Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue April 2011 Dawn McMullan
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Newspapers and Social Media:From Monologue to Dialogue
April 201
Dawn McMullan
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INMA ❙ 2
Introduction
Chapter 1:
What Social Media Means
to a News Publisher
Chapter 2:
The Short Social Media
Revolution at Newspapers
A. The marketing transition
B. The social media department
C. Huffington Post
Chapter 3:
Applying Engagement and
Conversation to Consumer Types
A. Your place or mine?
B. Engagement
C. Three types of news consumers
Chapter 4:
How 8 Newspapers are
Practically Using Social Media
A. Chicago Tribune (United States)
B. Financial Review Group
(Australia)
C. Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil)D. The Guardian (United Kingdom)
E. Mediahouse Limburg (Belgium)
F. Metro (Canada)
G. The Press-Enterprise (United
States)
H. SOL (Portugal)
Newspapers and Social Media:From Monologue to Dialogue By Dawn McMullan
INMA Partner in Business
03
05
08
12
18
Table of Contents Chapter 5:
Structuring Social Media as
Revenue or Brand Opportunity
Chapter 6:
Social Media Optimisation
(SMO) for Publishers
Chapter 7:
Social Media’s Next Steps at
News Organisations
Chapter 8:Conclusion
30
33
36
38
About INMA INMA (International Newsmedia Marketing Association) is the world’s largest and premier newsmedia marketing
organisation. This practical network of progressive marketing professionals now totals nearly 5,000 members in 82 countries worldwide. Members
exchange ideas through a bi-monthly magazine, multiple web sites, e-mail executive summaries, discussion forums, message boards, conferences,
workshops, travel study tours, awards competitions, benchmark surveys, and online directories and databases. The 81-year-old association has
offices in Dallas, Antwerp, and New Delhi. To become a member of INMA, please visit www.inma.org.
Cover art includes: The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, SOL
INMA Inc. © Copyright 2011 The contents contained within this report are the exclusive domain of INMA Inc. and may not bereproduced without the express written consent of INMA.
Dawn McMullan is a freelance
writer and editor living in Dallas.
She is the editor of INMA’s ideas
magazine and former editor of
Consumer Trends e-newsletter.
Her work has also appeared in The
Dallas Morning News, D Magazine,
and on National Public Radio.
Author
Dawn McMullan
Edited by
Andrea Loubier
Layout & Design
Danna Emde
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INMA ❙ 3Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
IntroductionNewspapers historically have been in the monologue business by broadcasting information
to the masses, one size fits all. By contrast, social media is about dialogue, the community, and
niche audiences — a complement to the new direction of news publishing.
What the social media revolution looks like on the
ground.
Whether news publishers should bring the
conversation from social media sites like Facebook
and Twitter onto their sites.
Whether social media is a revenue opportunity or a
brand opportunity for publishers.
What early-adopter newspapers are doing with
social media today.
“We’re at a huge transition,” Loux says. “Internally, weliken it to the transition between the quill and the
printing press. It’s that significant of a change. There
were those that didn’t make the jump and those that
said, ‘Hey, wait a second, we can now print every day,’
and completely opened up their markets and
transformed themselves. Not having lived through that
time, it’s a bit of a guess, but I imagine the ones that
made it were the ones who got into the business of
understanding, owning, and operating printing
resources. They didn’t outsource printing presses. They
didn’t stay at arms length from it. They bought the
It appears news media and social m edia cannot thrive
without each other.
While social media carries its fair share of personal back
and forth, the crux of social media content comes from
information produced by professionals. The news
industry must embrace this phenomenon because it is
changing the way people consume news.
“For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must
embrace social media and take on the critical role of
curator of the conversation,” says Khris Loux, CEO of Echo
States, a San Francisco-based real-time commenting
engine for publishers. “For social media to remainrelevant and avoid slipping further into a wall of noise, it
must work hand in hand with news organisations to
create a symbiotic storytelling relationship.”
What do social media and the changing consumer
habits surrounding it mean for the news industry?
INMA interviewed dozens of social media experts to
gather insight on:
How social media in the newspaper’s context is
defined.
KHRIS LOUX CEO, Echo States
“If you want to keep or strengthen the relationship you have through your local
audiences, you have to understand what these people care about and then you have to
supply that kind of information.”
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INMA ❙ 4Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Introduction
machines, brought them in-house, and learned how to
use them.
“In that same way, publishers are standing on the
outside, really facing an existential choice — to be
orphaned or to really embrace those technologies.
There’s no middle ground.”
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INMA ❙ 5Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
1
The first known use of the phrase “social media” came in 2004, which Merriam-Webster defines
as “forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging)
through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and
other content (as videos).”
And much like they did with the Internet, smartphones,
and more recently tablets, news publishers feel the
need to be there. The how and the why, though, still
may seem unclear.
That lack of clarity, experts say, needs to change.
“Like any other marketing initiative, the fundamental
priority in entering the social media space is to have a
clear set of objectives,” says Simon Wake, group marketing
director of Financial Review Group in Australia.
Questions such as:
What is the objective of your social media
platform?
What sort of behavioural change are you going to
try and elicit?
What is the most suitable platform to achieve these
objectives?
What Social Media Meansto a News Publisher
Seven years later, it’s impossible to get through a day
without a social media reference. We “fan” groups we like.
We “friend” people we live next door to, some we went to
high school with, others we have never met. We “like”
everything from clever responses by strangers to funny
video clips and tsunami rescues. We can summarise any
event, feeling, or request in a 140-word tweet.
TNS Global’s “Digital Life” survey of worldwide Internet
users in 2010 found consumers spent more time on
social Web sites than on e-mail — 4.6 hours weekly onthe former, 4.4 hours on the latter (and 2.7 weekly hours
reading the news). New York-based media agency
Universal McCann’s “Social Media Tracker” found that
61% of worldwide Internet users between the ages of 16
and 54 have a social media profile compared to 51% in
2009 and 45% in 2008. The same study found that social
media users worldwide keep up with an average of 52
friends through social media, up from nearly 39 in 2009.
Social media has infiltrated the world much the way the
Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, and smartphones have.
BRIAN SOLIS Author, Principal, Altimeter Group, Founder, Social Media Club
“What they’re not doing is recognising the opportunity that’s before them: that social
media represents a human network, individuals who are connected around relationships
and information and interests. That’s what’s so important right now.”
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INMA ❙ 6Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 1: What Social Media Means to a News Publisher
Some wonder if the Groupon phenomenon should be
included in the social media discussion. Sure, it takes a
group to make such group deals work; and they often are
spread through social media. But group deals are
basically a coupon app. They are not a conversation. They
are not information. They are not social media. That being
said, group deals are a good way to build audience.
Ward Andrews, the owner of Drawbackwards, a Phoenix,
Arizona-based strategic design, Internet marketing, and
business consulting agency, sees newspapers that don’t
understand who on staff should be using social media
and how to speak with people on social media.
“So Twitter is the best news-breaking medium of all
time,” Andrews says. “But in certain news organisations,they don’t have their reporters on Twitter. They have
some director of digital running a Twitter account in
their spare time. What’s happening naturally is the
younger generation of reporters, who are already on
Twitter, are now using Twitter to break news or to use it
for research for their article.”
As an example of doing it well, Andrews mentions a
Phoenix news anchor who asks viewers via Twitter what
they would like to hear about on that night’s broadcast.
She comments directly to those tweets during the
broadcast. Sports departments also often are using it as
it should be used. Some do live tweets from the coach
during a press conference instead of waiting to release
it in their article.
“As a fan, you just want the coach quotes,” Andrews
says. “People are going to follow that Twitter non-
stop.”
U.S.
Worldwide
2008
2009
2010
Internet users who manage social network profle
33.1%
48.3%
58.1%
45.1%
51.4%
61.4%
Note: ages 16-54; daily or every other day Internet access; in the past six months
Sources: UM, “The Socialisation of Brands: Social Media Tracker 2010,” October 1, 2010
% of respondents
Time spent on online activities
Note: n=48,804
Sources: TNS, “Digital Life,” October 10, 2010
% of internet users
% doing Hours peractivity week spent
daily on activity
E-mail 76% 4.4
News 55% 2.7
Social 46% 4.6
Interest 46% 3.9
Knowledge 39% 3.1
Multimedia 37% 3.7
Gaming 27% 2.9
Browsing 24% 2.3
Admin 21% 1.7
Organize 19% 1.6
Shopping 12% 1.8
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INMA ❙ 7Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 1: What Social Media Means to a News Publisher
Andrews points to the rule of three on Twitter as far as
how newsmedia organisations should interact with
customers:
1. One-third of tweets should be giving the
newspaper’s insight.
2. One-third should have a conversation with others.
3. One-third should be used for general conversation
(subscription sales, special announcements).
Newspapers are thinking of social media as another
broadcast channel to syndicate content, which is, to be
fair, how every business is approaching social media.
What newspapers are not doing, however, is worth
noting.
“What they’re not doing is recognising the opportunity
that’s before them: that social media represents a
human network, individuals who are connected around
relationships and information and interests,” says Brian
Solis, author of Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands
and Business to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in
the New Web, principal at the Altimeter Group, and
founder of the Social Media Club. “That’s what’s so
important right now.”
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INMA ❙ 8Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
2
The Short Social MediaRevolution at Newspapers
Social media may be the next Internet, with a multitude of news companies still unsure as to how or
why or where they need to be.
all news companies should be doing.
