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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Venuto: Magazines' Social Opportunity Thankfully, we are starting to see this behavior change. With some failures behind them, magazines are quickly realizing their future depends on the speed and innovation of their product development lifecycle. They are finally realizing the value and influence of local bloggers, niche communities and citizen journalists. Perhaps more importantly, magazines are taking advantage of existing social graphs to extend their editorial reach. More than reach, people are using their social graphs to influence each other—online, in small groups, through peer pressure—which is in turn giving rise to a whole new form of marketing that we call Social Influence Marketing (SIM). Razorfish defines SIM as marketing to the network of peers that surround and influence the customer across social platforms and on brand Web sites. The rise of SIM reflects the emerging thinking that the social Web and the mainstream Web are converging (should converge) and that digital publishers and marketers need to deliver better value exchanges to consumers that allow for more direct influence. SIM isn’t a hypothesis. It is now a driving force that affects everything we do as an agency, and it matters more than ever as consumers across the country are losing faith in large media organizations, and experts are instead turning to each other for advice. Magazines should know that 2009 will see SIM maturing and being incorporated into every online advertising campaign and marketing effort. It will be a year in which companies realize that social influence must be harnessed strategically if they want to transform their brands and their relationships with customers. Magazines have an incredible opportunity to adopt this phenomenon online, but doing so requires a different approach to editorial and product development. Consider these five points: 1. Focus on the value exchange between your brand and your users. 2. Harness the social graph imaginatively; think beyond your editorial content. 3. Don’t be afraid to mix your community with your advertising. 4. Help marketers find the social influencers. 5. Design social products, not products spread socially. An excellent example of a print publication embracing all these components in an innovative online product is the The Economist.com’s recently relaunched debate series. The Economist took the Oxford style debate—a hypothesis, moderator, pro and con speakers, rebuttals and comments from the floor—and brought it online. The online structure provides a forum for serious intellectual user-generated content in a controlled manner. Editors introduce a topic and then invite guest speakers to provide arguments for or against the hypothesis. Users can then add their comments and vote for the pro or con argument. The debates continue over a set period of time, with rebuttals and vote casting occurring continuously. A final tally is collected after closing arguments, and a winning position determined. What’s great about this example is that The Economist designed a social product that provided value to its audience, was totally on brand and mixed community with advertising. Publishers doing more of this will have a greater chance of being successful than those that can’t resolve the tension of involving communities into their brand and business model. Another great example of a magazine tapping into an existing social graph is BusinessWeek.com’s integration with the social networking site LinkedIn.com. Articles referencing particular companies will show a “LinkedIn Connections” link in the tools section of the article page. Clicking the link will show a scrim with the number of connections you have within the referenced company, along with the names of your top three connections. The value exchange here is clear. Readers can act on the information that piqued their interest by contacting someone within the organization, whether that be for recruiting, partnering, networking, research or curiosity purposes. This is an excellent example of tying one brand editorial with the social graph established by another site. It is also a nice combination of topic based and purpose driven functionality that uses existing social networking functionality and the massive community already established. The application of open social standards, such as Facebook connect and LinkedIn’s API, is still small, but this leaves plenty of opportunity for innovation. I encourage magazines to seriously look at these open social standards to quickly plug into their vast and far-reaching communities. Creating fun social products built on a brand’s core promise and tied into the Web’s vast social graph is only limited by imagination and a team’s ingenuity. Magazines have all the tools to be successful, and these examples really only scratch the surface of what is possible. Domenic Venuto, SVP and Head of the Media and Entertainment Practice with the New York City office of Razorfish, is one of our Minsiders, minonline’s series of columns by magazine industry experts and executives. He can be reached at domenic.venuto@razorfish.com. The author gratefully acknowledges Shiv Singh, Vice President and Global Social Media Lead with the New York City office of Razorfish, who contributed to this column. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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