Over on my personal blog, I mentioned a new instructional / inspirational video about social marketing that I think is really important for news folks to view.
Produced by Don Crowther of StomperNet, the message is that any business (and yes, that includes news companies) can take advantage of a huge opportunity — with a short window — to drive significant Web traffic, and get first-page search engine rankings, by using simple and cheap social marketing techniques. (That means utilizing existing social-media services such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Squidoo, Bebo, and hundreds of others.)
Why the short window? Because using social marketing to drive your business is something anyone can do. Most people haven’t yet figured out that it’s important and powerful — or they’re scared of the concept because it involves engaging in conversations with customers and audiences. But eventually social marketing (sometimes referred to as conversational marketing) will become mainstream, and using it for quick success will be a thing of the past.
In other words, most people are still clueless about social media and social marketing. If you’re not clueless — or can quickly get a clue — then it’s a nice short-term opportunity.
There’s a factoid in that video that I think is profound: Photobucket has replaced Flickr as the largest photo sharingsite in the UK. Photobucket gets 55 percent of its traffic from widgets and applications on social networks MySpace and Bebo. By comparison, Flickr only gets 2.4 percent of its traffic from social networking sites.
Let that sink in. By developing an effective social marketing strategy, you could — if Photobucket is representative of what’s possible — double your traffic by bringing in new users from social networking and other social sites. You’d do that by putting your content on lots of social sites, and engaging in (relevant and appropriate) conversations there.
This is especially significant if you’re a news organization that’s setting up niche sites. Think about using social marketing to establish your sites as the leader in their topics. Even on general news sites, you could use social marketing techniques to establish your coverage of, say, local politics, or land-use issues, or whatever, as a leader.
I spent the last couple years immersed in social (aka, grassroots) media, and got to dig a bit into social marketing. It’s a powerful new technique that too many people — especially in the news media — have avoided thinking about. Will the news industry let yet another important online trend pass it by as others dive in?
