I've been to literally half a dozen seminars in the past few months about social media. Everybody is excited about it. Government and business communicators are excited about it because it's an inexpensive, often free, way to get information to their clients and citizens.
Since the elections there's been a seminar every week on how the candidates used social media.
People who are entrenched in social media are very excited about it because it's creating new ways to do their jobs, and in some cases, actually creating jobs. Bloggers, Facebook users, Tweeters are all feeling a part of a social information revolution.
Only the established press is not excited. I recently attended several lectures at the Virginia Press Association headquarters in Glen Allen. I got in through the backdoor. I maintain a membership in the Virginia Press Women and that group was invited to this VPA event to fill chairs. In the two social media tracks I attended, the presenters were excited about how newspapers can embrace this technology and make it their own.
Like: find your cities' most influential, popular bloggers and link to them on your newspaper's website.
Some of the editors and reporters from small towns across the state said they had no idea how to find such bloggers, or even if they existed. The rest were downright hostile. Bloggers traffic in rumors and untruths, according to the press. Why do they want to link to bloggers?
One presenter showed how reporters who also blog are doing amazing jobs covering sports. Sports is a weekend game. No one wants to wait until the Monday morning paper to read about the game or comment back. The sports reporters who are online are instantly reporting. This often means staying up late after the game is over to converse with readers, or writing and posting on Sunday.
On Sunday.
You can feel the room ice up with Virginia-resistance.
Some of these sports bloggers have become their own self-employed news hubs, divorcing their papers and setting up advertiser-supported websites to report on their beats.
As evidence that bloggers are liars, one Richmond rep mentioned bloggers and Tweeters had gotten the Ukrop's grocery store chain sale story all wrong, that they fanned a rumor that turned out to be false. Did it? The core of the story is true. The supermarket chain was faltering and might very well take a good offer. (It's 2012 now, and that's exactly what happened. Social media had the freedom to speculate on it first because the grocery store, a major advertiser, had cooled the story to the daily paper to not influence the sale.)
The moderator brought up several types of stories -- like how to buy and finance your own home without a realtor -- and asked how many papers were doing those kind of stories? In these perilous financial times when no newspaper wants to lose more advertising, do advertisers control the type of stories written?
There was no shouting of nay, nay or blasphemy! blasphemy! Everybody there knew it was true.
Another lecture was about how to make money from social media. It's hard to get ad salesmen excited about selling digital button ads at $100 or less. Some innovators have found ways to automate it. But here was the future of ad selling: Twitter!
The Austin Statesman will run certain types of ads -- those that offer discounts, coupons or magic word incentives -- on its Twitter feed for two Tweets a day for $150.
But what's going to keep a person with a healthy following from undercutting you? Tweeting your ad twice a day for $50? Or just doing it for free. You'll be craiglisted in weeks. In fact, I pointed out, in Richmond we already have @rvabargains doing that and @styleoffers is trying to get off the ground.
Ice.
