How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic

"Teenager finds bat asleep in bra" or How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic Martin Belam International Social Media Summit, May 2009

Information Architect at The Guardian

*disclaimer

"The views expressed in this presentation are my own,

and do not represent the views of Guardian News & Media"

The Final Frontier

What is "Social Media"?

Diagram by Brian Solis

Let's not get over-excited here

"Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing as a 'social drinking sensation'.

You don't call people giggling on the phone a 'social telecommunications sensation'."

Social bookmarking icons

Social bookmarking icons have infected major publisher

websites like some kind of Internet design plague

Nobody likes to be pointed at as the odd one out

Popular services

The services you are most likely to see are Delicious, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Yahoo! Buzz is popular in the US

Popular services

Popular services will vary from country to country and

from language to language. And planet to planet.

The single icon approach

Some sites use ShareThis or AddThis

to reduce the number of icons on the page

Bookmarks give value back to your site

The BBC and The Telegraph, for example,

show people on their site what has proved popular off-site

Links drive traffic

These services can drive significant traffic.

Getting on the front page of Digg can drive many new unique visitors

Where there is traffic, there is cash, so there are cheats

Services offer to sell votes and recommendations,

or build robots to do it "automagically"

Twitter

Winner: Communications Technology Media Hype Award 2009

Announcing content on Twitter

Some publishers use Twitter as a pure 'push' medium, just like RSS

Selective promotion of content via Twitter

@GuardianVoices points to spikes of interactivity around

The Guardian's blogs or Comment Is Free site

A conversation with the audience

Channel 4 News have earned praise for their approach to Twitter

Good use of Twitter can really enhance your brand

ITV's football coverage is often criticised, but the person (or people) running their Twitter presence are very engaged with the audience

Counterfeit goods

You need to monitor what is happening

to your brandname in the Twittersphere

Blogging

It turned out not to be the CB Radio of the 2000s

Robert Peston has been the face of the "credit crunch"

You can't force people to blog

A successful corporate blog needs to work hard on tone -

a chronological list of press releases is not a blog

Build relationships, not email lists

Don't mass email bloggers - target them.

I wouldn't open a packet of crisps in London without inviting these two…

What about when it all goes wrong?

You will get criticised online…

… but then you used to get criticised in the pub, office and school playground, and you didn't have an opportunity to respond

It isn't going to go away… http://soshable.com/

You want people to carry your content with them

How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic Martin Belam International Social Media Summit, May 2009 currybet.net [email_address] twitter.com/currybet