John:
I've been involved with social media as a result of my employment with a publisher and conference organizer, Information Today, Inc. For a business we monitor and cover anything related to the application of information technology. Since our reporters and conference program planners are constantly monitoring the field, we tend to spot things early on. And, as our legion of reporters covers new developments, they tend to not be shy about giving me an earful on how the adoption of these new marvels might benefit our own enterprise.
It never hurts to practice what you preach, I guess. Besides that, I've always been one to experiment with new media, "experiment" being the operative word.
Since 2003, we've been running many experiments involving the new media. I launched our first blog at a key trade show in London that year. Working with some of my top editors, we covered the conference "live," not, mind you, as citizen journalists but as traditional journalists getting our hands on a new medium for the first time.
In our first go, we were using it as a publishing platform for the type of work we had always done. Wow! I've never had so much fun. It was really something to get to go to press the moment after the story was done, and without those crazy copyeditors taking out all my "clever" figures of speech, and without artists printing my "most dramatic" photo as a 2-inch square.
All well and good, but what we quickly learned about the medium, however, was that using it to do what we had always done, didn't do that much for us.
In a stroke of genius, Nancy Garman, who was working for us at the time, started hooking our "editors' blog" up to other bloggers, inserting links to flickr and adding de.li.cious tags (never know where to put those periods and I didn't take time to check)
Wow! Did our blog site traffic spike, once we started thinking of what we were doing as something other than traditional content creation!
We've also played around with wikis in support of our various conferences. The one that does the best is for Computers in Libraries, which is coming up next month. I suspect there are two reasons why it performs better than our other conference wikis: eiteher it's because our audience is librarians (who have a high information literacy quotient and like to play with new media, ergo . . . ) or it's that particular conference, being our largest, has the critical mass necessary to make a wiki project successful. Maybe it's a little of both.
Last year, when I invited speakers at a conference on Web 2.0 technologies to help me put their speaker bios together on a wiki, less than a third of them ever came to the wiki to check the bio we eventually published about them. Ironically, many of them profess to be social media advocates. Go figure. Maybe I'm just, once again, making the mistake of trying to apply an old metaphor (help me edit this document) with a new medium (do whatever you feel like doing here).
This year, I abandoned that wiki for a conference group on Facebook, but once again the Facebook group for Computers in Libraries is far larger and more active than the one for new media excecutives (Buying & Selling eContent ).
The big innovation we're trying right now is to launch a social media conference space, We've partnered with a start-up company called Swift. Attendees at CIL '08 will be test-driving a new platform called Swift. Among the things that the new platform will do is let site visitors automatically associate their conference attendance plans with their colleagues on Facebook, to tag items, flickr photos . . . We are the pilot case for Swift, so we're kind of working it out with them as we go.
At various places in our publishing operations, we've also experimented, most seriously at our StreamingMedia.com web site with podcasting; and another of my editors, Michelle Manafy at eContent Magazine, has used, quite successfully, a social networking/collaborative platform to judge her annual awards competition (the eContent 100).
We remained challenges as a publisher in figuring out how to make these things things part of our product mix. With only a few exceptions, we've had difficulty "monetizing" them.
Of course, we continue to publish like crazy on the subject. Here's an article from Searcher magazine by Mark Reid and Christian Gray, who believe the technology has application within enterprises of all types.
I hope I managed to stay on topic!
Dick Kaser
VP, Content, Information Today, Inc.
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