Newspapers and Social Media
As many of you know from my latest Twitter posts, I am at the Suburban Newspapers of America conference, talking with a few of my colleagues on the state of our industry. I gave the keynote address at this conference and covered the Top 10 things that publishers needed to focus on, to ensure a profitable 2010. One of the items on my Top 10 list was utilizing social media, correctly, to drive traffic to your Web sites. Many outsiders of our industry will find this point interesting, as they’d think newspapers would be uninterested in using the very medium that many blame for boosting their readers away. However, I can’t tell you how many times, of late that I have received calls from newspapers asking about using Twitter and other forms of social media, to benefit their organizations. The unfortunate thing is that although they call and I provide advice, many of them still move on to using social media the wrong way. They use these forums to sell and worse yet, post every classified listing they have in their database, as singular Twitter feeds. Those of us who understand social media see this as going against the very thing that social media was built on – two way engaging communication. As one of our industry players (Ben Smith – Lawrence Journal Word) put it, “it’s a form of spam”. The statistics shared by SNA chairs also fermented the fact that newspapers need additional training and education on how to use social media effectively:
Excerpts of SNA Social Media Survey
Are you using some form of social media at your newspaper?
75.8% – Yes
18.8% – No
5.4 %– Don’t know
What forms of social media are you using?
Facebook and Twitter were being used the most, along with a list of almost 200 other Web sites. What was concerning though, was that many of the sites on the list were not social media sites, but more of an online resource property that by no way represented the two way social activity that social media fosters.
Those not using social media, were asked if they plan to start using social media at their newspaper
35.3% Yes
23.7% No
41% Don’t know
The same group was asked how much they knew about social media
31.8% said they knew very little
A great reference point for newspapers and a recent example of how to use social media to drive traffic and build mind share for a nontraditional Web 2.0 company, is the very viral ‘Fun Theory’ video by Volkswagen. Our publishing industry could take a lesson or two from them. The video was fun, engaging and used for branding only and it worked – and thinking of engagement leading to mind share and branding is the exact formula newspapers need to apply when engaging in social media.
Fun Theory Video:
