A couple of months ago, Adam Japko and I sat down with two of our top editors to discuss the impact of social media sharing on the traditional magazine editorial workflow. The conversation was stimulating and I thought it would be useful to share some of my notes, since the observations from the meeting form a practical framework for implementing a content-sharing model within a traditional magazine team. (For background on the content-sharing model, you can see this post from last year.)
Diane Carroll is the editor of At Home in Arkansas and Clint Smith is the editor of Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles. Both have been at the forefront of integrating social media sharing into the day-to-day routine of their magazines.
The work of their teams has contributed to significant increases in web and Facebook activity around the brand.
Our conversation focused on what changes were necessary to execute the social media sharing and about what impact the sharing has had on their market presence.
The Conversation:
Diane opened the discussion by talking about how expanding the social media channels for At Home in Arkansas has changed the way she thinks about people and projects in her market.
She related an example where she was talking with a design resource in her market who wanted to get coverage in the magazine.
In the past, a limited inventory of editorial pages would have prevented her from giving this resource coverage, Diane shared.
With the addition of social media channels, there are multiple ways to share information about this resource with her audience: creating a blog post, doing a Facebook update on the fan page, and, in this instance, inviting the resource to do a guest post for the At Home blog. The resource came through with “a really great post,” Diane shared, that was interesting and useful.
The social media outlets that At Home and Atlanta H&L have developed are big benefits, Clint and Diane agreed, creating an entirely new way of distributing information, creating an interactive and energetic face for the brand and building their brand presence broader in the market. A simple act like updated the Facebook fan page keeps people very engaged, they observed.
The key to integrating social media into the overall workflow is improved long-range planning and execution of the editorial calendar.
Clint and Diane are experienced, seasoned editors, so it was interesting to discover that both of them had created the bandwidth for executing their social media programs by leveraging and improving their execution of an old magazine tool – the editorial calendar.
The focus was two-fold: improving the execution of the long-range features in the magazine editorial calendar, so that they weren’t racing to get pieces finished right at deadlines; and creating an editorial calendar for the social media content, so that they had a clear expectation of what work would get done when by whom.
The first task was to improve upfront planning. Both editors said that their upfront planning and execution on the print issue had improved as they had increased their social media activities. Without being explicit, it was clear that both Diane and Clint had used improvement of the existing processes in order to create the time resources needed to execute their social media plans.
The second task was to make the social media activity more routine. This required taking the same planning approach to social media as was used for the print issues.
Both At Home and Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles have created weekly social media content schedules.
These schedules are designed to achieve several goals:
- Share all of the content in the issue through the social media channels;
- Keep a regular flow of content on the brand blog and Facebook pages;
- Increase interaction with other bloggers in their topic area and market;
- Increase engagement with the community around their brand.
At Home has structured is weekly calendar around topics:
- Monday: General post
- Tuesday & Thursday: Share content from the latest magazine issue. This can be a Room of the Week, or a fashion segment, or a design project.
- Wednesday: Recruit a guest blog, typically from someone who has been featured in the magazine;
- Friday: Friday Favorites, a list of links to other blogs and comments that the staff found interesting during the previous week.
Altanta Home & Lifestyle has addressed the structure of its social media sharing by assigning a specific day of the week to different members of the content team. On that day, the team member is responsible for sharing something of value and interest on the blog and the Facebook page
This “staff blogger” schedule has helped to take the anxiety out of trying to make sure some content is being created each day. It also has the benefit of being predictable for the online audience; over time, a reader will notice that one of their favorites posts every Thursday, for example.
Creating a social media schedule shifts the focus and energy of the content teams, both Clint and Diane observed. One change is that the teams begin to look to other bloggers more. They’ve discovered that bloggers have an identity in the market much like top architects and interior designers. By bringing the bloggers into the umbrella of the brand, it increased the magazine’s presence.
Our discussion closed with some observations about the impact of social sharing on the market.
Clint and Diane commented that the “sense of connectedness” was different. Things are more interactive: they get comments and ideas from a community that is enormously positive.
As editors, they are seeing more and more overlaps among the ways that they distribute information, and are thinking about new ways to integrate things.
In order to continue to draw benefit from this social sharing activity, the editorial teams would benefit from increased access to the results that they are driving, both in terms of audience to specific posts and sections of the web site, as well as the relative value of this audience to any advertising customers.
In the future, the editorial and sales teams will also need to coordinate the amount of audience that needs to get driven into specific sections of the web site and towards specific customer groups, so that the potential number of conversions to client activity is lined up with the expectations of the clients.
Conclusion:
An editorial team needs to implement four steps in order to increase the consistency and effectiveness of their social media sharing program.
- Assess and improve traditional planning and workflow:
Many editorial teams can create incremental time by being more structured in their long-range planning and in creating their larger features with a longer lead time. - Set specific monthly goals for your social media content
- Feature magazine content in individual posts
- Guest bloggers
- Featured blogs and comments
- Online-only features
- Community engagement
- Traffic/audience
- Fans
- Set up a weekly content plan
- Establish a social media content schedule
- Assign specific elements or days to individual staffers
- Communicate content schedule to entire team
- Have monthly meeting to review social media assignments and results
- Track results & feedback
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The number one post was from March: 
The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about 
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 
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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 
