TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

digital

7 reasons why companies need social media managers

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There has been a lot of debate recently about the need for companies and organisations to employ social media managers and specialists in a dedicated role – the main criticism appears to be that the role isn’t needed because employees already use social media.

That might be the case in a limited number of small organisations, but someone will end up as an unofficial social media expert. And as someone who performed the role for a large organisation, I know there are a number of good reasons for having one person as the focal point – even if every employee is actively representing the group or company.

1. Justification: Are employees going to use social media effectively when they have senior managers questioning whether it’s worthwhile?

2. Guidelines: Most people have a reasonable amount of common sense, but if you haven’t got clear guidelines for employees to refer to if needed, you’ve got no excuse when they get things wrong. And all it can take is one personal attack for even the most responsible employee to make a mistake. That’s assuming they even keep up to date with the latest legalities of using social media in addition to their day job.

3. Analysis: Do you know what’s working? And is a social network referring the most traffic because of scale, or because other social networks are being ignored or done badly?

4. Co-ordination: Do you trust independant employees to know where exclusive news should be revealed first? Or could a status message or tweet destroy your carefully planned campaign? Is the right content going online at the right time, to coincide with the right development work?

5. Research and Development: Is Facebook more relevant to your company than Bebo? Will you reach the right people on Twitter? And should you be improving the forum on your site, or developing a widget for social networks? The answers are different for every organisation, and indeed, every campaign

6. Coordinating external resources: Do you know enough to decide between a good and bad external agency when it comes to social media? And in a large company, are you sure other departments aren’t hiring other agencies at the same time?

7. Crisis management: When something does go wrong, you need a plan in place, and someone who can manage an effective response.

Whether or not social media is a specialist role, or part of a wider remit, there needs to be someone with the authority and accountability to ensure that the work feeds into the wider business effectively, with an effect on product development, customer service, SEO, and business strategy.

Ads and Paywalls won’t save newspapers and magazines

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Numerous newspapers and associations of publishers are discussing the topic of paywalls for specific content or entire sites in an attempt to ‘create value by beginning to charge for it’ in the words of the American Press Institute.

Sadly for that plan, it’s not 1998 or 1898, and I’m not sure how charging for something creates value. The value that should have been created was lost when sales teams bundled online advertising as a free or low cost ‘added value’ bonus to print advertising, at a time when online adverts were capable of getting a decent click-through rate – and then not investing in helping advertisers to utilise new opportunities to better connect with their prospective customers.

The end result is that display advertising is generally decreasing in direct effectiveness and value (although there can still be branding benefits), and attempts to offer more innovative solutions generally fail because advertisers find it too much of a leap from simply booking the biggest reach at the lowest price they can negotiate. Those advertisers that are more innovative, meanwhile, have already started learning that they can create their own content and interaction directly with customers.

And the paywall debate continues to ignore the problem.

Instead it’s simply gouging consumers instead of advertisers.

I already have a paywall around newspaper content – which is one reason why I don’t buy print content. Every day I walk past racks of printed content protected by a cover price, because I can quickly access a wealth of equivalent content online, tag it and save it, interact with it, and often interact with the authors of it – whether bloggers, or increasingly mainstream media employees.

Want an example of ways to monetise a piece of content effectively – this is probably my favourite example of making the most of it.

It means investing in the content creators in your company who can connect and leverage levels of interest – whether they’re a celebrity columnist or an editorial assistant. It’s easy to forget the passion people feel for their favourite title or writers when you’re stuck inside the bubble all day.

It means creating value worth paying for and then offering people the chance to invest in it. And people need to be able to judge and justify the value for themselves – not be forced. Think forcing people works?

And it means creating value for the businesses who are looking for new customers.
I’ve seen companies move advertising budgets because a commercial person switched companies after giving them great service and helping them learn better ways to connect and make sales. If that person was able to educate more businesses, the demand from competitors and other companies would follow.

The problem is that doing all this requires more work, which could reduce the profit margin – but I’d rather have a small profit that can grow, rather than heading for losses.

U.S print ad sales dropped 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, losing more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue. There’s a lot more analysis on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur, including breakdowns by category, but losing almost a third of the value suggests U.S. print ad sales are reaching terminal velocity, and the rest of the world isn’t going to be far behind.

Online sales also fell by a record 13.4%.

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t need to sell as many widgets and doohickies than ever.

It means they can’t see enough value in print or online newspaper advertising to use a recession-hit budget.

And those that survive the recession will have had a crash course in finding alternatives which are more cost-effective and justifiable. They won’t be rushing back.

