Social Media

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Permalink Reply by Peter Milburn on April 11, 2009 at 5:59pm

Hi Eric,

I'm trying to track that as well. Here's what I've found so far:

SAMPLES OF PUBLISHERS FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS
http://redirectny.com/samples/REDIRECT_PubFacebookApps_Feb09.pdf

PUBLISHERS FAN RANK ON FACEBOOK (some pubs that don't have "magazine" in their page name are missing)
http://www.redirectny.com/email/2009_01_Newsletter/facebook/index.html

In terms of web-endemics (publishers whose only presence is on the web) they are doing a lot more and it would be hard to be comprehensive in describing all those efforts.

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Permalink Reply by Toni Nevitt on April 14, 2009 at 5:42pm

I definitely think it should be explored, depending on the objectives you want to achieve and the market. That said however, you need to constantly "feed" the conversations and the interactions. If you don't have the resources to do that then I wouldn't bother, you won't create the awareness/engagement you want or would expect. Again, it goes back to what you are trying to achieve.

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Permalink Reply by Mike Schneider on May 27, 2009 at 10:05am

While I am not personally involved, I would suggest attending the Audience Development 2009 Conference and Expo from June 7-9th in Chicago. It is a great conference for all audience developers, circulation mangers, general mangers, publishers and CEOs. There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss the future of print and digital media with experts and you can experience the most extensive curriculum anywhere on audience growth and management. There's still time to register: just go to audiencedevshow.com!

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Permalink Reply by Christine Oldenbrook on June 10, 2009 at 7:26pm

Eric: we're jumping in. Some of our editors have started this but the ones that are not, my audience marketing team is taking up the lead. This is a great example of where editors and audience developers team up. The primary objective of participating in social media is to drive traffic to your site using your content/voice...audience development is brand wide goal. Audience Development mgrs need to understand the value social networking brings to their development efforts and if they are the first to bring the idea to the group...so be it. One of our Aud Dev Mgrs set up a Fan Page, met with the reluctant editor and publisher, got buy-in, activated it and in less than a week we have over 500 fans/participants. That should incentivise any editor.

The editor needs to understand why their participation in this is great for the site beyond just one more task to do. I recommend measuring the impact through some of the easy to use tools that track social networks. There was a good presentation on this at the AUD DEV show in Chicago. It listed all sorts of great apps for tracking the impact of "tweets", FB, etc. Maybe they will post that list of tools.

We are also testing display ads in FaceBook. Stay tuned on the results.

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Permalink Reply by Fred Faulkner on June 13, 2009 at 9:23am

I'm new to the audience development arena but I did attend the recent conference in Chicago which was a great help.
It seems to me that there are at least two big wins achieved through using social media. First, I found by listening to various speakers at the conference that my view of what our audience is is much narrower than I should be thinking about. Maybe this is simply old habits. Social media exposes product to a new groups of readers, some of whom turn out to be your audience but may have never been on your radar.
With all the search tools available content can turn up on their radar with very little work on our part. The win is that the audience grows with relatively little work and investment. More importantly is that the growth is in areas that may never have been addressed because there was no potential payback or that audience segment wasn't even known about.
Second, although our content creators should feel connected to their audience my guess is many of them create their work and wonder about the value of their efforts. Social media offers the potential to do a direct link between author and reader. This can not only provide that reward value to the authors, it also provides a fountain of input to our journalists. Keeping our readers satisfied will help grow our audience and social media might be the best survey tool available.
As to the work required to employ social media techniques I think this can range from a fairly low level "reposting" of content using these tools all the way to extreme engagement between the editorial and advertising staffs and our audiences. At this point we should all be experimenting to determine where the best ROI is in the effort using these tools.

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