Brand & Media Content Gardens Augment Revenues By Monetizing Social Networks

Robin Carey, publisher of Social Media Today writes a great story about the progress the Wall Street Journal is making with digital strategy, in “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Social? Not The Wall Street Journal”. Here are my notes of the synopsis of the article, and ideas from the story, but read the article in full to get the complete story:

• WSJ.com has 1.3 million paid subscribers out of 50 million monthly visitors.
• The average subscription is $207 annually
• The WSJ had a wake-up call when its Tiger Mother story on its Facebook page had more comments than the paper's online website, at over 50,000 comments.
• The Journal is testing what works on Facebook with access to Journal content from the social network.
• The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Live YouTube video is an interesting development with 8 million monthly streams. Journalist Skype interviews are a mainstay of the network. Content works for the web, mobile and tablets.

 Several points stand out for me:

Content Strategy: The importance of building a content strategy that is effective within each social network. From the article, you can look at Facebook and YouTube. I see lessons for content optimization, and syndication. Robin also commented in the early part of her article problems publishers, marketers and website managers have with the proliferation of channels and content opportunities. An effective content strategy can address those issues.

Monetize Within Social Networks: As a social network if you are going to partner with content producers give them options to make money within your network. Apple is one of the best case studies with the developer network for apps on the iPhone. I wish Linkedin would do more to provide organizations with ways to make money through their groups. I have long believed that one nonprofit where I used to be a community manager for the group’s LinkedIn group should be able to charge for any jobs posted.

Tactics For Developing Columnist Ready Content: Columnists are a good idea as I've discussed previously for Content Gardens, its free content, and the accomplished writers brag about their publication more widely, and potentially more new places than a paid journalist, good for new social readers and SEO. However, if you need to generate content, video content can be produced cheaply and quickly with tools like Skype. That's one way to build relationships with potential influencers who may eventually become those accomplished columnists for your content garden, and enable journalists to easily produce content, that can be shot, and then once vetted in the marketplace of social sharing written up for good text articles.

Content Garden Definition: Maybe I should expand the concept of content gardens to include your whole content strategy within social networks if you syndicate or optimize the content on the main website to the network.