Media Company Social Media?

For years, ad execs and editors at major publishing houses ferociously resisted any sort of relationship with influencers.

And yet, over the past 18 months, we've seen the exact opposite happen: Publishers are now embracing influencer marketing and integrating influencers into their advertising and editorial operations in a big way.

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Publishers ranging from Hearst to Conde Nast to Univision (full disclosure: Hearst and Univision are partners of Reelio's) and many more are now embracing influencers, and you shouldn't expect the magnetism to stop anytime soon.

So what flipped? What was the original orientation that created such resistance between the two parties, and what is the new orientation that is generating such pull? From my perspective, after hundreds of conversations with dozens of publishing executives over the past several years, the single biggest shift has been that publishers have moved away from an orientation of quality to an orientation of scale. In other words, publishers have stopped seeing influencers as content creators who can't pass editorial muster at Cosmopolitan and Esquire and started seeing them as scaled distribution channels, ripe for monetization.

Contributor Models Help Media Companies Keep Up With the Never-Ending Content Cycle

Advertisers care about engaged audiences. This puts media companies in a position where they must produce enough relevant content to draw attention and keep up with traffic and to ensure that the content earns a high watch or read time. The pressure is on to fulfill quantity and quality demands. Whereas influencers initially didn't meet media companies" quality standards, those companies eventually realized that they themselves were incapable of meeting their audience's quantity standards.

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In today's content-saturated world, producing sufficient content flow can be difficult.

In order to maintain an influx of readers, many media companies have chosen to adopt a contributor model that relies upon influencers to create content for the publication. In fact, Forbes has built a contributor base where content creators, who have their own individual audiences, are writing content for Forbes and bringing their audiences with them. By doing so, Forbes doubled their audience. While this contributor model is text-based, it can be applied to any kind of media and platform.

And more content leads us to higher watch/read time, a statistic that lots of advertisers care about. User-generated content in influencer marketing is proven to generate, on average, seven times the watch time -- of content created by advertisers themselves.

Surprisingly, media companies found that it is through the sheer volume of that content contributor models generate that enables them to create quality content that maximizes watch time. The more experimental content you publish on your site, the more data you'll have around what is retaining audience's attention and what isn't. But of course, once you create the content, then you have to distribute it, and that's where influencers" value to media companies is most important.

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Influencers Provide Additional Scaled Distribution Channels With Incredible Economic Value

Media companies are more than just the content they create. They also provide the channels through which that content is distributed. Today, that power has been eroded. And the channels through which media companies distribute content are no longer ones that they own or control. The previous dynamic was to fight this shift. Now they're embracing it.

When you start to think of influencers as not only sources of content, but also as viable distribution channels themselves, then the win-win relationship between media companies (with their massive archives of owned content and other intellectual property like characters, brands, etc.) and influencers becomes even clearer.

Not only are content contributors more likely to republish the content they make for these media companies on their own channels, but the content they create can be used for various distribution efforts and see a better return on distribution.

Machine Zone, for example, used gaming influencers to create content around their new app and then used the YouTube video that had the highest watch time in a television commercial.

It's a simple answer to the question of efficiency. Why try to produce higher watch time/read times on your own instead of using content creators who are already maximizing watch time/read time on the content they're producing?

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Repurposing Old Content And Leveraging Intellectual Property Also Helps Media Companies Scale

Content creators don't always have to produce entirely original content either. Once you find a theme that has stuck with an audience (by looking at great watch time rates), content creators can work with it to remix and redistribute. This is a bit different than just re-sharing content.

On a large scale, how do you re-engage new audiences with <em>Star Wars, a well-known classic? And how do you get more viewers to jump on the newest season Game of Thrones? You repurpose licensed content and distribute.

Media companies (sports networks and entertainment companies in particular) are remixing and leveraging intellectual content to drive more audiences. Take, for example, HBO's Game of Thrones Beginner's Guide video. The idea is to catch up new interested viewers quickly and easily using the original licensed content.

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And it's successful. One comment reads "I didn't know I needed this in my life - but now I do." You can assume this led to a lot more viewers trying out the show.

The YouTube channel Bad Lip Reading is also a good example of the engagement that can strike when licensed content is repurposed.

The folks behind Bad Lip Reading are content creators, and franchises like Star Wars and the NFL have both earned shares, likes and comments from old and new fans alike on a remix of the licensed content -- and earned coverage on other sites like SB Nation. That's how you keep relevancy.

Publishers are embracing influencer marketing and influencers into their advertising and editorial operations in a big way, and you shouldn’t expect the magnetism to stop anytime soon.

Guest Authored By Pete Borum. Pete is the Co-Founder, CEO of Reelio, a data driven influencer marketing platform that connects brands to the right influencers. Follow Pete on Twitter.

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“If you're a media company, a diverse content creator pool can lead to more content that's more relevant to your audience, more distribution and ultimately more engagement.

And that's a recipe that will make any advertiser happy.." -Pete Borum

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Using Social Media To Become Famous For Nothing?

In 2006, I set out to brand myself. I had an idea that I shared with the owner of the small company at which I was employed. I called it "Publish or Perish," and despite the lack of originality, the idea was simple, but purposeful: We needed to elevate the name recognition of our company -- quickly..

