Newspapers Be Warned
If you’re a local newspaper or another outlet for classified ads, consider this photo to the left of the post a warning shot across your bow. With Facebook’s ability to target us by locality, and with a fairly inexpensive ad rate, why should I look for the younger generation in your print edition *or* your hard-to-navigate online version? Go where the market is, friends. That’s the word of the day.
And if you are a newspaper, looking to stay relevant, here’s a strange thought to consider: what if you atomized and started chasing down the eyeballs, instead of asking the eyeballs to come to you? What would that look like? What if my local paper started running articles in my Facebook news stream, or in my RSS reader, or somewhere else that I’m likely to visit? Hmmm.
Atomized media publications. Might be something.
Thinking About Magazines
Here are the top 10 magazines in the US, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. Take a look at their subscription rates:
AARP Magazine - 24,204,313
AARP Bulletin - 23,567,607
Reader’s Digest - 9,684,759
Better Homes & Gardens - 7,681,722
National Geographic - 5,051,999
Good Housekeeping - 4,686,152
Family Circle - 3,967,065
Woman’s Day - 3,924,195
Ladies’ Home Journal - 3,918,472
AAA Westways - 3,764,966
Is there an active community online or off, for each of these magazines? Are you seeking to reach them with what you’re doing? These are the TOP TEN magazine properties in the US. To reach into them is to find the heart and soul of the mainstream and share what’s possible.
Look at the online presence for National Geographic, whose mission is to inspire people to care about the planet. I can spend money, read lots of things, spend more money, read more things, look at things. But I can’t talk to other community subscribers. I can’t put my videos up on the NGS site.
AARP has over 24 million subscribers. Can we be helpful to them? Is there a way to bridge that world to what we’re doing over here in our little fishbowl?
While we’re talking about how cool FriendFeed is, and how much we want big businesses to join the conversation, I want us (and by “us,” I mean anyone contemplating their social media expertise) to think about the Top 10 magazines and what we might do with these people to help them engage.
What’s your take?
Chip Griffin Launches Media Disruption
Superstar media maker, epicurean, lunar photographer, and all-around great guy Chip Griffin announced yesterday the launch of his new property, Media Disruption. Just like Chip says, it makes sense. He loves media. He loves the notion of disruption. Let’s get hitched.
Congrats to Chip and Eaglon publishing.
Marketers in a Social Network World
Consider what a marketer’s role is: deliver more customers/clients/purchases. You can talk about education and building community and brand management, but there are really only a few metrics that ultimately will get a marketer noticed:
- Increase in sales.
- Good media coverage.
- Healthy sales/customer pipeline.
Am I right? (I’m not a marketer by trade or experiences. I’m a hack who sometimes gets put in the position of helping people market.)
If so, we have to consider what it’s going to be like for you as a marketer, being told to try out things like Facebook and Twitter and other social networks to do what you’re tasked with doing. One problem is that there are obvious benefits to using online methods to market, and yet, it’s not as easy as just blasting your traditional messages via electronic channels. here are some thoughts.
You’re the Visitor
In some cases, newly arriving marketers are quick to dive in and and get their message heard. They make a few cursory passes around the “neighborhood” and then set to work talking about their product or service. The problem is, even though it feels like this new neighborhood is filled with random people, lots of us know each other, and we don’t know you. We understand the pace, the patter, the social norms of this environment. Coming in and getting down to business is frowned upon in almost all cases.
Get to know some people. It does take a little more time, but the results are better. I know plenty of people who could pitch me their new project without me feeling weird or put out by them. Why? Because we’ve already gone through the effort of getting to know each other. I assume that what they’re pitching will be of interest to me, and I trust that they’ll be straightforward with what they need, while being sensitive to their relationship with me.
In the end, people who pitch me well get what they seek, and I do even more than a “cold call” would expect, because by that point, I feel invested in the outcome because I know and appreciate the person who pitched me.
And when the pitch doesn’t match my interests, no harm no foul. Try doing that with a “cold” dive into a social network and see what you get.
Collaboration and Two Way Roads
We do a lot of collaboration in social media and social networks. Sometimes, it’s about your cause. Other times, it’s about mine. Even the non-marketers are marketing for attention. Make a point of helping out others often. Try to be there when they need you, and Digg their story, chip in the $10, or do whatever else needs doing.
People remember those who help out. And then when the time comes, it’s a little more likely that people will be inclined to help.
Is this “quid pro quo?” Maybe. But it’s very tacit and explicit, and people who are collaborating understand that it’s a give-and-take relationship.
When you come without that kind of investment already built into the community, you have to spend some time sharing and doing what else needs doing, as well.
