It pays to be social

Dear Traditional Media Marketer,

Social Media is a very profitable and effective tool for tradit

ional media, and in addition to innumerable companies and brands, radio, television and print companies have also started to take advantage of it.

Minnesota Public Radio, for instance, considers its Minnewiki, which is launched in the fall of 2005 as a local music scene encyclopedia, to be one of its most successful social media projects. On April 13, 2007, the site had already been accessed 48,264 times. (Source)

Meanwhile, WBEZ prominently features daily photos of Chicago scenes on its home page, either found on Flickr or submitted by the station staff. The Photo of the Day functioned, for Daniel Ash of WBEZ, as a powerful tool of localism, countering what he sees as a public radio weakness. (Source)

Other stations like Q101 and Hot97 incorporate blogs, podcasts, and profiles on MySpace, and even channels on YouTube.

In television, ABC Family has launched a promotion on twitter around the new show Gr

eek, a comedy-drama about frat and sorority life, and the title character in NBC’s show Chuck, a computer geek who becomes a secret agent, also will twitter to fans. (Click here for the article)

And CBS has disclosed that social media has brought an additional 200,000 viewers in just one month and that, “YouTube has brought a significant new audience of viewers to each broadcast.” (Link)

Print journalism is also jumping in. In June of this year, the BBC conducted a “social media experiment”, where journalist Ben Hammersley “will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video

to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook” while covering the run-up to the July elections in Turkey for two weeks. Check out his social media content here.

Even the The New York Times Co. last year started offering on its Web site buttons for posting articles on Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine.com, an indication that the venerable news organization is embracing online social news sharing, while Steve Rubel explains how USA Today offers reader comments on every story, the ability to create a profile page that can be shared with others, citizen journalist photos, story tagging and digg-like recommendation buttons.

So What?
Your audience is social. Are you?

Interested? Here’s more:

Mathew Ingram – Can a newspaper be a social network?

GigaOm – Can social tools save plan ole’ radio? 

New York Times – Is radio still radio if there’s video? 

Billboard – Clear Channel launches social networking sites 

Community Rewards

Dear Online Community Manager,

Want to get your audience to participate? Reward them. There’s more than one way to do it. According to Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru:

Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.

Reputation management is also a great example of community rewards. Sites like eBay and Slashdot illustrate how it works. On eBay, a seller’s reputation allows a buyer to decide whether or not to trust them to conduct business fairly. On Slashdot, a discussion board, users assign a rating to comments based on their usefulness, and regular users are also rewarded with “karma” points.

On Wikipedia, the reward system is less obvious, but there nonetheless. The most active editors are granted “administrator” status, which gives them many more editing powers than the regular “editors”.

For a stellar example of community rewards, check out Virgin Radio’s VIP Awards. Virgin’s registered members are called VIP’s (already a nice psychological reward), but the more they participate and contribute, the more rewards they are likely to get. Virgin uses “Kudos” to reward its users with a number of different badges including “VIP of the Day”, “Number 1 VIP”, “Outstanding Contributor” and inclusion in the “Top 400 VIP’s” list, among others.

For an example of how to use monetary rewards, check out EksoMusic.com. Users earn EksoBucks for every contribution that they make to the site that they can redeem for concert tickets, CD’s DVD’s, music downloads and other prizes.

A reward system is also used on Fool.com, a site that advises people on stocks, investing and personal finance. The most frequent contributors to the site’s discussion boards are awarded free subscriptions to the newsletters of their choice and can eventually even be given a small stipend and the responsibility to monitor and patrol the boards or be recruited as a Motley Fool staffer.

And finally, Duke’s Chowder House also makes great use of incentives by offering 2 free dinners to anyone that signs up for their email list and a free cup of chowder for every friend they refer to the list!

So What?
Reward your users for their participation. They will be encouraged to contribute more often and with better content. Rewards will also motivate less active users to participate more.

Want to learn more?
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute – Jakob Nielsen

Reputation Managers are Happening – Jakob Nielsen

Online Communities Need Currency – leelefever for Common Craft

Community Rewards and Identity – Jon Nix and Pam Thomas, CommunityAnswers.com

(image: ©iStockphoto.com/Kuklev)

The Social Media Quiz

Dear Marketing Expert,

For the last several months, we know you’ve heard buzz words like “social media,” and “join the conversation” pretty much non-stop. Well, we thought that you might be interested in knowing that there are some pretty significant differences between two of these buzz words that sound like they could mean the same thing: “social media optimization” and “social media marketing”.

There’s more than one way to use social media. Social media marketing (SMM), for eample, uses the peer-to-peer networks, online communities and viral tactics to help a message spread online. Social media optimization helps make a website more discoverable. An example of SMO optimization is including social bookmarketing tags like post to del.icio.us and making content like videos embeddable on other sites. SMM could consist of creating groups and profiles on social networking and sharing sites. SMM is primarily focused on promotion through social networks, whereas SMO is concerned with getting visitors to link to and share your website.
Check out Cameron Olthuis’ post provides an insightful commentary on this.

Got it? Take the quiz and find out! (Scroll to the end for the answers).
Is It SMM Or Is It SMO?

1. The “Be Social” section on Miami New Times website

2. The “Apple” group on Flickr

3. The Dell “Yours is here” campaign Channel on YouTube

4. The “Share” button at the bottom of every post on TechCrunch

5. The Wired Magazine Page on Facebook

ANSWERS

1. SMO

2. SMM

3. SMM

4. SMO

5. SMM

How did you do?