“A lot of these individuals who are very prominent in the
tech blogging world have had sort of a tech blogging
face-off against traditional media,” Solis says. “They have
done so because they have made an incredible killing
writing incredible content shorter, faster, better, and
allowing their writers to develop personal brands and
network that content, developing micro-audiences that
collectively create a greater audience for the publication
they represent.”
Tech writers at The New York Times and The Wall StreetJournal, for example, have created their own personal
brands and built community. Yet Solis wonders: why
aren’t all newspapers doing this?
“What they’re trying to do,” Solis heard from a higher-up
at a major U.S. newspaper, “is figure out how to
humanize all this. I think what every business, not just
media, is not getting is that we’re in a marketing
transition. Online was pretty important. It gave people
access to information in a different place. But in and of
itself, that’s not the same thing as what’s happening. This
is nothing short of a revolution. The empowerment in
not just consumption, but creation of content. I can
create information. I can be a reporter. I can be a content
editor. That’s the foundation of this revolution.
“People aren’t going to look for you anymore. You have
And that’s OK, says Meg Pickard, head of digital
engagement at The Guardian in the United Kingdom.
“Anybody who goes into social media, or any new and
emergent technology, and says, ‘I know exactly how we
should use this’ is probably lying,” Pickard says with a
laugh. “The whole point of emergent technology or
things changing is the uses haven’t necessarily been
established yet. The change in Twitter in the last f ive
years has been remarkable. What’s it going to be like in
another five? Facebook, when it launched, was really
about your friends. In a meeting yesterday, someone said
they friended somebody they didn’t know. That’s thekind of sentence that if you’d said it to me five years ago,
I would’ve looked at you like you were crazy.”
That said, newsmedia companies need to understand
why they need to be engaging with social media even if
they’re not perfectly clear on how. When they don’t
know why, it shows, Pickard says.
A. The marketing transition
Consider the work of Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would
Google Do? , director of the Tow-Knight Center for
Entrepreneurial Journalism at The City University of New
York’s graduate school of journalism, and new media
columnist for The Guardian. Jarvis’ entrepreneurial
journalism movement is all about the idea of building
bridges between people and information — something
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INMA ❙ 9Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 2: The Short Social Media Revolution at Newspapers
to come to them. The reason it’s a marketing transition is
because it doesn’t negate the other reality — that you
still need your dot-com, you still need something in
somebody’s hands, whether that’s print, the iPad,
another tablet.”
And transition, as we all know, is difficult for
newspapers. This transition is no different, says The
Guardian’s Pickard.
“Most of the time it ends up being fairly clumsy,” Pickard
says. “It’s more about broadcast than it is about
engagement. They’re using it as a headline service or as a
way to tell us what you think, share this with your
friends. Look at the language they use to address their
audience; even the fact that they think of them as an
audience instead of a community.”
Tameka Kee, lead researcher and analyst for Social Times
Pro, agrees. But she sees newspapers trying.
“It’s so complex,” Kee says. “I also think that the
organisational structures of newspapers don’t lend
themselves to social media well. They’ve just figured out
how to do the Internet right, and now this other thing
comes along.”
B. The social media department
The Chicago Tribune has a “Social Media Justice League,”
based on the American comics that started in the 1960s
with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Green
Lantern.
Everybody in the Tribune’s tongue-in-check Justice
League has a certain social media superpower: viral
video, superior training skills, or strong profiles on
Facebook or Twitter. They get together to discuss what
they’re doing and how.
It’s all in fun, but the idea behind it is a good one.
Everybody has skills. Those skills need to be used and
shared throughout the organisation. At one time, that
was best done with a dedicated social media team. But
that’s no longer the case at news companies that have
made social media a part of their DNA.
The Chicago Tribune had a true social media department
a few years ago. Along the way, even the title of social
media manager went away, as Bill Adee, vice president/
digital at the Chicago Tribune Media Group, felt it should
be a part of everyone’s job.
Recently, the Tribune put someone in place to focus on
social media and coordinate social media events.
“If somebody has an event, they plan out what the social
media game plan is. They share best practices among all
of our departments,” Adee says. “That made sense as we
got so big and everybody’s doing it. It became
something I felt like we needed to coordinate. Now,
almost every publication has somebody who is expected
to focus on social media.”
The Tribune has one person doing a 90-day sprint of
Twitter training, teaching everybody in the building how
to use it. The goal is to have 1,000 people at the Chicago
Tribune using Twitter effectively. As of this writing, they
are halfway there.
Like so many in the industry, Adee thinks the synergy
between Twitter and newspapers is obvious. Says Adee:
“I think people thought it was sort of a nice thing to do,
but now that’s how people get their news.”
MEG PICKARD Head of Digital Engagement, The Guardian
“Anybody who goes into social media, or any new and emergent technology, and says, ‘I know
exactly how we should use this’ is probably lying.”
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INMA ❙ 10Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 2: The Short Social Media Revolution at Newspapers
Although most people in the newsroom were already on
Twitter, the Tribune training shows how those in the
marketing and advertising department can use it. The
official Chicago Tribune Twitter posts are done by one of
the newspaper’s Web site producers, while the Colonel
Tribune account is tweeted by a reporter, with help from
others every now and then.
The Guardian started out with a “communities team”
embedded into every department. The company is now
experimenting with having one community coordinator
who acts as a conduit between the community and
editorial.
The New York Times did the same thing, hiring Jennifer
Preston to be head of social media, then moving her to adifferent role this year, Kee points out.
“They realised social needs to be embedded in every
department,” Kee says. “Newspapers would do well to
have a champion of social in their organisation.
Somebody needs to own it and understand the metrics.
But it needs to be filtered holistically as well.”
C. Huffington Post
Most everyone mentions the Huffington Post as the pièce
de résistance of newsmedia organisations doing social
media, the epitome of the social media revolution. Sure.
But as Kee points out, the HuffPo, as those in the know call
it, isn’t a newspaper. It’s a digital news company — and
one that could learn a lot from newspapers, Kee thinks.
“It has an atrocious Web design,” she says. “The Huffington
Post monetises its traffic ridiculously and attributes social
media to a big part of that. I wonder if there was any way
to drill down into the quality of impressions from HuffPo.
The content is so aggregated, I wondered if we put the
same article from HuffPo versus a cleaner, leaner news
site and use the same social tools to drive traffic, which
traffic would be more valuable to an advertiser?
“HuffPo definitely has figured out one of the ways to
harness social and to drive massive amounts of traffic.
But, No. 1, how quality is that traffic? And No. 2, most
news organisations aren’t structured in the way that
HuffPo is. HuffPo wouldn’t have sold for US$315 million if
it wasn’t valuable, but I think what’s less valuable is the
content and what’s more valuable is the model.”
And newspapers should look at the Huffington Post’s
model. There is much to emulate about it. All content,
Kee says, should be socialised.
“The easier you make it for people to share your content,
the more you’re going to be able to monetise it,” she
says. “I’m not going to read the Des Moines Register, but
if my friend whose mom lives in Des Moines sees that her
mom liked an article on Facebook, and my friend likes it,
and I see it, then I click over to that. That’s a page view
that they wouldn’t have had.”
So socialize. But do so in your newspaper’s own voice.
Certainly, your average newspaper can’t get away with
sounding like the Huffington Post — and probably
wouldn’t want to.
Remember, Kee says, everyone isn’t a HuffPo reader.
Gawker, for example, is a New York-based news blog that
focuses on celebrity news. The Web site features a
caption of the day, inviting readers to write the best
caption, which will run with the photo.
“That’s fine and totally tongue-in-cheek,” Kee says. “But if
The Atlantic started sending all of its headlines and
TAMEKA KEE Lead Researcher, Analyst, Social Times Pro
“They realised social needs to be embedded in every department. Newspapers
would do well to have a champion of social in their organisation. Somebody needs to own
it and understand the metrics. But it needs to be filtered holistically as well.”
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INMA ❙ 11Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 2: The Short Social Media Revolution at Newspapers
allowing people to write the caption, that wouldn’t work.
If you’re a serious newspaper, you don’t want to do that.
“A newspaper needs to find its voice and then figure out
how that voice is social. Maybe that’s just giving two of
your local reporters a blog and having them do social.
Maybe once a week you do a Web case from a reporter’s
Huffington Post
Many social media and newspaper experts point to the
Huffington Post as an example of how newsmedia
companies should be doing social media.
desk, summing up the stories and posting it to a
YouTube page. That’s social. It’s also learning how to use
Twitter to break news and then drive traffic back to the
Web site or back to your print publication.”
Marshall Sponder saw the Huffington Post’s data last
year. A New York-based specialist in Web analytics and
SEO/SEM, as well as the author of Social Media Analytics:
Effective Tools for Building Interpreting, and Using Metrics,
Sponder works and consults in market research, social
media, networking, and public relations for companies
like IBM, Monster, The New York Times, and US Magazine.
Huffington identifies its top influencers based on the
number of comments and engagement. Sometimes,
they offer them blogs or connect them to each other.
This is the latest move by news organisations using social
media, ranking the level one, level two, or level three
influencers among those commenting, offering them
ways to interact with each other, looking at their social
graph, looking at the algorithms.
“What we’re looking at is the intelligent application of
technology to improve the reader’s experience and
better categorise and figure out who these people are,”
Sponder says. “The Huffington Post, because they’re
only five years old and not The New York Times or
Forbes, can afford to be a little bit more innovative in
ways the older publications, simply because of their
mass and because of their structure, have not yet been
able to be. Those publications may be more stable in
some ways but may not have the wherewithal to make
the shifts that are needed.”
