Photo courtesy of MalNino via Flickr
This post was written by Kevin McFall, Vice President of Global Business Development for Cision. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @JournoPR3point0.
The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) has not resigned itself to the hysteria and belief that the newspaper industry is going by the wayside. They are instead attacking their future head on. In doing so, they enlisted some assistance in clarifying the myriad of definitions, platforms, benefits and pitfalls to avoid of social media.
During their recent Mid-Winter conference in St. Thomas Virgin Islands, the group introduced their first NNPA “Social Media Academy,” a day long series of workshops created to help publishers understand what social media is, the mechanics of its use, opportunities for integration, and strategies for monetization.
I was honored to be asked to contribute insights and best practices on how social media can be used to deepen engagement with current readership and to expand the reach of these key community newspapers which have served our nation’s African American communities for many decades. While many might assume that being media companies, these organizations were already well underway using social media tactics to help their businesses grow, they fall into the same category as noted in a January 2011 study by Ad-ology that cites 46% of small businesses plan an increase in online marketing spending.
So to help equip these publishers with knowledge they need to execute their social media marketing spends effectively we led them through three dimensions of social media. In the initial session, we presented an overview of social media and what the world of shared media looked like. We touted the benefits of being multiplatform publishers and marketers and how social media enables that broader reach and more granular measurement. Finally, we concluded the initial session with a look into the near future for their papers, which included collective buying and couponing models, along with taking greater advantage of their strengths in location-based and hyper-local with emerging media technologies in those categories.
The next session focused on the mechanics of how to leverage some of the principles and functionality of social media into their newspaper offerings. We focused on Facebook and Twitter since they have a dense concentration of the potential audience and readership for these community newspapers. We presented several leading industry examples and best-practice implementations of newspaper Facebook and Twitter pages like those published by the Washington Post and New York Times. We also directed the publishers to resources like the Facebook Developers Documentation for Social Plugins, and popular social tools site OneForty.com to show them where they could get specific and easy to follow directions for integrating social engagement features onto their newspaper websites. Emphasizing this was only one facet of social media, we next presented an overview of influencer identification and social media monitoring so they could gain a basic understanding of who to seek out and what to listen for when those influencers and others communicate across the social sphere. They were introduced to Cision’s Social Media monitoring tool as a great solution for discerning 10 key types of messages to listen for and then 21 tips were provided from Brian Solis’ book Engage as a great guide to mastering techniques for building brand evangelist around the publisher’s newspapers.
The final portion of the social media academy focused on monetizing social media. Classic examples of digital marketing activations were given from Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken”, to Chase Bank’s cause-based giving campaign, to the back in the news again Old Spice man campaign. We highlighted how these types of engagement initiatives could be turned into revenue for both the publishers and their advertising clients. In the end, the culmination of the concepts and capabilities were impactful, but it was the discussion on revenue generation that resonated with them the most. They were grateful to be leaving the beautiful island of St. Thomas with many great new insights about leveraging social media throughout their business, but as publishers they were most concerned about the bottom line, which in the end, when we think about it, isn’t social media simply about driving the bottom-line?
Want to see what Kevin presented at the conference? His NNPA slide deck from his presentation is available here.
