Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

I was recently asked to present on the topic of ‘Monetising Social Media’ at Magazine Week in Sydney.  The audience were experienced publishers who had moved into the digital world and looking to continue to evolve with the changing landscape.  I personally think the presentation title is a little misleading.  You cannot really monetise social media – but you can use it as a vehicle to drive traffic to your website to generate revenue.  This does work if done right as the Old Spice case study shows. In this case Old Spice was a dying brand but used new inbound marketing techniques (the audience opts into your network are via facebook, twitter blog subscriptions etc) with traditional outbound marketing (pushing a message out hoping the right audience finds it (print and TV advertising, radio, trade shows etc) to great success.

One of the biggest thing that impressed me was that the publishing companies in the audience had moved on a great deal in the last 18 months.  iPad apps, digitization were the norm and Michael Nielsen’s prediction in 2009 was being borne out:

Today, scientific publishers are production companies, specializing in services like editorial, copyediting, and, in some cases, sales and marketing. My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.

Michael Nielsen, Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted

Here is some of the presentation with evidence to show outbound marketing is becoming less effective whereas inbound marketing is cheaper and and has more impact (for traditional powerpoint format go to slideshare here

Thanks to @sandnsurf for the Peter Shankman quote and @iggypintado for the Old Spice case study

Although Google Buzz is being phased out (and merged with Google+) businesses can now add themselves to Google+

From the Google Blog:

For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.

A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.

Direct Connect from Google search
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.

Maybe you’re watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Angry Birds). We’ll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.

That sounds like a good SEO opportunity to me!  HubSpot also do a good write up on Google+ for business and how to add yourself.

With over 55 billion tweets sitting in their database and more being added in real time, twitter provides a lot of data mining opportunities – both for brands and for research. If you are at all interested in analytics this new offering from PeopleBrowsr is worth having a look at:

• Real time twitter search – over 3 years worth of data segmented by location, community, interests, gender, sentiment…..
• Deeper diving with viral analytics platform
• Engagement platform – allows searches (like tweetdeck) AND a separate column of charts based on the live search data being pulled
• Generate raw data for export
• Collect info in a personalised ‘playground’

More great resources from Hubspot. This time a five minute video on how to create a facebook page. Not only that – but once you have created the page, Hubspot gives you an idea of what and how to post AND how to measure what you are doing.

Here are the 5 steps:

1. Choose a Classification
2. Complete Basic Information
3. Fill the Page
4. Take Advantage of Features
5. Play and Track

They also include a freebie ebook – How to use Facebook for business

Sound familiar?  You need to have software know-how.  Learning a bit of html doesn’t go amiss, plan content, network, attend trade events, learn new platforms, recruit and train, publish and join the conversation… At some point, surely, these roles will more become defined – but until then, ‘Jack of all Trades’ kind of fits….

How do people (myself included) find out local news?  I thought I was the only one in still ‘needing’ TV news of an evening to stay up todate but it seems not:

Pew’s infographic (2011) on how people find out about what is happening in their (US) neighbourhood found that local newspapers still scored the highest (25%).  Pew’s full report here

While local TV news remains the most popular source for local information in America, adults rely on it primarily for just three subjects—weather, breaking news and to a lesser extent traffic. And for all their problems, newspapers (both print and on the web) are the source Americans turn to most for a wider range of information than any other source, according to a new survey out today.

I also rely on friends to tell me what events are happening in town so, despite the internet, some things have not changed