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INMA ❙ 12Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
3
Applying Engagement andConversation to Consumer Types
seconds. Why the L.A. Times? They’d better come
up with an experience that drives me back to their
Web sites. It’s content, but not just content. It’s
because my friends go there, because there are
top-rated photos there, cool user-generated
content, comments, I can get badges and rewards,
discounts at local restaurants, because I follow
smart people there. All of those social experiences,
if you outsource every one of those, you’re gone
and become weak, ineffective, disaggregated. Your
content is a seed, and the experience is the fruit
around that.”
A. Your place or mine?
Many newspaper executives find it frustrating that their
content is being discussed on social media like
Facebook and Twitter instead of on their own Web sites.
“Our business relies on driving a premium audience to
our site so that they understand the extent of value
presented there to drive trial and subscriptions,” Simon
Wake says of the Financial Review Group, one of the few
subscription Web sites in Australia. “We have fully
There currently are two camps of newsmedia companies in the social media arena, according to
Khris Loux of Echo States, the commenting engine for publishers:
Those that are outsourcing their relationship with
their visitors to the social networks. These
newspapers have set up a Facebook fan page and
are driving traffic to that page. Says Loux: “That’s all
well and good, but it’s an economic calculation
that doesn’t work. The newspaper invests in the
content, they have a reporter, editors, distribution,
building — all this stuff to produce a story. If you
push that content into Facebook, then they control
monetisation of that page. Now you’re doing a
revenue share on your core asset. That’s really nice
for Facebook, because they have not invested in
the content. The heroine of it is when you do placeyour content in there, do you get a referral to your
site? There’s this candy, bit of goodness, this rush if
you will. But it does come with a hangover that
now you’ve given up registration, the ability to
engage visitors.”
Those who are building the relationship on their
Web site. When the cost of distribution goes to
zero, all that’s left are profits around the experience
itself. “Why would I go to the L.A. Times to read a
story on Qaddafi. I can get 1,000 stories in 0.025
MURRAY NEWLANDS Social Media Consultant, Blogger
“If your audience is having a conversation about a topic, and you’re successful at having
your story picked up as part of that conversation, then content is coming back to you.
And if you’re not in the conversation and your competitor is, then you lose that
engagement with the audience.”
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INMA ❙ 13Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue
Chapter 3: Applying Engagement and Conversation to Consumer Types
embraced Twitter from an editorial perspective. It is less
resource-intense than other social media but clearly
acts to drive traffic to the Financial Review Web site.”
Others in the news industry are concerned less with
having conversations on their Web site and more with
having conversations that are tied back to their brand.
“Our brand is our brand — everywhere,” says Jodi
Brown, marketing and interactive director at Metro
Canada, based in Toronto. “Twitter and Facebook are
fantastic places for conversations. I don’t feel like
dragging them back to our conversation. We use
Facebook Connect so you can see conversations on
Facebook about the site that they’re on, making it feel
like more of a community. I don’t see it as a major threat.
The reality is we want to be part of the Flipboards and
all the aggregators for news, and you just have to get
your head around all that. You don’t have to monetise
your audience on your site or your newspaper for it to
be important. It’s about the brand. Eventually, this all
leads to a stronger business.”
Luke Brynley-Jones, founder of Our Social Times, a
United Kingdom-based media consultancy, agrees.
“You shouldn’t get so hung up about your Web
property,” says Brynley-Jones, who co-founded the
United Kingdom’s first social media consultancy in 2001.
“The key thing is to have a presence on the Web. That no
longer applies to just one place.”
He, like other social media experts, recommends
newspapers have a community manager to conduct
outreach through various types of social media —
blogs, competitor’s blogs, Twitter, and more.
“You have to go where your audience is and where your
audience is having conversation,” says Murray Newlands,
a social media consultant and blogger based in the
United Kingdom. “If your audience is having a
conversation about a topic, and you’re successful at
having your story picked up as part of that conversation,
then content is coming back to you. And if you’re not in
the conversation and your competitor is, then you lose
that engagement with the audience.”
California-based Enterprise Media has spent much of
Facebook CommentsNewsmedia companies are struggling to determine
how much value Facebook discussions about their
content bring to the newspaper — and how to bring
that conversation back to their own Web site.
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the past 18 months working on that engagement.
Enterprise Media knew that A.H. Belo-owned Press-
Enterprise generated buzz on Facebook and that it was
missing out. In the last quarter of 2009, staff reviewed
how their community was using social media to share
and react to news.
The Press-Enterprise, like most other local newspapers,
plays a central role in what is talked about in its
community in Riverside, California. Historically, the
conversations have taken place in person or on the
newspaper’s Web site. Unfortunately, the emergence of
social networks disrupted the feedback mechanism.
Offline conversations were occurring online on
Facebook instead of PE.com, and articles were being
shared and spread using Twitter, instead of thenewspaper’s sharing tools.
Starting in December 2009, the newspaper moved from
its original commenting tool to the Echo real-time
conversation platform. There were several reasons for
this move, the most important being the trend showing
that Facebook and Twitter were becoming the
community platforms for discussing local stories and
events. News companies benefit from using Facebook as
a good advertising service for local businesses, but they
lose out from a content standpoint if the conversation is
taking place on Facebook instead of on the newspaper’s
Web site.
Echo changes this equation for the newspaper by
bringing the conversation back to its site. All comments,
tweets, re-tweets, and shares across the Web show up in
real time aggregated in the comment stream on their
own Web site. The best place to see reactions to their
articles is now on the PE.com story page and not on a
social network. In a short time, comments on the site
increased from about 2,000 per month to well over
25,000 per month.
“Social media sites are not typical distribution channels
for newspapers,” says Andrew McFadden, manager,
innovation and business development at Enterprise
Media. “They are Web sites that we do not own or
control and that have changed (and will continue to
change) their terms of service, restrictions, and features.
Even if the sites are driving traffic to your Web site now,
the traffic to a local media company’s Facebook page is
usually being monetised only by Facebook. This needs
to change.”
Having the conversation on your Web page is the
best-case scenario. And Facebook recently made iteasier by creating a comments plug-in upgrade that
allows a Facebook-like chat to occur on your page
(Facebook profile picture, name and all) while
simultaneously on Facebook. You don’t have to log in to
a new Web site. Comments are not made anonymously
which cuts down on inappropriate posts.
“Facebook has said it isn’t trying to steal traffic from
newspapers,” says Tameka Kee of Social Times Pro. “It
wants to help media companies. What newspapers need
to do is work on bringing that conversation back to their
site, and there are plenty of tools out there that make
that easy. Of course, Facebook has that data, and that’s
one of the cons. The bigger thing is you want to do as
much as you can to make that interaction happen on
your site.
“That said, conversations on [Facebook], as long as they
have a link, have a value. I would liken that to me
bringing a copy of The New York Times to someone’s
house. That person didn’t buy that copy of The New York
ANDREW MCFADDEN Manager, Innovation and Business Development, Enterprise Media
“Social media sites are not typical distribution channels for newspapers. They are Web sites that
we do not own or control and that have changed (and will continue to change) their terms of
service, restrictions, and features. Even if the sites are driving traffic to your Web site now, the
traffic to a local media company’s Facebook page is usually being monetised only by Facebook.
This needs to change.”
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Something staff at The Guardian has been discussing is
who readers want to follow through social media.
Asks Pickard: “Do I want to know the stories that my
friends are reading or stories that other people I
respect in the field are reading? Who knows everything
there is to know about classical music or nuclear
physics? Should I be following them or the people I
went to high school with?”
Moderating is another discussion. Facebook and other
social media sites monitor their own content. You
monitor yours. Should you be monitoring their sites
about your posts?
“If someone says something inappropriate, is it yourspace or their space?” Pickard asks. “That is not our space.
It’s the corner of somebody else’s buy. The table we’ve
commandeered, but it belongs to somebody else. It’s like
me going to a party and saying, ‘I really don’t think you
should wear those shoes.’ It’s potentially appropriate at
my own party, but if people are being inappropriate with
each other or about a particular subject, we sort of sit on
our hands. This is a community space, governed by the
community. We think others will call them out.”
Back at The Guardian’s Web site, a team of moderators
controls the conversation, keeping things reigned in yet
not being heavy-handed.
Readers often ask how the Chicago Tribune monitors its
Web site. Vice president/digital Bill Adee gets more
complaints about censoring comments than about the
comments themselves. He feels the best way to monitor
such discussions is by giving people choices. Do they
only want to see comments by their friends? Only see
comments that rank an article two “thumbs up” or
higher? This isn’t possible on the Tribune’s site now, but
Adee would like to build toward that.
In the bigger picture, publishers need to be building
experiences around their content.
“Their intellectual property needs to be those
Times, but they are reading it. Is there value in that or
not?”
If you can harvest the content from Facebook, Twitter,
and LinkedIn and have it all aggregate on your Web site,
the publisher’s site becomes the conical view of the
story. Says Khris Loux of Echo States: “The publisher has
all of it.”
If you simply want to move the conversation to your Web
site because it’s more profitable and convenient for you,
that’s not good enough, says The Guardian’s Meg
Pickard. You must add benefit to bring the conversation
to your Web site. The Guardian offers the benefit of the
author to discussions on its Web site.
