How Can Newspapers Make Best Use Of Social Resources

June 22, 2009 - PRLog -- While exactly these marketing instruments provide a cheaper way for newspaper and magazine brands to promote themselves without expensive advertising campaigns – concludes Gartner, an analytical company, in its «Newspaper Publishers Must Do More to Empower Brand Stewards» report.

The research was conducted in November-December 2008 and a total of 989 Internet users in USA, UK and Italy were interrogated. The general character of the questions was how they find different kinds of content and how do they share it with other users.
It turned out that 49% of the respondents use such instruments, as Google or Yahoo to find content at least once a week. Whereby, only 20% use the built in search engines on the newspaper and magazine sites.

The answers to the second question – how people share content with other users – seems to be quite discouraging: less than a fourth (24%) of the respondents use email or online messengers to share valuable content with their friends. And even a smaller number of respondents claimed to share frequently information trough blogs and social networks. It seems that only a small number of newspaper or magazine sites give their users a possibility to import the news headings straight in their Twitter accounts.
In summary, the news papers fail to fully realize and employ the possibilities of social resources. Which is quite a sin, considering the difficult conditions in which US print media exist today it is of crucial importance for the newspapers to get profit out of a strong relationship with their loyal readers, who are equally interested in both printed and online versions of a newspaper or a magazine.  

According to Allen Weiner – the vice-president of Gartner – the newspapers and the magazines should turn their usual loyal readers into so called “brand stewards” – the people, who have some “social weight” and enjoy trust from other people, to influence other “information consumers” by their opinions. This influence can be exercised on two groups of people: people, who they know personnaly and people, who share the same interests with them and who might use the stewards as a certain kind of a “reference group”.

And today’s newspaper’s websites do not provide their potential stewards for their brands with enough technical possibilities to realize their function in the social networks.

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