Falling Off A Blog

Will marketing go social?

Two reports out this week predict fast growth in social media marketing.

The first, from Forrester, forecasts US social media marketing spending will reach $3bn in 2014, up from around $700m in 2009.

The second, from eMarketer, predicts that, after a small dip this year due to the recession, spending on social media marketing will grow fast, reaching $1.4bn in 2011.

It is taking marketers a while to get their heads around social media, and to overcome their natural aversion to the anarchic nature of the environment. Marketers like to have total control over "the message" and you just can't do that with social media.

But I think that social media marketing could become a major source of revenue for publishers and others who find themselves running sites with significant social elements. That's because there are two aspects of social media that are potentially very attractive for marketers.

Caroline Little, CEO Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

Caroline is the keynote speaker at the AOP conference, talking about "The New Online Landscape: Local and Global"

The Washingtonpost.com has worked hard to build up a strong local audience. They find that local visitors come to the site more often, go deeper into the site and consume more pages. Visitors from further afield tend to come in through search engines and only view one or two pages. Sometimes they don't even know the Washington Post.

Old media goes multimedia

Sounds like the UK's Daily Telegraph is about to make a move that will shift it's centre of gravity significantly towards online publishing.

According to today's Observer, the Telegraph and ITN are close to announcing a deal to work together on new products, including content for a revamped Telegraph website. The deal would bring together the Telegraphs stable of journalists and ITN's TV and radio news expertise and infrastructure.

If the Observer has got it right, it sounds like the Telegraph's journalists can expect to see some big changes in their roles. The paper says:

"Executives at the Telegraph believe its roster of well-known journalists, including Simon Heffer and Boris Johnson, are an underused asset.

They want all reporters to write for the website as well as the papers and appear regularly on television or radio bulletins posted on the group's internet site."

This has echoes of the "all hands to the web" memo sent round the editorial team at the Miami Herald earlier this year.