“Feel entirely free to take the conversation anywhere, but
this is where the record is,” Pickard says. “If you want to
engage in debate with the authors, that’s on our Web
site. You can talk about it on Twitter. Rather than getting
upset, we have to say that’s fine. But if we want them to
come to our site, how do we incentivize them? You have
to provide something else. The something else we have
is talent, resource, and attention. We reward participation
with attention.”
B. Engagement
Nobody wants thousands of tweets, which is where the
news staff comes in. Consumers don’t want to see every
piece of art in the world, so they go to a museum to see
the art that has been curated by the experts. Grouping
content in a way that has meaning and can be absorbed
is the newspaper’s job.
“There is value in editorial content,” Koux says. “The
masses can tweet, but the masses also need rallying
points and editorial follow-up and due diligence and
curation. The beauty of social media is that you get so
much global reaction. The downside of that is the same
thing — you get so much.”
How consumers would like to engage is what news
companies and consumers are still trying to determine.
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The social media players
Facebook: Launched in 2004 as a social media platform for college students, Facebook
now has more than 600 million active users. Members “friend” other members, “fan” pages
of businesses like newspapers, “share” content, and comment on and/or “like” posts from
other people. Today at least, Facebook seems to set the tone for how consumers want to converse with each
other, read, and share news via social media.
Twitter: Launched in 2006, Twitter is now famous for its 140-character posts. Twitter has
more than 200 million active users and generates more than 65 million “tweets” a day.
Members “follow” other members and organizations. Content is easily shared among
followers by “retweeting.” Format is more pushed than interactive among members.
foursquare: A location-based social networking Web site designed for GPS-enabled
mobile devices that rewards users with “badges” for using their account and checking in
on the site to let friends know their physical location. Launched in 2009, foursquare has 7
million registered users and targets metropolitan areas. As of last year, foursquare now interacts with users
about their location and what’s around them, rather than just sharing that information with friends.
Digg: Released to the public in 2004, Digg is a way to share and discuss news items with
other members. Like Twitter, Digg members can follow each other. Its primary niche is
connecting people to content (voted on and shared by those in the Digg community, who hit
the “digg” button, much like Facebookers’ click “like” button) and encouraging them to share it.
Flickr: Hosting more than four billion images, Flickr intertwines image hosting with
social media. Launched in 2004, Flickr allows members to share their photos, talk through
comments and notes, and pick favourites.
Tumblr: Launched in 2007 as a m icroblogging site, Tumblr touts how easy it is to use.
The home page asks you for your email address, password, URL, and “start posting!”
Tumblr hosts more than 16 million blogs, many of which are photo heavy.
YouTube: Chances are, if someone views or shares a video these days, it’s on YouTube.
Launched in 2005, YouTube allows anyone to view videos and registered members to
upload and share them. The “largest worldwide video-sharing community,” as it says on its
home page, YouTube plays host to more than two billion videos viewed daily. Thirty-five
hours of video are uploaded every minute and more video is uploaded to YouTube in two months than the
three major networks in the United States created in 60 years.
LinkedIn: This social media site with a definite professional twist launched in 2003 and
has 100 million users. Users “connect” with people they know or have some professional or
social connection with, “endorse” people they know and/or have worked with, become
members of interest groups (most based on profession, specific companies, or university alumni), and have
group discussions.
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experiences,” Koux says. “Those building and learning will
be strong through this cycle. It’s a fascinating time to be
in the space. We’re providing a suite of tools that allows
publishers to experiment. That’s our role in it. We’re
sitting in the middle of this, trying to help people jump
over the experience gap into this new land. We see some
people who are afraid to jump. Some don’t jump far
enough and fall in the gap. And some jump and make it
to the other side.”
C. Three types of news consumers
As Brian Solis of Altimeter Group breaks it down, news
companies have three types of consumers they are
competing for:
The traditional consumer: Loves the print
newspaper.
The digital customer: Goes to your Web site every
day.
The connected customer: Goes to the browser only
seeking Facebook or Twitter and finds information
there if your content makes its way to her feed.
Solis himself is a hybrid because he has to keep up with a
lot of current information. Generally, he lets information
come to him, having built hubs that aggregate content
for him. He does not start his day clicking on Web sites,
nor does he download mobile or tablet apps. Why?
“Because they’re still monologue.” He is, for the most
part, the connected consumer.
“This revolution is not just content or not just channel or
not just syndication,” Solis says. “The revolution is that
information has to be hand-delivered like a baton to
individuals. The intermediary between content and a
consumer is a human being, a reporter. You can see the
whole cultural shift that has to take place within the
organisation. You first have to say that how we’re doing it
today is not going to work in these channels. And I don’t
know that anybody is willing to say that.”
Solis believes news companies are trying to innovate
their way around this revolution — putting content on
an iPad, for example. Why would that be, for some
consumers, preferable to having their human network
curate their information for them? He’s not impressed
with newspaper Facebook pages, either.
“If you could somehow build a relationship with me
through reporters that I enjoy, that I follow, then we’ve
got something different,” Solis says. “But it’s just a start.”
The New York Times is doing this. Columnist Nicholas
Kristof, one of the newspaper’s most popular columnists,
posts his own Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. It
sounds like him. He asks questions. You know when he’s
landed in Kigali or Tripoli. He asks questions of hisfollowers and sometimes mentions them by name in
later posts and responses. It feels like you have a
personal relationship with him.
That is social media that will reach the connected
consumer.
So what if, Solis theorises, NYT.com starts spending more
time and money in social media, restructuring its Web
site to allow people to comment, to like, to retweet right
from the page? Done, done, and done.
“That is as necessary and innovative as it is not a
complete solution,” Solis says. “It helps, right? But the
question is how you get someone there. The online
consumer and the traditional consumer are no problem.
Keep doing what you’re doing to reach them. But how
do you get the social consumer to get there and use
those buttons. The thing is that no one has really great
answers. But they’re not asking the questions either.”
Solis asks the question. His answer is that such a model
can be built around scalability not unlike concept
marketing. The smart publications, he says, are already
looking to search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost
visibility of content around topics. The same can be done
for social media.
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4
How 8 Newspapers arePractically Using Social Media
like 12 producers focused on the 40%, but who do we
have on the 60%? We had nobody.”
In early 2007, he created a social media group of four
people.
One of the first things the group did was get the Tribune
on Twitter and Facebook. This was before Facebook had
pages for publications, business, and non-profits. So
Tribune created an avatar called Colonel Tribune.
“That really clicked,” Adee says. “It was the first time I felt
like we got in touch with the Web community here in
Chicago.”
The Colonel has 800,000 followers on Twitter, which
noticed what the Tribune was doing and made the
Colonel one of its suggested users back when Twitter
used to make such suggestions.
In March 2008, the Tribune started its social media
Before there was a fake cobra tweeting from around New York City after his escape from the
Bronx Zoo, there was the fake Shaquille O’Neal. And he was Ward Andrews. U.S. basketball star
“Shaq” was known for humourous verbal quips — and he didn’t have a Twitter account. So Andrews
started one for him. Eventually, Twitter shut down the account. (Google “Ward Andrews,” “Shaquille
O’Neal,” and “Twitter” to read the full story).
The point of this story? “If you don’t take on your own
identity and speak for yourself, someone else will,”
Andrews says. “You need to be there and be the
authoritative voice there.”
Here are eight newspapers around the world doing just
that:
A. Chicago Tribune (United States)
Bill Adee, vice president/digital at Chicago Tribune
Media Group, moved from his position as sports editor
to the digital department in 2006. He immediately saw
the power of social media.
“I started to look at just the numbers of how our site
worked,” he remembers. “We got 40% of our traffic from
people coming in through the home page, typing in
chicagotribune.com or bookmarking it because we’ve
been around for a long time. And I thought, ‘Wait a
minute. Where are the other 60% coming from?’ We had
WARD ANDREWS Owner, Drawbackwards
“If you don’t take on your own identity and speak for yourself, someone else will. You
need to be there and be the authoritative voice there.”
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group. Through tweet-ups (gatherings organised by
notices on Twitter), staff met a lot of local bloggers,
leading to a site of Chicago’s best blogs, www.
chicagonow.com.
“We always get in a huff when people don’t link back to
us and our journalism, but on the flip side, we hardly
ever link out to bloggers,” Adee says. “We found the
best blogs in Chicago and reach out to them to show
the traffic. Our blog network has over 300 blogs. We’ve
learned a lot about what bloggers want in a blog and
we’ve carried over a lot of those ideas to our core Web
site.”
Another part of chicagonow.com is taking the
knowledge gained from the bloggers and training localbusinesses to blog. Out of that venture came the
Tribune Company Digital Consulting Group in late 2010.
Local business owners lack broad knowledge about
social media. They were happy to have help — and
happy to pay for it. The group has four focuses: social
media, Web development, SEO, and training.
“There are plenty of great digital consulting agents that
do big brands,” Adee says. “What about the local
businesses, the ones that we saw as needing the most
help? Many of them are already our clients on the print
business. People come into the Tribune building, learn
the same kinds of things we teach reporters. It’s been
very lucrative for us.”
Statistics show 80% of online users in the Chicago area
are on Facebook. That’s significant.
“We have to use it for that,” Adee says. “But I think just
using it for that doesn’t give us anything. We have to
use it correctly.”
The Tribune uses Facebook to get information from its
audiences and sources as well as learn what’s going on
in a reporter’s area of expertise. Facebook is also a
forum for newsmakers — from Charlie Sheen to Hosni
Mubarak. For now, the Tribune is keeping up with the
big social media players, which seems fairly stable at
the moment.