Will Britain become a rural backwater online?

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Although I already knew the difference in broadband speeds around the world, seeing the direct comparison in a BBC article on 100Mbps broadband really lept out at me.

‘The upcoming Digital Britain report is expected to outline plans to give the UK population universal broadband access at the modest speed of 2Mbps by 2012.

In South Korea, the government is aiming for speeds of 1Gbps by 2012, up from the current average speed of 15Mbps.’

Now I know that companies will be able to justify the additional cost for the faster speeds available, but in an online world where everyone is networked, what’s the cost for entrepreneurial individuals if they’re stuck on 2Mbps competing with someone on 1Gbps?

I’m thinking about people like my son, who will probably start using computers and games consoles around 2012.

And about businesses which will always aim for the majority market – globally in the case of the digital world. If you’re running a service in 2012, will you build it for those on 10Mbps? 20Mbps? Or the people on 2Mbps?

The other major problem doesn’t seem to have been mentioned anywhere – in the U.S. for example, there’s uproar about the introduction of data caps at 250Gb…in the UK I’m doing fairly well to have a data cap of 20Gb!

Competing with 1/12th of the information, data and capacity available seems like a bit of a handicap.

Newspapers continue to talk a bad game…

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Lumping together so many disaprate businesses into one homogeneous ‘newspapers’ group is always going to result in a bit of schizophrenia, but when you’re attempting to discuss an industry, it’s a bit unavoidable.

Still, a few recent bits of information point to an industry that as a whole are still running around pointing fingers without working out their own gameplan.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the position Google occupies by providing the discovery and aggregation mechanism for news content – While I disagree with some of his points, Nick Carr compiles a lot of the views in an interesting post, which is immediately countered by Nieman Labs Matthew Ingram (Whose name seems to be coming up a lot in the Nieman posts I’m enjoying the most).

Meanwhile Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey has talked about “Superdominant players like Google and the death of journalism as we know it.”at the Digital Britain Summit.

“We’ve become dependent on pats on the back from new kids on the block who tell us what the rules are.” – lots more via PaidContent.

However:

I don’t know whether it was Nick Carr or Danny Sullivan who first pointed out that by editing the robots.txt file, newspapers can cut their search traffic off to spit their face.

Obviously the drop in traffic isn’t an option if you’re still selling display advertising based on scale, but there are options.

Besides picking an alternative search engine to work with (Hmmmm)…

How about using more social media to minimise search – after all, there are reports it’s driving more traffic than Google in some niche areas already.

Or instead of introducing Facebook and Twitter as middlemen, why not play around with open APIs (Hello, The Guardian) or install your own newspaper Laconi.ca?

But here’s where it gets really confused:

‘Newspaper publishers will no longer be required to supply newsagents with the newspapers they order under a shake-up of the regulations governing newspaper distribution. ‘ from Brand Republic.

Now this comes from Government Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, but I would allege that a rule change generally doesn’t happen without at least some consultation or consideration of the big players involved.

‘Small newspaper retailers are concerned that they risk becoming dependent on the larger retail wholesalers’

Hang on – small newspaper retailers are worried that they’ll be stuck with hugely dominant middlemen – doesn’t this ring a bell?

At a time when local is seen as a newspaper saviour, is it right that small newsagents are likely to suffer, and get the blame when people who might not be able to easily travel to a large supermarket on a daily basis can’t find their paper?

And incidentally, if local newsagents disappear, then newspapers and magazines (which I work on/with), are then left with large supermarkets as the dominant distributors. (I hear the sound of a bell ringing again)

And despite my questioning of it, the small percentage of online newspaper readers compared to print shown by both Martin Lengeveld and Ian Duncan, and now followed up with a great comparison by Rob Weir at the Columbia Missourian, does indicate that people migrating online can completely bypass the newspaper site they might read offline.

Is anyone else’s head hurting?

Some clarity:

There have been some well documented cases of newspaper businesses doing things rather than just talking about them.  The Guardian and the New York Times being about the biggest and best known examples.

Watch what they do, rather than just what people are suggesting. And please share other examples of innovation and change in all forms of journalism/digital publishing.

See what happens to those emerging from the wreckage.

And keep a close eye on the results, but also consider the other factors. A Finnish online-only daily might have suffered since losing the print edition, but is that down to the editorial proposition, staff cuts, tech adoption in the region, broadband access, alternative news sources, etc? Nobody knows yet.

Somehow we need to cut through the confusion.

Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

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I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream– I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?

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