Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue

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Newspapers and Social Media:From Monologue to Dialogue

April 201

Dawn McMullan



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



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.”




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.”




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.”




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




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.”




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




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.”





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.”





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.”




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.”




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.





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.”





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.





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.





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.




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.”

http://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9CWard+Andrews%2C%E2%80%9D+%E2%80%9CShaquille+O%E2%80%99Neal%2C%E2%80%9D+and+%E2%80%9CTwitter%E2%80%9D+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a







Chapter 4: How 8 Newspapers are Practically Using Social Media

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.

http://435digital.com/







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.





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.





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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree







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.





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.





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.”





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.





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.





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.





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.




5

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.”

http://visualrevenue.com/







Chapter 5: Structuring Social Media as Revenue or Brand Opportunity

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.




Chapter 5: Structuring Social Media as Revenue or Brand Opportunity

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.”




6

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.”




Chapter 6: Social Media Optimisation (SMO) for Publishers

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

http://marketmesuite.com/







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.”




7

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




Chapter 7: Social Media’s Next Steps at News Organisations

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.”



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.”

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Newspapers and Social Media: From Monologue to Dialogue

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