How The Media Should Take Advantage of Social Networking

Kevan Stone September 23, 2010

Social media has taken the internet by storm. Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming movie “The Social Network” has a website entitled www.500millionfriends.com. What media outlet wouldn’t want 500 million subscribers, especially if most of them were millennials – those born between 1990 and 2000?

The media, if it hopes to ride the social media wave, must embrace sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, for the name of the game is branding in places where the young in general and the young business professionals in particular are apt to gather..

The heaviest hitter is Facebook.  Chances are some ftm readers have Facebook pages, maybe even minimized to read this story.  The site allows one to “connect” with friends, family, and colleagues in a socially friendly and easy way.  Want to let your friends know what’s going on in your life; post it on Facebook.  Think that YouTube video was hysterical; post a link onto Facebook. Think your friends would enjoy a media story, even this one, then post it on Facebook. Now if individuals can do that why not media companies?

Initially, family and friends were the target when the site first launched (see Sorkin’s film for insight into that one).  Later came fan pages where users were able to “like” certain businesses, people, social causes, etc, giving exposure not only to the user, but to their friends as well. And it wasn’t too long before business saw potential there, too. A good media example is to type Wall Street Journal into Facebook’s search engine (link). The page will tell you that more than  130,000 people “like”, or subscribe, to this page.

Talk about free branding!  On my initial visit to the Journal’s Facebook page the moment I click on “like” or “subscribe”  that information goes out on my newsfeed to my more than 1,500 Facebook friends – that 1500 is no typo; people my age tend to have a ton of social media friends).  Might some of those friends take a look to see what I am talking about? Might they like it, too, and thus their friends are told about the site, and then they look at it and … well, you get the idea. The WSJ page includes articles filed by the Journal plus there are reader comments. The Journal can also recommend publications or sites also on Facebook that they endorse, own, or follow.

The page is designed for the younger users – it is impressively interactive, with multiple tabs allowing a reader to pursue columns, stories, and even dedicated discussions.  It is a perfect integration of allowing the user to do what they would be doing on the internet anyway, but through the Journal’s page.  Additionally, the page allows for the user to see if any of their friends also “like” the Journal, allowing one to make a seamless connection to others. 

It provides for debate and comments about specific stories, or the publication as a whole.  Moreover, it provides a “hip” impression to youth, which is Facebook’s primary audience – ok, my Dad has a Facebook page but he’s in the minority at his age!   It is important to note that this page is free to the user. 

So how does all of this help the Journal?  It puts itself at the forefront of electronic readership in the media world.  It provides a doorway to a demographic that previously would not even think about subscribing, all for the cost of allowing a few stories to be accessed for free. The hope, obviously, is that later in life when the reader needs to know more about the business and financial world that a subscription will follow.  Not too many college students pay to read the Journal, but now they have some access via Facebook and so they become familiar with the product.  What news organization doesn’t want to encourage such millennial readership?

On to Twitter, for which I have mixed emotions. Twitter allows its users, in 140 words or less, to post whatever they want and it is sent out to their network (those that “follow” the user). Some media organizations have embraced it but fall into the overload trap -- I once subscribed to MSNBC’s news tweet but cancelled it quickly because there were just so many Tweets that they became an annoyance. 

Many millenials use Twitter to follow celebrities and news-makers rather than for hard news. But Twitter recently started a breaking news service (link)) with many of the Tweets coming from credible national and international news organizations. It’s a good way to get an instant fix on the breaking news of the day.

Take The Los Angeles Times, for instance, and look at the bottom of a Web news story.  You’ll see: Email: (link); Twitter: (link)(link); Facebook: (link) to encourage citizen journalism. And as this story is being written the number one item on the Twitter breaking news page is a LA Times item on the arrest of local municipal politicians. There’s a link to the entire story on its Web site so this gets people where the newspaper wants them to be – a great example of how social networking sites can serve to get young people to visit a news organization’s various digital platforms. Much like Facebook, Twitter provides an avenue to widely disseminate information.  A user is able to attach a URL from another tweet, thus creating a chain that allows for more exposure. 

And somewhat embarrassingly for news organizations Twitter can easily be first with breaking news – it really showed its value, for instance,  in 2008 with the huge Chinese earthquake when the only reports for some time were via Twitter from people caught in the middle of the earth moving beneath their feet.Credible news organizations probably will treat such Tweets as a tip something may or may not have happened, but at least they get the tip.

And then there is Linkedin.com.  It’s a bit different from Facebook and Twitter since it is geared to business professionals in a businesslike manner as opposed to a socially inclined website.  LinkedIn allows its users (free, of course) to create networks and promote their professional lives.  It allows the users to list their career experiences, current and past positions, and allows for recommendations to be posted by colleagues, customers, and other relevant individuals.  Additionally, it allows companies to have a page as well, listing its members and posting career opportunities, or, in the case of the WSJ, it created such a page itself. 

I won’t dwell on how the likes of classified Web pages such as Craigslist have hurt the newspaper classified business, but newspapers can learn a thing or two from Linkedin. Living in the Washington, D.C. area, this writer has utilized LinkedIn as a job search tool.  When one enters the customized parameters (in this case, the Washington D.C. metropolitan area), a slew of job postings come on the screen.  In an example last week, more than 60 alone came from Microsoft.  After cross referencing, this writer found that those jobs were not posted on any local media outlet and were thus exclusive to the site (as well as Microsoft’s site).  The same could be said for other entities also looking to fill employment posts. 

On any given day, there are hundreds of posts in Linkedin that are not in the classifieds section of one’s local paper.  Do the math; that is huge! LinkedIn has successfully branded itself to appeal to the business professional and it provides an attractive arena for job candidates.  In local print outlets, you may see professional career type postings, but they can sometimes be intertwined with the “dime-a-dozen” sales, marketing, and dog walking posts (that is not a joke).  Is that really the kind of company a monolith like Microsoft wants to keep?

Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, while very different, have recognized who their users are and have succeeded in branding their products to ensure future growth. The media should jump on those bandwagons, using them heavily for self promotion, for at the end of the day, what the media wants most of all is eyeballs, especially young eyeballs, – and the social networks can play a huge role in getting them. If the media doesn’t do this, then it shall its own definition of the “lost generation”.

Ed. note: 32-year-old Kevan Stone long ago gave up reading print newspapers and magazines and relies on the digital world for constant news fixes. He shares what he and others like him – American young people - expect these days from media news organizations.

In this second of a two-part series, he concentrates on social networking sites and how they can aid the media into getting eyeballs, especially young eyeballs, to their own sites. In the first part (see here) he explained why mobile phones, even more than tablets, are the savior for the media’s future.

Kevan Stone lives in Washington DC and is the son of Philip Stone.

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