The company had made a fortune working with a niche client, but unwisely, it chose to fly under the competition's radar. In other words, it did the opposite of marketing for fear that if competitors knew how much money it was making from this niche client, it would face stiffer competition. So naturally, after years of this "guerilla obfuscation," the niche client business dried up and now left the little-firm-that-couldn't struggling to sell its wares to prospects who knew nothing of our work, history and values, or even if we could deliver on our promises. Rapid marketing needed to be done.

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Publish, perish and politics.

With publish or perish, I argued, our team of very talented organizational designers, trainers and safety professionals would publish articles and thus get our name out there to get it associated with expertise in our industry. Well, my idea fell flat. A mousey woman with no actual marketing experience, education or aptitude had the top dog's ear and whispered sweet gibberish into it. Print publication was dead, she said, so were trade shows. The answer was social media. We needed a Facebook page, but most importantly we needed to blog.

I resisted, of course. I had no interest in blogging, which I still hold is, in the majority of cases, self-important dreck and a platform for those whose writing just isn't good enough for publication. (I feel even less beneficent toward self-published books; if it isn't eligible for academic and literary citation, I don't see any value to it, but hey that's just me.) At this point I might throw out a conciliatory "there are some top-shelf blogs out there..blah blah blah," but that's not my style. Good bloggers know when their work is good and don't need my validation. As for the rest of you, well if you read my statement about most blogs being dreck and thought I was talking about you, I probably was. Deal with it.

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Despite my protestations I was ordered to blog. I fought and threw a tantrum to no avail, so I finally acquiesced, on one condition: I would write what I wanted without anyone else having a say-so. I also managed to convince my leaders to allow me to submit abstracts and begin a public speaking campaign. I soon learned how to become famous for nothing by using social media, key words, the Google Search algorithm and press releases. Quickly I became the Brook Shields of Safety -- she's always been famous and has big bushy eyebrows, and no one can account for either -- I was famous for no apparent reason.

Press and public speaking.

I quickly learned that the true power of public speaking is the press before the event, promotion during the event and press after the event. At the time most of the major print magazines were scrambling for online content and had robots or interns using key word searches to get it. The Google algorithm leaned heavily on how many links a given post had (reasoning that the wider the distribution the more reliable and important the content).

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By using a free press release site and a handful of key words carefully and artfully woven in -- words like "aerospace" "automotive industry" and..well, false modesty prevents me from giving away all my secrets. Anyway, this site would blast my press release to publications looking for those key words and soon my press releases were on scores of pages, unread and unvetted. I was able to get my press releases, which had usually been run as articles, into minor and major business publications which I won't name because they are competitors of Entrepreneur (which by the way, never fell for this Machiavellian scheme of mine). Even today there are news outlets that aren't as judicious as they had ought to be. Fox News routinely posted my Entrepreneur articles, assuming that I was a conservative business writer, until someone eventually got around to actually reading my work, and it was unceremoniously removed from the site.

The PR service allowed me to Tweet the press release, share it on Facebook and post it to LinkedIn. I used to post the links separately to LinkedIn because that way I could post it as a discussion topic in all 50 groups to which I belonged.

For some reason, I keep getting thrown out of the groups on LinkedIn because many are run by the adult equivalent of the uptight high school girl who reached the pinnacle of her life and career by being voted third-runner-up for homecoming queen and alternate on student council. Such people ain't buying what I'm selling.

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It wasn't long before I was an annual speaker at the National Safety Council, until I pointed out that in my obnoxious estimation several of their perennial speakers were nothing but snake oil salesmen, an embarrassment to the profession. I don't burn my bridges, I dynamite them and pelt the repair crew with hot stones as they try to rebuild.

Posting and Peru.

It wasn't long before my blog following grew: I've always said I'm a bit like watching an abandoned warehouse fire. You're not glad that it's burning, but it's fun to watch the spectacle and nobody really gets hurt -- or, if they do get hurt they should have known better than to have been inside it to begin with.

I got a notice from WordPress that today is the seventh anniversary of my blog. It's actually older than that, but I put it on ice for a while when the owner of my company finally got around to reading it and insisted that I get it approved before publishing. As is my wont, I recommended he engage in congress with himself and offered interesting and inventive suggestions of where he might consider sticking his approval. This did not look good on my review.

On WordPress, I have posted in the neighborhood of 364,000 words, plus I have spoken at over a 100 international and local venues, including an address to an International Safety Conference on Mining in the Andes, in Lima, Peru. This despite my only knowledge of mining safety at the time was to stay the hell out of one. I have 167 works in print, and I was named by the largest safety magazine to both its list of "The Most Influential People Working in Safety" and "The Young (or Relatively Young) Up and Comers in Safety. "This despite the fact I'm not young. (I am often mistaken for being younger than I actually am because of my full head of hair, youthful skin and gross immaturity.)

Guest Authored By Phil La Duke. Phil is is a Safety Transformation Architect at Environmental Resources Management. An author, he writes about business, worker safety and organizational change topics on his blog. An avid user of social media for business. Follow Phil on Twitter.

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"The point I am yet again meandering around is that people try desperately and pathetically to use just one social network to build their personal brands when the true secret is to use all social media outlets as tools to get their brand out there, by using them holistically.

Oh, and it helps if you can write, if your message and style are distinctive, and if your brand is of interest.

Remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Los Angeles, CA where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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