Adee has faith that the Tribune and others in the
industry will continue to embrace this new way of
engaging with customers: “I think we’re much more
agile than people give us credit for.”
Chicago Tribune
United States
At left, top: Bob McDonald, Katharina Bockli, Katie
Kohler of the Tribune Company Digital Consulting
Group. One of the first things the Chicago Tribune
Media Group did when entering the social media arena
was get the Tribune on Twitter and Facebook with an
avatar called Colonel Tribune.
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B. Financial Review Group (Australia)
The Financial Review Group’s professional target group
seems a perfect fit for social media. Actually, they like
the idea of social but in the more traditional sense of
the word.
The newspaper’s BRW Fast Club (branded after its BRW
magazine) is a non-virtual community of entrepreneurs
and business owners who regularly meet at actual
meetings. In person.
“From day one, the club was profitable,” explains Simon
Wake, group marketing manager at Financial Review
Group (FRG). “But importantly the members gained
most of the benefits, personally and professionally. It issomething that just wouldn’t have worked via a digital
community. Members want to rub shoulders and
network in a safe, branded environment they trust.
BRW’s editorial team is already very close to this broad
community of 2,000 up-and-coming business leaders,
so the brand was a natural fit. The caliber of members
and the community at large attracted the interest of a
major investment bank with a particular interest in fast
growing businesses as principal sponsor.
FRG staff has looked closely at business networking
sites, considering them a marketing channel because of
their ideal business-focused, highly qualified audience.
But that doesn’t bring traffic to FRG’s site, and FRG has
no control of any aspect of such a venture, including
advertising appearing alongside its brand or the yields
associated with its brand.
“For some, there is a compelling reason to be involved,”
Wake says. “For other sites, we see just as many pitfalls
as opportunities. A principle consideration is that any
involvement in social media requires proper resourcing.
It’s not a case of set and forget. In fact, quite the
opposite, because social media is all about being
contemporary and interactive. Any efforts in
developing a Financial Review peer group within an
online business network potentially drives traffic awayfrom our sites and creates a Financial Review audience
in a branded environment that we can’t control.”
Considering that commitment, staff at FRG has
weighed the production overhead of monitoring and
interacting online, as well as editorial investment,
against other possible content initiatives.
“The Financial Review’s brand values centre around
trust, as we provide objective financial and business
analysis,” Wake says. “Some aspects of social media
could put this at risk. The mitigation of this risk often
involves actions that fly in the face of social media
norms and, therefore, cancel out the benefits. We will
develop new social media platforms moving forward.
Financial Review Group
Australia
For its target audience, Financial Review Group has
taken a more traditional approach to social while it
evaluates how helpful the social media approach
might be.
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But it will always be with considered thought and
certainly what we develop will be worthwhile and
resourced optimally.
“We’ve never felt that we have to be there [on social
media]. Rather we’ve looked at what we’d forego to be
there and, so far, some alternatives have delivered a
better business case.”
The Fast Club works, Wake says, because it’s based on
BRW’s brand equity and it’s tailored to a niche audience.
“By their very nature, entrepreneurs are hungry for
ideas. They want to learn from the experience of others
and, importantly, they want to do deals. A face-to-face
environment is far more conducive to achieving this.”
C. Folha de S.Paulo (Brazil)
Folha de S.Paulo currently has one of the highest
number of Facebook fans in the world among
newspapers with 206,000. The newspaper has two
goals with its social media strategy:
Grow its presence on social media networks.
Increase traffic referrals generated toward its Web
site, Folha.com.
“We’ve obtained a good balance between information
(hard news and features), humour, and subjects that
can generate discussions,” according to Marcos Strecker,
the newspaper’s social media editor.
Social network referrers now represent 4% of the
newspaper’s Web traffic, up from 2% less than a year
ago. Strecker has heard it can increase 10% to 15%.
Through Facebook alone, the site gets more than one
million post views daily.
Last October, Folha de S.Paulo launched a Facebook
application, the first of its kind in Brazil, which soon will
have banner advertising. The newspaper also plans to
use Facebook social plug-ins, as The New York Times
does currently, to allow advertising.
“Brazil is advanced in social media with one of the
biggest rates among Web users in the world,” Strecker
says. “You want to be present in every social media
Folha de S.Paulo
Brazil
Consumers in Brazil have one of the highest social
media usage rates in the world, one reason Folha de
S.Paulo is embracing the new opportunities.
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couple of years, it ’s really nothing new to The Guardian.
The newspaper’s Notes and Queries section started
decades ago, tossing out questions and printing reader
responses. Since the debut of The Guardian’s Web site
13 years ago, that social engagement has gone digital,
starting with blogs in 2002 and adding comments to its
Web site in 2004. In 2006, the newspaper launched
CommentIsFree, which engages its audience in
conversation about opinion and commentary pieces.
“Since then, we’ve basically been building and building
and building on the kinds of things we have,” Pickard
says. “But we’ve always thought it was important to
have a dialogue with readers. We haven’t just suddenly
got the memo that we’ve got to do something with
Twitter. But social media tools have allowed us to
extend the kind of things we’ve been doing and
thinking about and relationships we’ve been building
for over a decade now.”
In 2007, Pickard’s department started hosting social
media training “conversations” at The Guardian, using
pastries to get staff to show up. Back then, staff
members could see how social media applied to their
personal lives but not their professional lives. But all
that has changed, with Guardian journalists and others
now understanding the engagement process.
Staff started using Flickr a few years ago. On the day
Barack Obama was elected president of the United
States, The Guardian launched a Flickr group called
“Message for Obama.” The group featured pictures of
people holding up signs with messages for the new
American president. Three weeks later, The Guardian
turned it into a book. The Guardian Camera Club is a
more long-term use of Flickr, with photo editors giving
readers regular photo challenges.
“Readers submit their portfolios and our picture editors,
who are very high in their field, will do a critique of
their amateur portfolio,” Pickard explains. “That’s never
going to make it into print, and we won’t write books
about it. It’s more about we love photography; if you
love photography, how can we engage in this love of
network, but Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are
strategic nowadays.”
Strecker’s strategy is to post up to 12 daily features on
Facebook, 30-40 Twitter posts daily for hard news, and
regular videos posted on YouTube.
Are they bringing in new revenue? Yes, but that’s not
the point, according to Strecker. At least not now.
“We’ve had some campaigns on Twitter, which were
clearly identified as advertising so they would not be
mixed with editorial content,” he explains. “We usually
advertise products of Folha Group like books and
promotions, and we will very soon have banners in our
Facebook application (not on the fan page). But I think revenue is not our main interest right now with social
media. As in the beginning of the Internet, it’s more
important to understand this new media, develop the
right ‘language,’ and have a strong presence in the
networks.”
In Brazil, 86% percent of Internet users spend their
Internet time doing search/navigation, 85% use it for
social media, 75% for e-mail, and 59% for news/
information. By 2014, the number of global users of the
Internet using mobile platforms will outnumber the
desktop users, ComScore reports.
“Social media is especially important for mobile,”
Strecker says. “It’s logical to have a strong presence in
social media networks when we think tablets and
smartphones will somehow shape the Internet of the
future. Social media networks grow faster than other
Internet services. Users are spending more time on
social media networks. It’s clear that being present in
social media networks is important. I think social media
will help with Internet advertising, apps subscriptions,
and Internet subscriptions. It will make the news
industry more effective and relevant.”
D. The Guardian (United Kingdom)
While social media may be the buzzword of the last
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photography? Social media tools are helping us to
extend those kinds of interests and relationships that
we already have.”
The main social media use at The Guardian is Twitter,
which Pickard and other social media experts feel is the
most newspaper-like use of social media. Facebook was
a little trickier in the beginning.
“Our main social media strategy, when we started using
those exact words, ‘social media,’ was really about
making it easy for us to be found and making it
relevant in places where people already were,” Pickard
says. “Facebook was growing in popularity, reach, and
influence. We clearly needed to be there. We had the
feeling that what we did there was less relevant and
would become relevant over time to us and our users.”
When The Guardian started its Facebook page in 2009,
it didn’t tell anyone. Wanting to look at organic activity,
staff looked to see how the site was found and bywhom.
“There needs to be a good reason for somebody to
form a relationship with an organisation,” she says. “It
can’t just be because they’ve heard of us. We realised
that before we knew exactly what the use for Facebook
was, we wanted to know who our audience was. An
audience of people who find us was better for testing
rather than an audience who we’d funneled to our
location. So we wanted to start with the early adapters
or the people clever enough to be able to find us.”
The grassroots strategy worked. Those early adapters
told The Guardian what they wanted posted as well as
what they liked and didn’t like. It wasn’t until 2010 that
The Guardian
United Kingdom
The Guardian is known worldwide as a leader in the
social media movement. But being interactive with
readers is nothing new here, which may be why its
efforts feel so natural in the social media realm.
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the newspaper really promoted its Facebook page. The
Guardian also added a feature that shows how many
times an article has been shared via Facebook or
Twitter, which makes people want to share more,
Pickard says. In addition to the main Guardian
Facebook page, there are pages for sections within the
newspaper: environment, technology, media, and
sports. Generally, Pickard feels Facebook works better
for brands than it does for individual news stories.
Pickard, who has a background in social anthropology
and worked with AOL for more than eight years, joined
The Guardian in 2007. A self-described early adopter,
Pickard has been blogging since 2000 and using Flickr
since 2004. She and The Guardian are constantly
experimenting with different technologies, talking to
the founders of new social media opportunities and
looking for ways in which they are relevant.
