our staff at New England Home and to do a presentation at a networking event about how the design community can use social media to help grow their businesses.

Pulling the presentation together has been fun and has given me an excuse to spend time browsing Facebook, Twitter and the web at large to see what some high-end design professionals are doing.

High-end design is so intensely visual and satisfying on one hand, and so much about the intersection of aesthetic and personality on the other. Designers have been using the web for a while as a useful place to present their portfolios, but very few are able to communicate the breadth of their vision and their personality through their static marketing sites.

Social media can give them the tools, the venue and the opportunity to share their personal vision in a more intimate way with a larger group of people.

In looking around for examples of design professionals who are using social media to these ends, I stumbled across Tobi Fairley, a designer in Little Rock, AR. (We publish At Home in Arkansas, based out of Little Rock. It’s also the town where my grandfather grew up and a place I really enjoy visiting.)

Fairley is doing an terrific job using social media to give us a look into what she is seeing, what she likes and what she’s doing. A prospective client who has interacted with Fairley across the multiple platforms she uses is going to have a good sense of who she is and how she works. This is the kind of connection that can create confidence in hiring someone for an expensive, personal service.

Take a look at Fairley’s body of social media work.

Her blog: http://tobifairley.com/blog/.

Her Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/tobifairley.

Her Tumblr feed: http://tobifairley.tumblr.com/.

You can also find her on Facebook. It’s a good social media footprint that she’s tending very well and is sure to help grow her business.