(Limor Peer)

The Internet is a communication medium and people engage with it and use it more when they can connect with others. No wonder that social media is all the rage - their audience is growing, they receive ample time and attention from their participants, and they are increasingly worth a lot of money (see YouTube-Google and NewsCorp-MySpace deals).

Elsewhere on this blog, Rich Gordon talked about how news media can become connectors for communities, in essence being a social medium. Here I want to talk about how news media might go about leveraging social media as a third party (as opposed to the actual participants in social media, who are the "main parties"). This is clearly an opportunity to reach desirable potential audiences. But how can news organizations harvest the power of social media to enhance their brands?

One answer comes from the field of marketing: Advertisers are third parties, and they are in the midst of a debate about what to do about social media. This was at the center of a half day conference organized by the Media Management Center and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. About 80 participants - senior marketing executives from large and small companies, traditional media folks in charge of digital media, advertising executives, industry researchers, strategic planners, professors, and students (whose papers you can read on the conference site) - gathered at Kellogg's downtown Chicago campus to discuss social media and marketing.

The question of how to best leverage social media for marketing was brilliantly discussed by Mohan Sawhney, a marketing professor at Kellogg and the first key note speaker at the conference. According to Sawhney, social media can be integrated into every step of the marketing process:

1. Ideation and concept formation - community based idea generation and "trend sensing" like IBM's InnovationJam which is an online, company-wide, multi-country innovation brainstorming session.


2. Product development - the community is a platform for collaborative design, product testing, and demand forecasting. For example, Converse letting people design their shoes at the Converse Gallery.
   


3. Positioning - outsourcing creative functions to customers, like the Doritos Crash Super Bowl ad campaign, or Chevy Tahoe inviting consumers to create their own ads as a promotional tie to an episode of "The Apprentice."
   


4. Marketing communication - Create opportunities for active customer engagement. For example, FaceBook group sponsorships like Paramount's sponsorship of an environmentally conscious group to promote Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." Corporate blogs can also serve a similar function.
   


5. Customer support - the community provides peer-based support, communication around a product. For example, MyTreo community discussion board.

Thinking of news - and local news in particular - as a product to market, the parallels for news organizations are apparent. Embracing the community in all steps of the marketing process means more than involving people in the process; it means giving up a certain amount of control to them. News organizations are not there yet ... how many news organizations allow users to contribute to the development of their sites? Or encourage community peer-based customer support of their sites?

One of the best lines in the conference belonged to Chad Stoller, Executive Director of Emerging Platforms for Organic, a digital marketing agency. His advice to advertisers is that if they want to come to the social media party, they need to - like any stranger, latecomer, new-guy-on-the-block crashing a party - make sure they come with beer. And if they really want to be liked, they ought to also order the pizza and definitely help clean up. The main point being that, third parties can't come empty-handed and expect to be well-received, let alone profit. They have to give something of value to the community that is already doing pretty well without them.

News organizations might think they have a leg up on many advertisers because they enjoy a wide-spread recognition that they are important and valuable in society. But just like the awkward stranger at the party - status isn't conferred, it's earned. With this crowd, news organizations need to give in order to get.

News organizations have a choice to make about the role they want to have in the social media space - they can select the role of a third party, in which they use social media to advertise the brand or simply push content, or they can be full participants and leaders, invested in social media and shaping the conversations that take place there. The role news organizations take will depend on the stance they take toward social media, but also, Sawhney reminds us, on other contextual factors (such as corporate appetite for risks and experimentation and whether there is a perception in the company that the design is amenable to open source work).

This table describes Sawhney's taxonomy of the roles advertisers can have in the social media space. The organizing principle is "stance and scope," that is, how reactive or proactive the organization is when it comes to social media.



This table, along with Rich's ideas on how to build a networking strategy, provides a framework for thinking about social media that should be urgently considered. For many news organizations it is almost too late to join the party.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.


Note: The Social Media Marketing Symposium is the first of many Media Management Center programs and events on digital media issues. To be placed on MMC's Digital Media contact list, please e-mail v-vahlberg@northwestern.edu. To view some of the more than two dozen white papers and essays on social media issues that MMC has published, click here and here.