LibraryTechtonics

Today I’m hanging at the BlogHer Boston 2008 conference, where I have bartered early-morning registration table duty and 2 live blog posts for entrance into the conference.  Props to Kristy Sammis for a job excellently done in terms of organizing the conference, and for giving me the opportunity to be here!

My first full session (I caught the tail-end of the speed dating bit of the opening session, but I’ll talk about that later) was meant to be focused on how social media can actually help support traditional media and even save it from going the way of the dinosaur.  The discussion was a little all over the place, and with good reason, since there’s no easy answer to reconciling one medium with the other.  But the fact that the session went non-stop until the end with energy and discussion speaks to the fact that it’s not impossible, and we had a lot of ideas on the subject.

Our fearless panel

• Lisa Stone, moderator
• Lisa Williams, the creator of H2OTown (Watertown, get it? :D) and a leader in the PlaceBlogging (or hyperlocal) media movement
• Sarah Corbitt, GateHouse Media New England’s director of online content development, producers of WickedLocal
• Teresa Hanafin, Boston Globe’s Director of Community Publishing
• Colleen Kaman, current MIT media researcher and Emmy-nominated journalist/documentarian (I met her during the speed dating thing, she’s awesome)

To be honest, the first portion of the session made me feel like I’d walked into week 4 of “Online Advertising 101″ without doing any of the homework.  I understand online advertising conceptually, but when it comes to the technical details of CPM (cost per thousand impressions when it comes to web advertising), run of paper vs. run of site advertising, and numbers, numbers, numbers, I was a bit lost, but I tried to do my best to keeep up and grok it.  I will say that many interesting resources were mentioned during the talk that I can imagine would be useful to advertising gurus and novices alike, since a huge part of the traditional vs. web problem is driving revenue to the right places:

• BzzAgent:  company that specializes in finding your target market, giving them access to your product/service, then turning that into a word-of-mouth buzz for you.
• YouData:  kinda like social networking for advertising…. you post what types of advertising you want, advertisers post what kinds of ads they offer, and you find each other.

If you know of more sites like these, or even informational articles and such especially catering to bloggers who are new to the whole blogging for revenue thing, please share them in them in the comments.

These advertising resources are indicative of a trend that many of the panelists acknowledged, and Lisa astutely summarized, after we got past the bulk of the blogging-for-dollars speak: growing and sustaining an excellent community is the key to growing and sustaining an excellent business model; it’s all about business models that promote quality information, and having equal interest in growing the number of users you reach as well as growing revenue.

Simply: relationships and user content.  Let me take you where I’m going.

On one hand, Sarah Corbitt talked about how difficult it can be to get traction with advertisers in terms of advertising on the more social parts of their sites, because the content isn’t necessarily controlled by editorial, and the advertisers don’t want to be so closely related to such free flowing content and the controversies that may ensue.  It’s an odd duck situation since, as Theresa Hanafin explained, generally when you provide quality content, the advertisers just follow your lead.  It’s also interesting that Colleen Kaman noted that companies seem to view communities as more stable than they actually are; communities are constantly evolving, so advertising and outreach priorities need to be flexible to match the change.  Lisa echoed this sentiment, “In the long run, Google eats everyone’s lunch,” since destination sites like the one she runs will never keep up with the growth of the internet.

So, how do people who run media sites get to take advantage of how the internet grows as a whole?  And how does this connect to traditional media?  Theresa believes that, eventually, advertisers will come around.  Lisa reminded us that if you create something that is valuable, you can sustain something that’s worth getting a sponsor to support it.  Even beyond the advertising issue, Theresa believes that all big media companies have a responsibility to take advantage of the role as publishers and to publish/aggregate more than outlet-generated content.  While social media can help save traditional media, traditional media can also support and grow social media by becoming a distribution network for the reader/writer, and for every site that’s relevant in a particular channel, including the local bloggers, municipal sites, and more, not by taking the content, but linking out, using the standards they apply to the content they generate to pick and choose the content they link to.

It’s also a matter of media outlets and leverage, Colleen explained, as a key to taking a successful user-generating community to the next level, but also for people to help each other.  She cited the example of iReporter, and how CNN isn’t sure what to do with this successful content outlet… they know they need a social network of some kind, but they don’t know what do to next.  If CNN doesn’t act quickly, then they’ll lose the momentum they have with that community.   (I know some of my readers have issues with iReporter, and I encourage and welcome your comments, I only ask that you keep it on the topic.)

Don’t forget about helping the community thrive even outside the confines of whence it came, which may sound conterintuitive, but seriously, if you love it, set it free, and it’ll come back.  An audience member talked about how many of their community members choose to take conversations from the more “public” sphere of their web site’s social network (I missed the name of this woman, if you’re out there, please comment!) to a more “private” community on the BigTent site.  Many of the panelists agreed that this is a wonderful thing to foster, and encourages your community’s bond with your product/service/site: by providing them more freedom to pursue their community as they see fit, you make them comfortable with what you have to offer, and foster the relationship.

I could go on for days about this session, but I’m sure there will be many other posts to peruse, since it seemed like everyone at BlogHer who has a Twitter account was in the same room ;D.

Communities, like viral messages, are organic, they are fostered and not engineered.  The key to loyal and strong communities is the freedom to let them grow and give them what they need to thrive.  Once traditional media embraces the concept, especially given what I heard in this session, I feel that it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship with social media.

Tags: blogher, blogherboston, socialmedia