Shared Value
Marketing is used to the idea of giving something to get something. It’s not very different in the social networks world. Only, really consider the value before making the offer. If you’re marketing something that has a fan base, give ways for people to have access to something (give Sony pictures fans cool games to play, like they did with 30 Days of Night’s vampires game on Facebook). Give people who love your software a badge to place on their site, if they want, but make a value link back to the person displaying such a badge.
In short, in the universe of social networks, it’s not enough to hit people over the head with your message. Instead, the goal shifts towards finding supporters and giving them something of value, on one front.
Wooing Non-Customers
Social networks afford marketers the opportunity to learn lots about people. You can read Facebook profiles and understand what people like, who they know, what they support, etc. This means it’s a great environment to find out about people who aren’t engaged with your product, or who use a competing product.
If you’re a smart company like the guys from Zoho, you have search terms and triggers set up for when people mention their products, and I’m going to bet that they have terms set up on certain competing products, as well. (I’m not singling them out, but I’ve met the Zoho team, and have talked with them online - on my blog plenty of times and also in email - and I think they’re a great example of people paying attention to their non-customer base, as well as those who are already believers).
With this knowledge, you have the chance to build relationships, and offer opportunities for people to try out a product they might not be currently using. Don’t be pushy about it, but by paying good attention to blog posts and profile information and the flow of words on Twitter, a marketer can also find their non-customers identifying themselves over and over again.
Because these social networks capture data that isn’t usually considered - watercooler-like conversations, for instance- you have an opportunity that doesn’t exist in the offline world. How you execute on it is the real question. Will you be ready?
Marketers Can Do Magic on Social Networks
But only smart ones. Those who choose to roll their existing methods onto the web will find themselves writing articles in magazines about how the web is a horrible place to market. For the rest of you (and I mostly mean YOU), this is a great place to start out learning, and then grow into being a transplant to this new community. In no time, you’ll be one of the gang, and hopefully, the metrics that matter most to your organization will be growing in the right ways, by way of your efforts.
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
Someone, a brave someone, from Boston’s local TV news scene asked a question to a panel with representatives from MySpace, Facebook, Eons, IBM, and a virtual worlds builder. She said she wanted to know the role of traditional media in this space, and what road she and her organization should get on for the future of media. Their answers were all over the map, but Jeff Taylor (former founder of Monster, current founder of Eons) had the start of a thoughtful answer, and his response blended with something someone else said earlier (either Jeff again, or Tom Arrix of Facebook): that if we observe the Superbowl ads for 2008, we’ll notice that the majority of them will point us to a web property. So, with this as backdrop, some advice.
Be Brief On Air, Go Deep Offline
The current champions of this method are NPR. They post all their subsequent materials, including longer versions of interviews, on their website for further review. For people you want to know about, watching or listening to just the snippets that make the news isn’t always enough. Having the option to go deeper is a great service that takes advantage of all the quality work a journalistic team has put into the experience.
This is a value-add for people interested in a particular story, but it’s also clever for marketing and understanding your customer base. We can track and observe and understand the behaviors of people, so that we may better serve them. That’s the first line value.
Integrate Local Social Media Types
Papers and TV are still missing an opportunity to “draft” independent media makers into their work. Move to an upstream, editorial and curation relationship with people who can go into their own communities, surface stories of interest to them, and then bring this body of work to editors and curators who can understand which of these stories are right for the air, which would do fine on the web, and which might merit further professional reporting, with a hat tip back to the original creator.
Embed Community Technology Into Your Sites
Pluck up the best of blogs and videoblogs in the area. Build community conversation sections, even if that invites critics to come out and shoot at your stories a bit. Build chat rooms for during-the-news discussion experiences. There are tons of ways to empower the voice of your audience to have reciprocal value. These are just a few. You probably have a few more.
Make Your Media Portable
Take some of the deep stories and make podcasts out of them. Give us embed codes for your media. Make a spot for metadata like user tagging. Give us ways to build your media into our sites and spread your word to more sources.
Switch Sensation for Causes and Empowerment
We put a premium on stories of what’s going wrong. Of course, it’s important to know about some of the bad news we’re getting out there, but why aren’t stories about where we can help coming to the fore in LOCAL news? Why aren’t we learning about people doing great work more often? Right now, they have that slot at the very end of the newscast, where the two or three people on desk make that weird half smile.
Push the empowerment stories up, and bring that into your deep web coverage as well.
Random and YOUR Ideas
One more thing: do we NEED everyone at a desk with monitors behind them, or sitting in fake living rooms? Aren’t there other settings? We haven’t mixed it up much for over 50 years. I guess this isn’t social media advice, but hey.
And what else? What do you think? How can we fix the news?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
