[Ed's note: What follows is a superb guest post from John Potter, VP of Technology at CNET Networks Business.]
As the World Wide Web is transformed into what Tim Berners-Lee has called the Giant Global Graph, companies whose primary business is producing content need to adjust. If you're working inside a content company, and you're a user of social networking sites, or social media sites like Digg, then you probably already know this. Chances are, though, you'll need to sell this up the chain within the company. To help you, I've put together some of the best arguments for embracing these changes.
The primary reason for embracing social media is that you need to be where your audience is. I mean this both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense, you need to promote your content on the social media and networking sites that users are spending their time on. One of the most common objections to putting effort into doing this is that your current audience doesn't use these sites: "our users don't even know what Digg is." On the surface, this is a hard objection to overcome, because obviously a company tends to focus their efforts on their existing users. In reality, it' a trivial objection, because it is incredibly short-sighted. Even if there is not a lot of audience overlap now, chances are the demographics of users of social media match well with those of your existing users.
Right now, I guarantee you there are large numbers of users on social networks and media sites, who would love your content, but who will probably never hear of your web site unless you reach out to them. Your need to reach these users is even higher if your existing audience demographics don't match those of the social networks. In the 1990s, people in the newspaper industry used to joke that "our audience is dying every day," because young people weren't reading papers, and the elderly people who did were steadily disappearing. It was a joke, because, at the time, their business was still relatively healthy.
It's not a joke anymore: the newspaper business is imploding. Similarly, by rejecting new methods of distribution, the record companies put themselves on the same path of decline. If you work for a web content company, you need to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to you. To do that, you need to be where your future audience is already, and social media and networking sites are where they are. Moreover, even if you ignore this large potential audience, you can be sure your advertisers won't. Advertising spending is quickly shifting from TV and print magazines to the web. Where it goes on the web depends where the audience is. Increasingly, your advertisers will be asking how they can use you to reach the users of social networking and media sites. In the figurative sense, the idea of being where your audience is means you need to provide your users with a site that has all the interactivity that they have come to expect. Today, users are not willing to just passively consume your content. They expect to not only be able to comment on your content, but to rate it, to share it, embed it on their own blogs and social network profiles, and to receive credit if they link to it through trackbacks. If you don't provide these tools, your users will gravitate to other sites that do provide them.
A second reason reason for embracing social media is that you expand the reach of your existing community. Whether you publicly acknowledge it or not, your site already has a community of users. At a minimum, that community is shaped by the content you produce. However, if you allow comments, you have already taken the further step of letting your users interact with each other. As your users interact, they build a community, and individual users build a reputation within that community. The more tools you provide for users to interact with your site, the stronger this community will become. Adding the ability to rate content, to submit your content to social media sites, or to embed your content on blogs or MySpace profiles will increase a user's identification with your site. That's important, because in many ways, social media is about the users' branding of themselves, and you want your brand to be part of the individual user's brand.
One of the largest sources of advice or information that people turn to is their peers. So, if someone sees that a friend is participating on your site, they are more likely to do so themselves. If you then expand your community's reach onto social networks, you provide your most active users with an additional way to leverage the reputation they have built through their contributions to your site. That makes their contributions more valuable to them, and encourages them to continue to participate. By providing a convenient way for users to show their affiliation with your site on social networking sites, or submit them to social media sites, you give your users another way to evangelize your brand. Even if you never gain any direct traffic through this (and you will), you increase your brand recognition. This makes it more likely that users who encounter your site on Google, or other search engines, will recognize you and click through.
Lastly, by embracing social media, you will more quickly optimize your content production. Web properties learn what's popular, and hone their programming, based on their knowledge of what people are consuming and talking about. Traditionally, you can only measure site activity by page views and on-site comments. Now, social media provides you with many more tools to assess how you are doing. By seeing who is linking to your content, who is rating that content, and how often that content is being submitted to social media sites, you can more quickly assess how you are doing. The more open you are, the speedier your programming optimization will be.
In conclusion, it can help to think of social media as the new blogs. Not that social media are the same, but it's instructive to look at the fear publishers had about blogging a few years ago, and how far they have come. As time has gone by, content companies have come to embrace the openness that characterizes blogs. Publishers have to be brave enough to take the next step and embrace social media. The internet is about connections between people and content, and content providers have to recognize that and leverage it by opening up their sites to those connections.
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