“It’s like active watching and waiting,” she says. “We’re
experimenting, tinkering, constantly trying to find new
ways. But it all comes down to reach and engagement.
It’s not about the conversation. It’s about the
relationship; listening in and contributing to
communities of interest and communities of relevance.”
E. Mediahouse Limburg (Belgium)
Mediahouse Limburg launched madeinlimburg.be in
September 2010. The idea was for the Web site to
become “the Facebook of local entrepreneurs,” hence
the focus on the individual, his or her challenges,
successes, and occasionally his or her failures, explains
Koen Van Parijs, who is on staff in the general
management department at Mediahouse Limburg and
assistant to the CEO at Concentra, Mediahouse
Limburg’s parent company based in Hasslet, Belgium.
Within five months, the Web site surpassed most of the
company’s original objectives, now reaching 50% of its
target market, attracting significant new revenues from
a book in review that was tied to the Web site, and
organising a well-attended event (51 businesses
opening their doors to the public on “Made in Limburg
Day”). Staff ran institutional and B2B campaigns on the
Web site with advertisers presenting themselves; staff
started field-selling ads in April.
“What we like most about madeinlimburg.be is that we
have been able to deliver a unique experience to readers
and advertisers at a very low cost since we leverage
existing platforms whenever possible (e.g. CRM) and
Mediahouse Limburg
Belgium
MadeInLimburg.be was created to be the “Facebook of
local entrepreneurs” and is an ever-evolving, popular
platform.
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make extensive use of available open-source
technologies for both our Web site and our crawling
technology when new development is necessary,” Van
Parijs says.
Van Parijs attributes the initiative’s success to the
simple fact that people like to read about people. The
majority of the news on the Web site is people-
oriented, while issues like economics are left to the
traditional newspaper.
Madeinlimburg.be has about 500 exclusive stories
online at any given time and has about the same
number of comments from readers. Traffic is about 30%
above target. Each day, the site gets three to four times
as much traffic as the Web site of the largest serviceorganisation for entrepreneurs nationally.
To comment, readers must log in. Most comments:
Are about a promotion or deal.
Are on the photo galleries (“I saw you” or “Have you
seen me?”)
Are about issues related to every entrepreneur (like
costs or regulation).
“It wasn’t really conceptualised as a social networking
site, but it will turn into a social networking site,” Van
Parijs says. “When people want to do that, you will have
to follow. Our vision was to write about people, but
when you write about people, people start doing things.”
At some point, madeinlimburg.be will have a button
similar to the Facebook like button, but it will say
“Proficiat,” (“Congratulations”). The thought is that this
will cause interaction to increase when people can hit a
button of congratulations in addition to (or instead of)
commenting.
Madeinlimburg.be also has a Facebook page, with
1,100 people as fans among a target group of 20,000.
The Web site gets 30,000 to 35,000 unique visitors each
month. Staff has launched a daily newsletter that is
e-mailed to a target audience at 6:00 a.m. every
morning, which is sending more people to the Web site.
The newsletter is averaging six new sign-ups each day.
The Web site was designed as an umbrella platform for
the book and events Mediahouse Limburg had in mind.
And it is with the former that the new revenue is
coming in. While advertisers have asked for more
advertorial presence on the Web site, so far the
company has refused.
Facebook, Van Parijs says, is a platform that’s hard to
beat for sharing content. But on madeinlimburg.be,
readers really like to see their name. News companies
should provide users with more options to interact withstories, to see what other readers have done with
stories, to see the journalist behind the story, to see
how the story became the story.
“These are all things that we can bring to our platforms,
be it powered with a Facebook log-in — because
competing with Facebook or the next thing isn’t an
option anymore — or otherwise,” Van Parijs says. “If
people are discussing your information on Facebook,
then the value is created on Facebook. The only way
discussion will happen on your site is if you’re
interesting enough, if you are open to people, if you
make it easy for people.”
Traffic from Facebook becomes more valuable each
day, he says. Facebook is a key starting point, but it is
only that.
“Social media is not just about mechanics like profile
pages, buttons, status updates,” Van Parijs says. “It’s
about personal communication, conversation. If you
want to be social, you have to be social in bringing
people in front and be open for conversation. Having a
more powerful platform — like Facebook, and we are
working on that — would certainly lower the threshold
for participating. But in the end, it is about people and
about conversations.”
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F. Metro (Canada)
In 2010, Metro was the first newspaper in the world to
be on foursquare, a location-based social networking
service that has a gaming aspect to it and uses GPS
tracking — a perfect f it for Metro’s urban, on-the-go
readers.
“Location-based is really key to Metro,” says Jodi Brown,
marketing and interactive director at Metro Canada,
based in Toronto. “Now we have a relationship with
about 35,000 followers. What’s in it for our readers as
they move around the city is that Metro gives them tips
about what they could or should be doing or eating.”
Metro Canada also has an iPhone news app with asection called m-flyers (mobile flyers). Like the paper
flyers retailers created, m-flyers are in your hand as you
move around the city, delivered when an opt-in reader
is near the advertising business. Metro can also deliver
banner ads that are geography specific, a huge hit with
car dealers.
“What we’re working on is layering news and
information as you move around your city,” Brown says.
“We’re adding contextual information about each of
our nine cities to get you the news closest to you.”
Brown is a fan of Twitter as the best way to share news,
tidbits, and links with readers, and Metro Canada has
about 30,000 followers. Among the news and headlines
tweeted, Metro also tosses in some marketing and
takes questions from followers.
At Metro Canada, managing editors are key to social
media, watching what the reporters do all day and
managing the flow of tweets and posts going out so as
not to flood readers’ feeds.
“It really tends to be a pretty engaged audience,” Brown
says. “Twitter is great because if readers have any
questions — they may wonder why you took an angle
on something, for example — it’s such an immediate
way to get feedback.”
Metro Canada has had a Facebook page since late 2009
but really didn’t start putting much effort into it until
the past six to eight months, feeling that Twitter and
foursquare were better social media venues. Facebook
is now Metro Canada’s No. 2 referrer behind Google.
Metro
Canada
Metro uses the fact that its audience is urban and in
movement for its social media strategy, which centered
on foursquare early on.
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Metro is about to launch “Be Seen in Scene,” a Facebook
fan page readers can fan for a chance to have their
photograph in the “Scene” section of the newspaper
— an effort to build its number of Facebook fans. The
campaign for the page will be promoted in the
newspaper.
“It’s always a 360,” Brown says. “You can drive more
traffic through Web sites and brand, but you want to
get something back from our core platform.”
Metro’s youth — the free daily is 10 years old in Canada
— is an advantage as it plays with social media. The
New York Times does a nice job with social media, but it
still feels fairly traditional, Brown says.
“It’s hard to change completely the way you do things,”
she says about more established newspapers. “I think
there’s a big shift that’s going to happen. Also, the
nature of technology and what your browser is able to
remember will change. Content providers should be
able to leverage that somehow to deliver to you what
you’re ready for. When your browser knows how many
articles you’ve read about Libya, that you’re pretty
well-versed in the background, then it can recommend
articles based on your level of knowledge.”
Metro definitely is along for the social media ride,
Brown says: “It’s just part of our fabric.”
G. The Press-Enterprise (United States)
Enterprise Media — publisher of The Press-Enterprise
newspaper in Riverside, California — has seen
phenomenal Facebook growth and usage by small
businesses since 2009. Working with champions across
the sales department, The Press-Enterprise created a set
of social media services that small businesses would beable to easily use. The goal was to generate incremental
revenue from existing advertisers and help the
newspaper reach more deeply into the small business
marketplace.
To reach that goal, the newspaper:
Surveyed the local marketplace: To better
understand the social media usage of the group of
advertisers most likely to benefit from social
media, local newsmedia companies should
conduct an annual online presence analysis of
advertisers from the past six months, recommends
Andrew McFadden, manager, innovation and
business development at Enterprise Media. “Our
local analysis showed that many businesses were
The Press-Enterprise
United States
Enterprise Media has monetised social media by
becoming the local expert in it.
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Chapter 4: How 8 Newspapers are Practically Using Social Media
struggling to keep up their Web sites and could use
social media to improve their presence online,” he
says.
Did an internal audit of social media competency:
The Press-Enterprise also conducted an internal
audit to learn how its sales people use social media
and identify training needs. “We learned that most
people use social media in their personal lives but
not as a business tool, so we developed training
materials and sales programmes to teach them
how to use social media to improve revenue and
how to sell it,” McFadden says. “Beginning with a
simple concept, the social media platform needed
to solve the problem of ‘I know I need to be on
Facebook, but I don’t know how to do it.’”
Shared out social media expertise: Success
depends on having the right people employing
best practices and the right leadership to support
innovation, McFadden says. The newspaper has
had some notable successes in helping local
companies launch social media campaigns and
increase engagement. Prior to engaging the
newspaper’s services, a local museum had shown
some success in increasing engagement by using a
personal profile instead of a business page. Since
August 2010, the museum’s fans increased from
500 to more than 3,000, leading to increased
engagement and comments. The Press-Enterprise
team was also able to apply social media
marketing techniques to increase exposure for a
local termite inspection company with no social
media presence to create hundreds of Facebook
fans and more than 700 Twitter followers in just a
few short months.
