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:
by drm on September 24, 2009
eMedia Vitals, a new online information resource, was at a couple of conferences this week reporting on what senior media execs have to say about social media one year into the great advertising contractions.
In a report from Advertising Week, Naomi Reiter shares the insights of top agency and media execs for big brands on how they are approaching social media.
Reiter summarizes the content into 8 action-oriented maxims:
- Always be truthful. “Google’s the long tail of lies,” said Schultz.
- Never sell first. Add value before anything else.
- After creating value, communicate that value to an audience.
- Consider brand voice but don’t try to control the conversation—listen instead.
- Convert audience members into brand advocates by respecting their contribution to the conversation.
- Social media is not just a marketing channel. “It’s the grease that drives our lives,” according to Schultz.
- While traditional media is like real estate (it charges to let people on its property), social media is like religion, according to GCA Savvian Advisors managing director Terence Kawaja. “You don’t know if it’s working; you just have to believe.”
- Social media is already mobile. “If you figure out a social media presence, you have a head start on your mobile presence,” said Kawaja.
I particularly like the last point. Social media is a mobile strategy – you are aligning your content with the mobile consumer’s information usage pattern. [More on that in another post.]
And I take slight exception to the next-to-last point. As long as you publish all of your mobile content from a web-based repository, like a blog, you’ll be able to track interaction with your social media content elements.
In another post on the site, Prescott Shibles summarizes the conversations at the Niche Digital conference, where I delivered the keynote. You’ll find the post here. He does a very good job of making sense out of my comments, and fleshes out the conversation with perspective from Mitch Rouda and Joe Pulizzi, who both spoke at the conference.
