I recently, attended a presentation during Silicon Beach Pasadena at IdeaLab presented by Perfect Market, "Content Marketing for Startups." On the panel were Tim Ruder from Perfect Market, Martin Beck, Social Media and Reader Engagement Editor at LA Times, and Tony Pierce, former Blog Editor at KPCC, LA Times and LAist.com. There was a big emphasis on the importance of social media to online media. Social media is so important that the Los Angles Times has a social wall for its online content.
There were several takeaways from the event that online publishers should find interesting.
- The Los Angeles Times is no longer in bankruptcy - after a revolving door of editors and problems, it is surviving by using many content marketing strategies.
- The way people get and use news is changing. An audience member asked the panel about how and when news is read. The consensus was that people consume news over the day in small bites, instead of once a day in the last century when news came in a paper version, once a day.
- Companies should create a team of group blogs with multiple voices. Updating a post is fine, but if it's more than 2 hours after the post has been published, create a new post and link back.
- Subjects in online media/news should be as unique as possible.
- Social media especially Google+ is very important.
- Online web content should have follow structure that includes breadcrumbs.
- Since people spend as much as 17 hours a month on Facebook vs 12 minutes on the top 25 news sites, publishers should have interactive presence across social media.
Newspapers have been struggling to make money with online versions of their publications. Social media is so important that non-subscribers to the Los Angeles Times are being blocked from articles if they don't Tweet, Google + or take a survey, via a social wall.
On a recent visit to the Los Angeles Times website, I was blocked access to the content if I was not a subscriber, unless I took a survey or shared the page via Twitter or Google +. Clicking on the Google survey button showed "The website you're visiting earns money from the surveys that appear." Some could consider this wall, forced social networking. Instead, I went to one of the many other online news sources, I read for free.
Wireless and Mobile News encourages your Google+, Tweets and Facebook "likes," however you will not be held a social hostage to read anything we publish. We know that if you are reading this article on a mobile device you are in a hurry and don't have the time to take a survey or a forced Tweet.
You can see the back of my head in the photograph in the front row, highlighted in yellow, above.