“We have created a dedicated team of social media
experts that support all of our clients and provide
insights for our content teams,” McFadden says. “While
our launch and growth processes are extensive, the key
is to understand how the client builds business
relationships offline and translate that into interesting
content and engagement activities online. As the local
newsmedia company, there is an opportunity to
enhance our business-to-business brand by being the
trusted expert in social media and social media
marketing. Unlike any other advertising service, social
media is about creating interesting headlines and
relevant content that attracts attention and readers.
Who knows how to do that better than the local
newsmedia company?”
SOL
Portugal
SOL gives its readers the option of liking its content
through Facebook or retweeting it through Twitter, as
well as the ability to connect to Facebook through SOL’s
own Web site.
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Chapter 4: How 8 Newspapers are Practically Using Social Media
H. SOL (Portugal)
SOL first launched its Web site when the newspaper
was born in September 2006. Unchanged by
September 2010, it needed a facelift.
“We were already on Facebook and Twitter, but the old
Web site didn’t have the option to share the content we
published in those social networks,” explains Teresa
Oliveira, SOL’s online editor. “With the new Web site,
coinciding with the explosion of Facebook’s popularity
in Portugal, readers can share our news through the
most important social networks.”
Additionally, SOL gave readers the option to “like” its
content through Facebook or to re-tweet it, as well as
giving readers the option to connect to Facebook
through SOL’s Web site, adding a widget on its pages to
enable readers to see which friends also like SOL. Lastly,
readers can also share news through Facebook without
needing to be registered on SOL’s Web site.
SOL’s Facebook friends have multiplied and continue to
grow, passing 57,000 in February 2011 to become the
network’s second largest community amongst daily
and weekly newspapers in Portugal. A few thousand
news stories are currently shared per week, a great
many of them through Facebook, and much of the
newspaper’s content is “liked” or re-tweeted.
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Structuring Social Media asRevenue or Brand Opportunity
“Social media is one of the stronger brand-building
tools that we can have to create trust and conversation,”
says Jodi Brown of Metro Canada. “There are lots of
other ways to hit your bottom line. It takes time to do i t
well, but it hasn’t cost us a penny in terms of dollars
spent. We’re not paying separate teams to do this.
We’ve incorporated it into the heart of our business.”
Drawbackwards’ Ward Andrews understands the
mentality of the bottom line. But news companies must
understand the difference between monetary capital
and social capital. The latter, he says, carries more
weight in this new, social media world.
“If you have truly built a community with your Twitter
account, with real people talking to real people, you’re
going to be able to deliver a quality product that is
exponentially higher than the other guy,” Andrews says.
“It’s not going to translate in quarter one on the bottom
line, but we’re looking at a younger generation that’s
more interested in my company because of our social
capital than our monetary capital. The value to my
employees who work for me is much higher because
they work for a company that works for a brand man.
We’ve seen this in business for years. There’s so much
Is social media about revenue, brand, or both?
value in saying you work for Nike.
“At the end of the day, I’m going to want to follow the
Twitter feeds of people and brands that give me the best
information and contribute back to my community
instead of the ones that don’t. But that’s a new concept,
and it’s a younger generation that values that. It’s very
hard to explain to an aging editor/publisher that for
them, there may be no monetary value in the short-term.”
But the money will come, experts say.
Consider a company like Visual Revenue. The New York
-based company “provides editors with actionable,real-time recommendations on what content to place
in what position right now and for how long, using
predictive analytics that allow media organisations to
proactively manage the cost of exposing a piece of
content on a front page, whilst maximising the return
they expect from promoting it,” the company’s Web site
touts.
The company launched in early 2011. Its analytics tell
editors what people are most interested in at the
moment, by the minute or by the hour, giving them the
JODI BROWN Marketing and Interactive Director, Metro Canada
“Social media is one of the stronger brand-building tools that we can have to create trust
and conversation. There are lots of other ways to hit your bottom line. It takes time to do
it well, but it hasn’t cost us a penny in terms of dollars spent. We’re not paying separate
teams to do this. We’ve incorporated it into the heart of our business.”
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knowledge they need to make decisions about moving
content around.
Author Marshall Sponder feels such data is key to
newspapers trying to engage readers and bring in
revenue.
“This addresses the problem of figuring out on the
front pages of section pages if you have the rightcontent up there long enough,” Sponder says. “A
newspaper has a lot of content, and most of it is
archived content within the first day and a half. The
most money is happening then. This is the time when
people want to read the story. The metrics help
calculate how much money that newspaper makes if
they can keep people there reading it longer [using an
advertising calculator].”
Tameka Kee of Social Times Pro sees several possible
ways newspapers could bring in new revenue from
sites like Facebook, where all sorts of social commerce
already is going on. News companies could:
Sell custom content like in-depth articles or special
photo spreads.
“Rent” an in-depth Q&A in the same way that Warner
Bros. is renting movies on Facebook. Why couldn’t a
newspaper sell a 15-minute video interview in
five-minute snippets for US$0.99 cents each?
“If it’s valuable enough, then somebody’s going to buy
it,” Kee says. “It’s not going to be core revenue, but it
might end up being a content play, another option for
them to sell their content.”
Means of distribution and means of consumption have
changed, says the Guardian’s Meg Pickard. Digital
media allows consumers to customise, time shift, use
completely different formats. News organisations must
stop thinking like they are talking to consumers in one
way at one time.
“Each content must be relevant in its own way,” Pickard
says. “Rather than mass, think about how we can
stimulate and serve and monetise many niches. Niche
MARSHALL SPONDER Author and Specialist, Web Analytics, SEO/SEM
“A newspaper has a lot of content, and most of it is archived content within the first day
and a half. The most money is happening then. This is the time when people want to read
the story. The metrics help calculate how much money that newspaper makes if they can
keep people there reading it longer [using an advertising calculator].”
Social media engagement
This graphic from VisualRevenue.com gives a visual
glimpse of the key words readers of The New York Times
liked via Facebook.
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plus niche plus niche equals mass. Rather than finding
one thing for one million people, we find 10 things for
100,000 people. Just because this has always been
about trying to find one thing that works for
everybody, what does that look like in the changed
world, a world in which mass doesn’t work?
“That’s where we’re looking at this. A series of engaged
niches that are loyal, have relevance, have details. Does
that beat the anonymous mass, fleeting and fick le
drive-by audience? That’s the sort of quandary that
everybody is really coping with at the moment. How do
you think about the changing shape of the audience
and the changing shape of attention?”
The Guardian doesn’t feel like it needs to make moneydirectly off its social media activities, Pickard says. A
sustainable business, yes, but the two are intricately
tied together.
One of the keys to extending revenue is through
increasing and enhancing reach and engagement, she
says.
“Engagement will point to different usage of our sites,”
Pickard says. “Being able to say, ‘Look, it’s not just 40
million who have come to a site once, but we’ve
actually got people who are loyal, come back
frequently, this is how many times a day they use it.’ It’s
being able to say our relationship is not just for fun
because we’re able to do something more with them,
and they become a more valuable audience.”
Adee agrees, adding, however, that there is money to
be made in social media. And The Tribune is making it.
Adee has a budget and a P&L.
So, social media is about revenue and brand.
It is about the revenue: “Every incremental bit of
revenue counts,” social media consultant Murray
Newlands says. “Some newspapers have a very large
presence on Facebook, Twitter. There are advertising
opportunities within both. That’s where their
advertisers want to be. If they don’t, they’re missing out
on not just revenue but also an opportunity to engage
on behalf of advertisers. They should be looking at
where do advertisers want to engage with their
audience? Because really, part of what a newspaper is,
is a conduit for engagement with the audience.”
It is about the brand: “I consider social media a big
engagement and brand initiative,” says Jodi Brown of
Metro Canada. “Strengthening your brand through
social media doesn’t have a direct monetised impact,
but it does impact your brand as a whole. The more
engagements you have, the more our engaged readers
love us on the way to work. We are able to launch more
new products that can be monetised if we have an
engaged audience who loves us on all platforms.
It is about both: “It’s about building a legacy, leaving a
legacy in the long-term growth,” Andrews says. “If you’re
on there early, you have the opportunity to gain market
share as markets emerge. That may be the value. The
guys who were online early, they’re the ones who have
a mature digital department who are actually making
money on it. If 10,000 hours of work goes into being
proficient in something, you’d better start your 10,000-
hour clock now.”
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Social Media Optimisation(SMO) for Publishers
The solution to that? Empower a new generation of
reporters who are connected and spend part of their
day writing and part of their day connecting. That
connection is a commodity, and newspapers need to
realise that.
“It’s content marketing and it’s social networking, but
it’s also audience building,” author Brian Solis says.
“Newspapers are competing for attention. They have
yet to really acknowledge that. What we’re looking at is
a whole new infrastructure, a new type of connected
reporter down to the HR level. They have to be
rewarded for this audience. The era of the traditional journalist is over.”
Of course, social media doesn’t fall entirely into the lap
of the reporter. Social media should, in Solis’ opinion,
be a new role of the managing editor or a new breed of
editors all together.
Luke Brynley-Jones of Our Social Times recommends:
Listening: You can buy services to search out — in
specific terms and phrases — what people are saying
Now that you’re figuring out SEO, let’s start working on social media optimisation (SMO), which is
all about human connections. And reporters aren’t so sure they like that.
what about your content. Facebook has privacy
standards, making such tools less helpful. But say you
have data coming in on readers who are interested in
tropical fish. You can put that into specific search tools,
allowing you to give out niche news on the topic.
Engagement play: A key strategy for future revenue
models must include increased customer engagement.
