It’s not the pace of life that concerns me, oahu is the sudden take a look at the finish….

Sorry, Facebook have updated the way that pages operate over the last year (and unfortunately they’ve made it a lot more complicated!). You should have a look at Hubspot’s guide, which is here.

best,

Randall

[...]Good to discover a person writing about this vital issue[...]…

Another great post that mentions the essentials.

I agree – what is free actually worth? If you look at the FT and WSJ (business media), they get strong loyalty and readership (plus can charge substantial subscription fees) because their content is strong and they don’t send it our for free. I’m a big fan of the meter system; even though I won’t necessarily pay to subscribe to these websites (I don’t really have the time to read enough to justify £20 a month or so), because I know that after 10 articles a month I’ll have to pay, I value those “free articles” more than I would if everything was free. This reinforces my brand loyalty, ensures that there is a good chance I’ll mention something I read at the FT, and therefore makes me more likely to share that content with others. Interesting to see how the New York Times’ “metered” pay wall will work given its consumer credentials.

The noise out there is deafening, so curation is definitely a strong area to focus on. We are seeing this more and more in the news media industry, with “curators” becoming key filters for people who want more (content quality) for less (time). Aggregation gives specialization to some extent, but has not proved super-efficient at delivering customized content to highly segmented audiences. I know RSS works well, but I often want only the “China” news of a certain publiation and such feeds are not offered.

Curators, in the broadest sense, can be anyone from bloggers to people you follow on Twitter – already we are seeing people focsuing more on lists and tweaking desktop clients (eg, TweetDeck) instead of logging on to twitter.com. Progressive websites like the Guardian are feeding into this more and more, to complement the traditional role of the editor, as is the Guardian’s “comment is free” community – I often follow comments to lead me to more information on a given topic.

So this leads to the role of communities. Facebook is great for me for this. As you said, curators can be your friends, and I now get around 20% of my daily reading from friends’ links on FB. A lot of my friends, pressed for time, have commented that my links are an important part of their daily digest (I get paid to read the news for many hours a day; they don’t). In fact, I now pay more attention to what I post…if this can become a general trend then a new layer of filtering will emerge (possibly).

So that means I guess that whoever has the social media crown will become an important platform for content (Facebook for now, obviously), but looking at Chinese social media trends, I see some new elements emerging. Whereas most “Westerners” will have FB, and a few Twitter, that is usually it when it comes to social media. For many Chinese (numbers growing daily), the will have a Sina Weibo (a super effective microblogging tool – unkind to call it China’s Twitter as they are really killing it with photos and video), Kaixin001 or one of similar FB-type platforms, and Douban. Douban for me is very interesting – it is a place for “intellectual” discussions and blogs. Think MySpace for artists, writers, intellectuals, musicians. The Chinese social media space is already seeing greater segmentation than Western social media (on a mass scale). Of course, you also have to take into account different Chinese reading habits (the young crowd), but that is for another time.

For marketers/advertisers, I think FB is great. As are all strong communities. I used to get put off by banner ads (still do, generally), but FB is doing really well with its targeted ads. I know privacy is an issue, but I still see 5-10 FB ads a week that I’ll click on. What do you think of this? I wonder how companies can tap into other communities, like Comment is Free, without provoking a backlash.

Final point. Again, your point about quality control is very pertinent. But if you look at news websites, I find a lot of people now saying they don’t give a damn about editorial control – they find themselves liberated from the decisions of publishers and can access anything they want, when they want. This appears to be a strong sentiment. How do you see “curation” working mass market (of course, some of us already turn to curation)?