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

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….

If you want an overview of some of the things that Google offers, Hubspot have an excellent ebook.  If you don’t know about Hubspot – they are offer a ton of  free Hubspot resources and clear explanations on business use of social media as well as software.  Below is one such example.

Download (PDF, 1.89MB)

“Getting support from my managers and Ministers to venture into social media has been a bit like taking my Dad to the Big Day Out….”

Respondent comment, Nielsen Social Media Study, July 2010, public sector survey

This latest Nielsen report is now available for download.  It was recently presented in conjunction with Community Engine in Sydney which I attended  – see my comments on the initial reactions here: Nielsen and social media use in Australia.  Here is the report in full.  It covers:

1. Australian business’ investment in social media
2. The social media activities conducted by business’ in 2010
3. The barriers to business investment in social media
4. Experiences and outcomes to date