News companies might consider a team to do this. “You
need to have somebody there responding to the
discussions [articles] spark, on Web sites, the mobile
versions of Web sites, or on the actual platforms where
a lot of the discussions will be taking place,” Brynley-Jones says. “The reason for it is not just to spark off
conversations and chat about it. Just by being involved
in the conversation, you are connecting yourself better
with the customer. Through that, when you do come to
want that customer to do something for you, buy
something, join something, share something, then
they’re more likely to do it.”
The big plus for newspapers in this is that they already
have an engaged audience. Brynley-Jones says they just
need to leverage that audience and engage with them,
LUKE BRYNLEY-JONES Founder, Our Social Times
“Just by being involved in the conversation, you are connecting yourself better with the
customer. Through that, when you do come to want that customer to do something for
you, buy something, join something, share something, then they’re more likely to do it.”
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perhaps taking one of these discussions about a
specific news story and holding a live event or
discussion. “Then it becomes either an event or a report
or a news story that they can then monetise,” he says.
Tapping into the real time news currency: Social
media dashboards (like MarketMeSuite) are a way to
balance consumer need for immediate news without
overloading Twitter feeds and, thus, a newspaper’s Web
site. “There’s a big land to curate what you get from
Twitter,” Brynley-Jones says. “Basically, there are
downloadable apps to set up different columns for
different topics. There’s a column for all your social
media monitoring. You can set it up so if somebody
mentions a specific word of phrase within a specific
distance, say 50 miles of London, you can automaticallysend them a message.”
Such technology allows newspapers such geomapping
relationships, especially important with the rise of
consumers using smartphones for their social media
consumption. Useful information for newspapers to
have? Yes, but most aren’t very savvy about it.
From what Brynley-Jones has seen from the
publications he’s spoken to in the United Kingdom,
newspapers still have traditional teams set up, tracking
the demographics and metrics of their distribution.
“Because of their strong background in statistics and
analytics, sometimes they haven’t had the will to shift
into social media,” he says. “That’s going to have to
change. They’re rightly, to an extent, focused on the
bottom line. I used to walk into offices and say, ‘You need
to be listening and engaged,’ and they would look at me
like ‘where’s the money? Who’s going to pay for all this?’
“The answer, though, is the same as it is for any
business. Which is there’s a curve with social media, an
investment of time and effort. You start with a really
high investment of time and very little return. Then,
gradually, the amount of time you have to put in drops
and the engagement you’re getting goes back up. It’s
the scale of engagement.”
Sponder’s most recent focus is social media metrics:
“You could track everything if you want to take the
trouble,” he says.
Barnes & Noble has the ability to know Sponder is at
their store and tweet him while he’s there. The reality
right now is that technology allows more information
— or intrusion, depending on how you look at it —
than customers may want.
Technology aside, newspapers’ content puts them in
the perfect position to partner well with social media,
Sponder says. While there are worries about where that
content appears and where people are using it, social
media loves — and needs —content. Sponder
mentions the Huffington Post as a “perfect example” of how media use social media.
“The whole social media ecosystem functions on
having something to talk about or share,” he says.
Sponder recently saw a New York magazine that
sponsored a video film workshop, offering a weekend
class for US$1,000 — much less than the US$30,000 or
US$40,000 one might pay to shoot and produce video
through a private company or school. That magazine
will now curate and feature that content, almost like a
guild, Sponder says.
“Not like the old guilds but in a sense that one thing
the publishing outlets have is an audience,” he says.
“That offers some unique possibilities that a lot of
others cannot offer.”
When Sponder looks at the major players among U.S.
newspapers, he sees that they’ve given up trying to
monetise their online content; they are trying not to
lose any more subscriptions and trying to give their
print newspaper subscribers more platform options to
see their content. And social media clearly is one of
those options.
“Even at The [New York] Times, you can see how so
many people comment on Facebook,” he says. “There’s
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Chapter 6: Social Media Optimisation (SMO) for Publishers
the possibility now to cull responses that really didn’t
exist until about five years ago. The question is, again,
what to do with it, how to monetise it. The information
itself is free, but the intelligence and knowledge that
come out of it isn’t.”
Complex Magazine in the United States used a metrics
system that was able to determine, based on different
parts of the magazine and its network, who its
audience is and what content they may want to see
shared, Sponder explains. The system suggests to social
media managers which of the magazine’s posts and
articles are more sharable. That content is, thus, shared
more. This curation of content intelligence using a
social graph produced a 25% increase in site traffic and
a 30% increase in the number of fans of the magazineat the end of 2010.
Gathering the analytics of social media is getting easier.
The real hurdle is what to do with it, Sponder says. That’s
where newspapers need to invest.
“It’s how you layer it, what you do with it, how you relate
it to business metrics, and business goals, which is really
what people are willing and needing to pay for,” he says.
“Those are hard things to do, and that’s why they cost
money. Maybe using Twitter gives you relatively good
results or Cloud gives you some interesting results, but
they are not reliable. Increasingly what money is spent
on is reliability, the validity of the data.”
What data do newspapers have that someone might
spend US$10,000, US$15,000, or US$25,000 on? “My
feeling is the data itself is a commodity,” Sponder says.“It has been for the last two years. More than the
intelligence behind it, the data’s the gem.”
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Social Media’s Next Stepsat News Organisations
While news organisations admittedly are still finding their way with social media, planning ahead
is tricky. That’s true whether they simply have a Facebook page, have enriched Facebook-like
interaction on their Web site, or are restructuring their different departments to embed social
media.
stream for newspapers. And because newspapers had a
traditional way of looking at things, they’re bad with
keeping up with the monetisation methods that some
social media publications have had. Most of them have
been slow to react. I see it, in a way, as similar to Detroit
and the car industry as far as the type of structural
industrial change.”
While many believe it’s fine to sit back and watch while
the big players in the industry determine the best way
to monetise and engage with readers with on the
tablet platform, that isn’t the case with social media.
Everyone interviewed for this report believes
newspapers will find their way into it — whether you
go all-in like Metro or make an informed decision based
on your audience to go a more traditional route like
Financial Review Group.
As Brian Solis once said, “Monologue has given way to
dialogue.” But newspapers are all about monologue. All
about the masses. Neither of which will work with social
media. Newspapers simply must get out of this century-
old mindset. And that starts at the top, Solis says.
“Leadership at any organisation is not something that
you have just because you work your way up,” Solis
says. “It’s something you have to continue to earn. If
you’re not steering your organisation in a direction that
Even the most innovative newspapers like The Guardian
and Metro are watching — “actively watching,” as
Pickard puts it — to see where social media will go
next.
This is a movement led by three drivers:
1. Technology.
2. Obvious long-term leaders like Facebook and
Twitter.
3. Consumer whims and newly developing habits.
It is like the iPad/tablet question in many of those ways
(replace “Facebook” and “Twitter” with “Apple”) but
unlike it in the way that social media is an issue of
relationships, not a specific platform or device.
How flexible and pliable newspapers are in this space
— to consumer needs as well as their own — will
dictate how well they fill and engage with it.
“Social media is creating lots of additional content, and
I suppose that competes with attention with traditional
newspapers,” Newlands says. “People get their news
from a variety of sources, and those other news sources
compete for the ad dollar, driving down the revenue
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is embracing emerging opportunities, then you don’t
belong in that position. The sooner leaders realise that
it’s their responsibility or have people within their
organisation who can convince them there’s an iceberg
ahead, the better. The difference is that everybody’s
telling you that it’s there.”
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8
ConclusionStruggle though they will, the future of news media and social media are intertwined. Technology
simply makes richer the connection between the two.
Revenue is not the only consideration.
Facebook and Twitter improve the newspaper
brand by getting its content in front of anotherwise unreachable audience that wants to
engage.
There is no tangible benefit to these social
experiences taking place off the newspaper’s Web
site.
Newspapers inherently have the content necessary
to engage with their readers via social media.
“Consider the social mean content like grains of sand
— there’s a lot of it and it’s inexpensive,” Echo States
CEO Khris Koux says. “What the publisher needs to do is
blow glass. How do I make a vase or a wine glass or a
bottle out of this sand, which is so plentiful and cheap?
That’s what I keep going back to — the experience.
What experience do you craft with 1,000 tweets and 500
photos so it becomes beautiful and part of the story and
doesn’t drown the story out?”
That, among other questions, is still being navigated —whether news companies “like” it or not.
Perhaps none of this should be a surprise.
“There is no such thing as ‘social media,’” Mediahouse
Limburg’s Koen Van Parijs says. “Media have always been‘social.’ Media provide information, entertain people,
and, more importantly, help people integrate socially
— giving them something to talk about, establishing
relationships with other people by helping them,
sharing things. Media help build and confirm their
values.
“Ten years ago, we talked about the personalised
newspaper. We always thought personalising meant
that we, as news publications, would control it, that we
would aggregate the information. Look, we’re in 2011
and people are aggregating for themselves. Your profile
page or your wall on Facebook is a kind of newspaper. It
doesn’t really look like a newspaper, but there’s a lot of
news that’s relevant for you, and you can customise it
yourself. It’s the most personal newspaper you can
imagine.”
The lessons from this social revolution are numerous
and fluid:
Money can be made through social media.
“Ten years ago, we talked about the personalised newspaper. We always thought
personalising meant that we, as news publications, would control it, that we would
aggregate the information. Look, we’re in 2011 and people are aggregating for
themselves. Your profile page or your wall on Facebook is a kind of newspaper.”